The news that if I so desire I can tune in next Saturday to the League One clash between Doncaster and Stevenage and the League Two encounter between Milton Keynes and Tranmere Rovers is of zero significance to my life. And zero interest for that matter. The grotesque overexposure of Our National Game has resulted in a version of the law of diminishing returns. The more football there is on television the less I tend to watch. This weekend I watched far more rugby union than football on the crystal bucket and I am not even a big rugby union fan. But the one football match I did watch – inevitably the Liverpool derby – reminded me of one my pet modern hates: the co-commentator.
Sky’s main commentator at the spanking new Hill Dickson Stadium was the perfectly serviceable Rob Hawthorne, accompanied by the former footballer Chris Sutton. The relationship between commentator and co-commentator is essentially conversational and to that end Hawthorne and Sutton blended quite well. Sutton has positioned himself as someone who is NOT AFRAID TO SPEAK HIS MIND, hence his weekly appearances on Radio Five Live’s ailing 606 (it really should have been quietly put to sleep after Danny Baker left) but yesterday he was on his best behaviour and basically said nothing of any real merit, unless you want your commentators to tell you exactly what you can see already. What I would have liked is actual technical analysis. I’ll give you an example.
Watching the game on telly naturally means your field of vision is limited. The camera generally follows the ball around, which of course makes sense because that’s where the action is going to be. But it would be handy if ‘experts’ could tell you things you can’t always see. It took me precisely two minutes to work out that Everton’s manager David Moyes had assigned James Garner (the footballer, not Jim Rockford. One for the teenagers, there) to follow Liverpool’s impish midfield ‘playmaker’ Florian Wirtz all over the pitch to stop him creating anything. Now, I am not some kind of football expert, but I thought, well, if I can see that, then so can the well-paid commentators and studio ‘experts’, like the eternally shrill-voiced Jamie Carragher, should be able to as well. But they didn’t mention it once. Beyond a ninety minute plus chat, there was no real analysis at all.
Hawthorne and Sutton were actually better than many other commentary teams. None are worse than the smug, self-satisfied duo of ITV’s Sam Matterface and Lee Dixon, whose miserable schtick relies upon endless waffle and piss-poor in-jokes. What is it about ITV that produces such terrible commentary teams? Not only that, they are assigned all of England’s games. ITV got rid of the enduringly excellent Clive Tyldsley and his sparring partner Ally McCoist, the best co-commentator in the business, to give us these clowns. No wonder the phrase football fans associate with the country’s premier commercial channel is ‘ITV football is shit’. That’s because it is.
It is the incessant need to fill so-called dead air that infuriates me. The commentators of years gone by allowed the action to do the talking, not least because there used to be just one of them. Legends like David Coleman, Brian Moore and, in my view the best commentator of them all Barry Davies not only gave us the odd technical detail they would not trouble us with meaningless tosh like “he’ll be disappointed with that” when a player does something wrong. (I’m sure Dixon is on some kind of financial incentive scheme to say it as often as possible during games.)
Some co-commentators are good at what they do. Gary Neville is the pick of the ITV line-up, Alan Shearer the best of the rest when he is allowed out to play on Amazon Prime, but the rest are dismal, with TNT being the worst of the lot. Aside from McCoist, the viewer has to put up with the wretched Steve McManaman, who is comfortably the worst co-commentator out there now that Jermaine Jenas has axed (not for his dismal commentaries but for sending dubious text messages). And there’s Lucy Ward, whom I am loathe to criticise following former Bristol Rovers’ manager Joey Barton’s unpleasant verbal assault, but frankly she is truly terrible; not quite as bad as McManaman, but not far off, giving the viewer nothing by way of tactical analysis.
I suppose TV companies have done their research and it’s only me that could happily live without co-commentators and, for that matter, the talking head pundits who, at least for me, add nothing to the entertainment. Most of the pundits have no more experience of coaching and management than me and I have often found in life that those who know the least about football are the ones who have played it. Perhaps, they were too busy playing that trying to dig out worthless phrases like “he’ll be disappointed with that”?
TV companies, and Sky in particular, are moving to a model whereby every single Premier League and EFL game will be live on TV. I for one can wait. At least for the moment, the lower league games seem to require just the one commentator, which is surely enough? But given the co-commentator role appears to a job creation scheme we probably know how this ends.
The worst words in the world are currently: “And with Lee Dixon, it’s Sam Matterface.” Can we simply not go back to the days when commentators simply told us the players’ names and who has scored? The co-commentator usually has nothing of interest to say, but s/he always says it anyway. It’s far too much to expect actual analysis, so how about just prattling on a bit less? Some hope.
