Ray Stubbs[]
Ray Stubbs is the loveable, albeit half-witted, grinning face of the BBC’s Final Score, which was formerly part of Grandstand.
Stubbs, who looks like someone who’d be waiting for a haircut, was a professional footballer of little note before winning one of BBC Sport’s top jobs for no obvious reason in the early 1990s.
The Wirral man’s benign features became indelibly associated with those nervous moments as you watch your side ship two late goals away to Blackpool until everyone got Sky Sports News and realised Soccer Saturday was better.
Frustrating things that Stubbs does[]
- Use the construction ‘as far as … is concerned’ at least three times per show.
- Remind us that ‘there’s time for scores to change’ at the start of the programme when there are 15 minutes left.
- Get mixed up and call a latest score a result.
- Tempt fate by saying things like ‘so it looks like Lincoln will win their first game in three months’ when they have just gone 3-2 up with nine men and 15 minutes left.
- Get the League that a team play in mixed up.
- Read a score more than once. In 2004, he read the final score Grimsby 0-1 Rochdale 22 times, commenting on each occasion that there was time for the score to change. -
The BBC’s cruel treatment of Stubbs[]
Due to Stubbs’ hapless nature, the BBC tend to give him the most unappetising of tasks outside football.
During Sport Relief in 2002, he was dropped 100 feet into a pile of boxes. In 2004, he was suspended from a crane and swung into a pile of shit (no really) and in 2006 he was tied to a post and hit with 15,000 bouncy balls. Meanwhile, semi-love rat Gary Lineker got a better deal as he was sponsored to display an air of quiet self-satisfaction, raising a much greater sum.
While his colleagues were sent to the Olympics in Sydney, Stubbs was sent to cover the Scottish Hop-Scotch championship in Aberdeen.
Stubbs’ wage is also a point of contention. Unlike other BBC presenters, who are handsomely paid for their efforts, Ray is just allowed to get the autographs of the more famous people in the studio.