Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that’s even remotely true.

On the way home from 5-a-side football the other night, I turned on the car radio to listen to the live League Cup commentary, a bit of background noise to keep me entertained during the trip. I initially tuned to Radio 5 Live, as if Rangers are playing, I don’t tend to listen to Radio Scotland’s Sportsound programme (but more on that later). Shortly afterwards, I had retuned to Radio Scotland because Radio 5, in their wisdom, had selected Craig Burley as co-commentator on the evening’s featured game.

In theory I shouldn’t mind Burley; he’s fairly even-handed, will call things as he seems them with no concession as to whether the players are ex-colleagues or not (see Ray Wilkins for a sugar-coated contrast), and is reasonably intelligent. But the man is so lugubrious, it becomes difficult to listen to him for longer than ten minutes without feeling the urge to contact the Samaritans. While his fellow BBC analyst Mark Lawrenson can sound unenthusiastic and miserable if he’s not interested in either team playing (International tournaments) or if England are losing, Burley sounds like he’s bearing the weight of the world in every game he watches. I’d almost swear the man doesn’t like football.

So, I ended up on Sportsound’s ‘Open All Mics’ coverage of the Scottish Communities League Cup. Said programme is hosted by one presenter, in this case Richard Gordon, and instead of featuring one full commentary as its English counterparts, it instead has correspondents despatched to each game being played, who will then exclaim loudly and inarticulately to draw Gordon and the listener’s attention to the fact something’s happening in their game. This may have been an interesting idea, but in practice it sounds like live radio coverage of an orgy. In between climaxes, the panel chat about stuff and nonsense, generally loosely connected to what’s happening on the pitch, and last night one of them brought up Davie Cooper’s memorable goal in the Drybrough Cup final of August 1979.

They talked quite happily about the goal for 30 seconds or so before Chick Young pipes up that he doesn’t think it was the Drybrough Cup, but the Glasgow Cup. Richard Gordon pauses for a beat, then agrees with Young. In under a minute, Chick Young’s inexplicably enduring and pervasive influence on BBC and Radio Scotland has once again ensured that all facts and thus any chance at informed debate have gone out of the window.

Back at the house, I found myself watching a fairly run-of-the-mill programme on ITV4 entitled ‘20 Goals that Shook the World’ featuring, as you might expect, 20 goals that were reasonably controversial or impressive at the time they were scored. A succession of talking heads gave their opinion on why they thought each goal was controversial or impressive, and this is all fine until we reach Andy Townsend and his lack of knowledge of any adjective other than ‘stunning’. Most mainstream journalists tend to over-use the word ‘stun’ and its variants, existing in a semi-permanent state of incredulity it appears, but Townsend takes the biscuit. Stunningly.

I’ve harboured a crackpot theory for the last couple of years now that the simply appalling standard of football commentators, pundits and reporters in the UK is partly responsible for British players being so limited technically and in terms of imagination compared to their compatriots around the world. I have, of course, no way of proving this. My language skills are not good enough to allow me to comprehend first hand what insights European commentators and analysts bestow on their audiences, and so I can only base my theory on my observations of the British game.

We have media that covers football on television, on radio and in print. Almost to a man (and the occasional woman), the individuals in this sector are prone the hyperbole, cliché, stereotype, jingoism. They don’t know the laws of the game. They don’t appear to be familiar with the English language for the most part. Most, if not all of them haven’t been involved in professional football for 10+ years and so haven’t kept up do date with modern developments. Almost all foreign players and teams are dismissed with ‘we don’t know much about them/him’.

It’s only been in recent years, perhaps as a reaction to the poor quality fare offered by the BBC and ITV, and certainly as a result of the growing blogosphere and Twitter, that more in-depth analyses of football have become available to the fan that wants to learn about such things. But for the average punter, the suggestible type, exposed only to the mainstream media? Hopefully at some point we’ll all become tired of inaccuracy and cliché, commentators talking about players being ‘denied by the woodwork’, analysts absolving a player of making a violent, dangerous tackle because ‘he got the ball’. At some point we’ll realise that it’s not actually that impressive when our British midfielder plays a 40 yard cross-field pass or controls the ball with one touch because almost every decent footballer in the world can do that. But I’m not going to hold my breath.

Advertisement