Televised Football

Once upon a time, in a land that has come to be referred to as ‘the 1960s’, one could sit down on a Saturday evening, and enjoy the simple pleasure of watching football highlights. It was basic, decent, honest, but most importantly, it was not a struggle. Millions of people up and down the land would simply sit and let the delights of a mud-soaked Brighton & Hove Albion drawing 0-0 with Aston Villa wash over them. The commentator would have no need for hyperbole, would not refer to a pass as an ‘offload’, or to a clean-sheet as a ‘shut-out’, and they most certainly would not talk about ‘the Makélélé role’. A simple voice, 22 men running their heart out for their local club, and a field that can only be described as a poor man’s Somme – lovely stuff. Post-match analysis was also reassuringly clean-cut; it would consist of a well-spoken man, whom had a strong vocabulary, simply grinning after the Brighton/Villa clash and saying “well played both teams, great stuff there, up next… Plymouth Argyle versus Queens Park Rangers”.
Unfortunately, somewhere down the line (let’s say… after Thatcher? She is a villain of the necessary cartoon proportions), the BBC and BSKYB decided that this kick-ass formula needed a revamp. It needed to be sexed up, flashy, big business – coincidentally all the characteristics of people who benefited under Thatcher (cow). At first however, I must admit, it was ok. The BBC launched the dynamic duo of Alan Hansen and Mark Lawrenson, and BSKYB gave us Andy Gray and his insights into managerial tactics. Former players, with a good grasp of their native language, and a straightforward manner of communicating to the general public what managers expected of a flat-back four.
But with TV executives being what they are, they couldn’t settle on what was an acceptable update. SKY started running war-metaphor advertisements, in which managers and players are hyped as gladiators. I have seen Frank Sinclair play against Cardiff City, and I can assure you my dominant thought was not “bloody hell, Ridley Scott missed a trick here”.
The BBC executives on the other hand, seemed to develop a voracious appetite for employing former players to do the Hansen/Lawrenson role, an appetite we can thank for giving publicly funded punditry careers to such stars as Lee Dixon, Gavin Peacock, and (I shit you not) Iain Dowie. For those of you not familiar with Iain Dowie’s football skills here are some stats; in 3 years for QPR, Dowie scored 2 goals………… Iain Dowie was a centre-forward.
Indeed, it seems that the BBC has forgotten the key prerequisite for being a television pundit; good presentation and oratory skills. What we now have however, are poor former players grasping at the use of metaphor and simile, in the manner of a child grasping desperately at an allusive shiny balloon. An example will illustrate this best. Here is how Iain Dowie recently described Wayne Rooney’s immaculate ball control skills:

“It’s like he has got velvet gloves on his feet”

What? I mean seriously, what are you saying? Shall we find out together fellow ranters? So Dowie’s claim is that Rooney’s ball control makes it seem as though velvet gloves cover his feet. Firstly, the foot equivalent of a glove is a sock, and Rooney was wearing two socks when he controlled the pass – Dowie’s simile is inherently stupid. Secondly, since when did velvet gloves become the finest material for increasing grip on gloves? I recently asked a construction site worker if he would like to come with me and give velvet a try, and I woke up on a drip. The suggestion seemed offensive to him. “Lay off Dowie!” I hear you cry, “Give that gimp Peacock what-for!” you demand.
Firstly, Gavin Peacock likes to say “I’m just going to run the analysis”. What he means is he will run the video, and analyse it. I know this seems picky, but you can’t be too careful when dealing with a mega-brain like Gavin Peacock. Most importantly however, he seems to be unaware that he is on a television programme, or more accurately, what television actually does. The beauty of television is that it affords the viewer the opportunity to visually appreciate what is going on ‘at the other end’, and enjoy the beauty of moving pictures. Peacock however will continually pause footage in order to draw circles around the number of players ‘behind the ball’, then count the circles, and then forever conclude that ‘Bolton came today to disrupt Arsenal’.
Or he will stop footage, and then draw arrows showing where players will next move, in order to illustrate ‘pressure on the forwards’. Thanks Gav, but without the pause and the arrows I would have figured it out myself by watching it happen anyway. He is rendering moving pictures and one of the 20th century’s great inventions obsolete.
Maybe he and Lee Dixon are secret agents, bringing TV down from the inside, revolutionaries on a quest to see radio and the spoken word brought back to the fore of British culture. Or maybe they have been placed on MOTD as a tester for the BBC’s new primetime show How Not to Orate, or What Not to Say, I which two women with an overt sexual chemistry tell people that they ‘speak stupid’, and that this is the reason nobody wants to sleep with them.
I realise that maybe I have ranted too much, but I leave special mention for the superstar ITV pundit – Andy Townsend. However bad the BBC gets, you can be sure that ITV will plunge deeper. During the coverage of the FIFA World Cup 2006, or ‘Blatterfest’, Dutch football legend Ruud Gullit offered the opinion that Spain’s football failures were a consequence of apathy on the part of the many regional allegiances that its players have, and that players from political rivals Barcelona and Madrid did not want to mix. This was too much for Townsend to accept, who interjected with this nugget of diplomacy;

“What?! That’s ridiculous; the coach ought to sort that out!”

Idiot. It is no surprise that in previous years ITV deployed the ‘tactics truck’, which was a van directly outside the stadium in which Townsend would watch the game, and from which he would give his half time analysis. I should imagine Townsend did not see the inequality of the situation, despite the fact he was in a Ford transit in an empty NCP, whilst the rest of the gang would be inside the 80,000 strong San Siro. Then again I don’t think he actually knew what a tactics truck was, seeing as tactics and vehicles are two concepts that go way above his head.
So please TV executives up and down the land, stop this madness and give back the decency to football. Please shorten MOTD, so that 50 something’s of Britain can wait less time to join their partner in bed and not have sex. PUNDITRY HAS GONE TOO FAR.

ROAR Covers

A dangerously obvious one here, but a topic i feel must be brought explicitely to light.
Now, Kings doesn't have the greatest track record of instigating and maintaining a student-led fourth estate structure. Even those rotten stinkers at UCL have done better, having as they do a student radio station which is going fm this week. The good man Drummond's alleged attempts at the setting up of something similar here only descended into murky threats of speech only podcasts.
Now, you may cry, surely Kings has Roar! But then you would have to sit quietly and consider the stupidity of your ejaculations. Everyone knows Roar is terrible. From its trite, underwhelming attempts to take on a glossy magazine format instead of a respectable, London Student esque newspaper guise, to its endless, boring articles on Rag week, cringing pieces on sex and dating, and ill advised attempts at humour, the paper is even more of an embaressment to the college than the badly dressed engineering students streaming in and out of the campus doors every morning. But of course, everybody knows this.

The icing on the proverbial cack here is the fact that, before even sifting through the cretinous garbage inside (except of course for the music section, as Vinny and I have written for it, saving grace and whatnot), one must first face down the cover. Offensive as the basic templated set out and tabloid fonts are, what most brings a tear to the eye and an upsurge to the gullet, is the godawful images of too many drunk medics in school uniform quoffing snakebite (does anyone outside of the first year even drink this?) and generally looking rowdy, obviously either at Phase (eurgh) or Walkabout (euuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuurgh), which always seem to grace the cover. Must this be the face of our college tome? Whose fucking ridiculous idea is it to put this on the front of it? Who is this appealing to, aside from other drunk medics, who still consider a school disco night (replete with thos appalling dots on the cheek which all the most loathsome pencil on) a legitimate form of entertainment? It's a disgrace. (Ammendment) As anecdotal evidence of the preposterousness of the whole thing, when i returned to the heady nightlife of a Southampton University student 2 years after i left, i was reminded why i initiated my departure. Standing on a table at one particular dive of an establishment (Jesters, obviously), i saw an overweight, badly dressed student chugging from a jug of snakebite, simultaneously keeping one hand shoved firmly down his pants. I dont mean to make too scathing a comparison, but the individuals on the cover of Roar are, i fear, only one uncropped picture away from this kind of behaviour. But i digress.

The humanities department has some of the finest looking young people in London in its ranks. This should be made use of. Likewise the fact that the outside of the Maughan fucking owns now that the scaffolding is off. How can the good students of the Strand maintain a straight face and an ounce of dignity when this is how they are being represented at a base aestetic level? Im sick of it.