Only once have I sprung uncontrollably from my seat in a press box to celebrate a goal.
It was the second of Leigh Griffiths’ free kicks against England, with the ball hitting the back of the net provoking a spasm of my leg muscles that made maintaining contact between my bahookie and my seat a physical impossibility.
I found it equally as impossible to lift my eyes from my laptop screen a few minutes later, funnily enough, as my English colleagues bore holes in the side of my head following Harry Kane’s late equaliser. Damn you, Stuart, why didn’t you just clear it?
Anyway, I tell this story to preface this column as an illustration that while I am a huge believer in maintaining professional objectivity, I also understand that football is an emotional game. And if you love it, sometimes it is hard to be impassive when all around you are losing their heads.
Neither am I really one to be taking aim at media professionals who put themselves in the firing line as they give their hot takes and analysis on football. People in glass houses, and all that. But the recent trends in football broadcasting do, I feel, merit some critical comment.
It was the Manchester United game against Lyon last Thursday night that proved the straw that broke the camel’s back.
It made for exhilarating viewing, and it is little wonder that anyone watching would be getting wrapped up in it all. Even those paid to offer their objective analysis from the commentary position.
A little excitement on the part of the co-commentary team would be understandable, and arguably even add to the experience for the viewer. But a little excitement would be a gross underestimation of the ridiculous reaction we the viewers were ‘treated’ to from TNT pundits Rio Ferdinand and Robbie Savage.
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The ex-Manchester United pair completely lost the run of themselves. Their screeching and their beseeching of their team to ‘go and get the winner’ made you pray for Lyon to break up the park and put their gas at a peep.
There was no acknowledgment of how Man United had gotten out of jail. No analysis of just how they came to be trailing the 10 men of Lyon by two goals in the first place. No mention of the fact Lyon had 10 men at all.
Man United were back, baby. Except, as their subsequent defeat to Wolves showed, they clearly were not.
Ferdinand and Savage were more interested in trying to outdo one another in their exuberant celebrations than offer any sort of insight or context. And as the experienced commentator Clive Tyldesley has since pointed out, there was perhaps more motivating their fan-boy reaction than a simple love for the club.
There was, as it turns out, a ‘co-comm cam’ pointed at the gantry, with both men no doubt encouraged by the director to lay it on thick so their celebrations could be chopped up and fed to the masses via social media. These were not commentators, but content creators.
Time was that Sky would offer you the opportunity to press the red button if you wanted to listen to two fans providing their unabashedly biased views on a match. Now, you have no choice.
There are no doubt reasons behind the shift towards former players of any particular club being the ones hired to cover their matches, and those ex-pros being encouraged ever more to wear and air their allegiances like a badge of honour.
Ach, maybe I’m just becoming a grumpy middle-aged man. But for me, the football viewing experience is made all the better when the men with the microphones bring some insight to proceedings, and maybe tell you something you didn’t know.
There’s nothing wrong with showing a bit of excitement, passion even, and if you are on club TV, then have at it. But the line has become so blurred between what may be acceptable on a club’s own broadcasting output and what is now encouraged on ‘mainstream’ channels that you could easily have thought you were watching MUTV the other night.
Co-commentators will always split opinion, but I feel that our own Ally McCoist is probably the one who straddles this line most effectively. There is no hiding his pro-Rangers or pro-Scotland leanings when he is commentating on their matches, but usually (his uncharacteristically bad call on Robin Propper’s recent red card against Athletic Bilbao aside) he doesn’t allow it to cloud his judgment.
As if to prove the point about how subjective this all is, I am sure there will be many Celtic fans who disagree with that assessment of ‘Super Ally’, but I have rarely seen such universal agreement on how a commentary team detracted from the viewing experience as I witnessed last Thursday.
The fact that Ferdinand and Savage had played the game at the highest level was irrelevant. These were no longer former pros whose experiences added value in the background, but fans with microphones playing up to the cameras and attempting to insert themselves as the main characters in the story.
I’m sure it all played out well on TikTok. But as a television production, for me, it was a huge turn-off.
