For your subscription fee this weekend, at halftime during the impossibly dreary Manchester City-Middlesborough game, deadlocked at that point at 0-0:
Richard Keys: “What do City need to do to come away from this game with a win?”
David Platt: “Score.”
Top, top work. Almost Billy-The-Fishian (“At the end of the day, it’s the team with most goals that’ll win the match”) in its jaw-dropping blandness. Even at a time when the BBC are giving Alan Shearer regular work and Andy Townsend is still inexplicably cashing ITV’s paycheques, Sky really are pushing the envelope in terms of “experts” who refuse to say anything about anything. Even taking Platt aside, there’s Jamie “Literally” Redknapp, Ray “Shouldn’t You Be Paying More Attention To Your Day Job?” Wilkins, Glenn “Triffic” Hoddle, Graham Souness, Peter Reid, George Graham, Alan Smith – crikey, that’s just a murderer’s row. Or it would be if boredom could kill.
In some cases, the lack of anything meaningful to say seems to be a matter of simple incompetence (Mark Lawrenson, David Pleat take a bow). However, more often and more insidiously there seems to be a reluctance to criticise either the expert’s mates in the game (Jamie Redknapp’s the best choice to commentate on a game featuring a team he used to play for that his dad manages? Really?) or anyone who might conceivably offer them a job in the future (hello, Sam Allardyce!). It’s only when you’re listening to someone who seems to view offering genuine insight and honest criticism as his responsibility that it’s possible to fully appreciate the sorry state of football punditry. It’s difficult to imagine any Sky mouthpiece emphatically declaring that anyone who paid to see the game they’re watching deserves a refund, as the ever-excellent Brian Moore did during the England rugby team’s turgid win over Italy.
That City-Boro game also contained several examples of the two most irritating verbal tics indulged in by football commentators. Question – what happens more often, someone scoring a goal or a talking-head squealing “He should have scored!” It’s the latter and it’s not even close, right? Similarly, compare the number of goals to the number of “Great save!” exclamations. Again, there are apparently more fantastic saves than converted chances.
Here’s the point: if a player “should” score a chance, doesn’t that heavily imply that he should be converting more of those opportunities than he misses? If a save is “great” or similar, doesn’t that imply that it’s not one you’d expect the keeper to make, and so you’d expect to have more goals than terrific saves? But we don’t, in either case because the “fantastic chance!” and “wonderful save!” descriptions are thrown about like handfuls of confetti and are now completely devalued. The former gets attached to any relatively free header in the box or any reasonably clean strike of the ball in the penalty area. The latter is used to greet any save where the goalie has to leave his feet, or any stop of a shot inside the six-yard box even if the ball’s blasted straight at the keeper and he’d have to actively jump out of the way to avoid it (come to think of it, Paul Robinson’s given that technique a go during recent England games). It’s mindless, thoughtless hype and in any sensible world there’d currently be a course of aversion therapy going on featuring every commentator ever, replays of Liverpool’s European campaigns of a few years ago and a car battery attached to assorted dangly bits.
Actually, listening to Jonathan Pearce’s demented squealing any time the ball goes anywhere near either penalty area, it’s possible that course has already started.
one goalkeeper's been arrested and another's blown up this is exactly the kind of start we didn't need, when I have nothing to say my lips are sealed
