We’re still alive!

CollinsBeans has not succumbed to a slow death

Sorry we’ve been a bit quiet recently. Our first post of 2011 is clearly well overdue.

And as a site partly dedicated to analysing football punditry, it seems fairly obligatory to have a piece on the Andy Gray and Richard Keys saga.

At this stage, there’s not much to add that hasn’t already been said in the frankly staggering amount of media coverage that has been given to this story. Some opinion may follow, but in the meantime see below for a pretty interesting piece by Paul Hayward of The Guardian. It focuses a bit more on the generally poor standard of television punditry and raises some of the issues we feel strongly about.

I certainly don’t agree with all of Hayward’s thoughts – I think his list of superior pundits is very dubious - Gareth Southgate, Graeme Souness, Mark Lawrenson and Scott Minto? Yet his general theme is very much spot on.

Further posts will follow, rest assured, including an overdue update on the fortunes of Wandsworth Athletic.

TV's chance to elevate football punditry to the level of enlightenment

The Andy Gray-Richard Keys saga gives football broadcasters

There is a burning appetite out there for more rigorous football punditry: a point lost on the more star-struck television executives, who are failing in their duty to re-train and to coach. More Mike Atherton, less Paul Merson was the cry from the street when Andy Gray fell and Richard Keys again morphed into Alan Partridge with his parting shot: "Success breeds envy."

The two modes of TV broadcasting are shouting into the lug 'ole of the imagined "bloke in the pub" and cosy-cosy on the sofa for all the family. Neither is conducive to the kind of mind-enriching insight and analysis served up by Atherton, Nasser Hussain and David Lloyd in cricket.

This disparity is written into the histories of the two sports, many frustrated football watchers argued after the Gray-Keys imbroglio. One is contemplative and articulate, the other visceral and cliche-inclined. But there is no reason for football to keep its range of expression so narrow, its expert analysis so anodyne and its journalistic standards so low.

This is not to dismiss all ex-player commentators. Lee Dixon, Gareth Southgate, Chris Kamara, Graeme Souness, Mark Lawrenson, Alan Smith, Scott Minto and the under-used Gary O'Reilly are among the former pros who seek to cast light and treat their new vocations seriously (we are talking television here, where David Pleat is also a fine analyst – not radio, where the BBC also hands out co-commentating mics too easily).

The craving one hears all the time is: tell me about the game, show me, help me understand, as Atherton or Hussain can, and Paul Merson, Andy Cole and Dwight Yorke cannot, or choose not to. Controversy-phobic players in search of a job are not the prime culprits. In football, a fame-addled industry, they are led up from reception, slapped with make-up and shown to a sofa, where their presence alone is meant to be sufficient. "Look: it's Dwight Yorke!"

This is not broadcasting, it's Madame Tussauds. It is institutionalised sycophancy, for which the viewer is paying. And it patronises the aficionado in his and her own home. People who follow football properly spend more time thinking about the game than is probably good for them. From ex-players they seek the kind of enlightenment that is beyond their own musings on the bus or train. They are not fooled by in-jokes, love-ins or the kind of evasions that end with a violent leg-breaking tackle being described as "unfortunate".

Gray and Keys were not guilty of these offences. With his Pentagon box of replay tricks, Gray would break the game down, sometimes with sledgehammer emphasis on a full-back "bombing on", and Keys would ask a tough question, and bring journalistic shape to the discussion (on-air, at least). But the spectacular implosion of the game's big front-of-house double act offers television a chance to listen at last to viewers when they say they want less of the old boy network and more intelligent talk about the game.

Especially annoying is Match of the Day 2's special guest slot, when a big name is coated in honey by Colin Murray, whose questions could do with a regular trim to eliminate unnecessary clauses. Most of us watch MOTD2 to see the game deconstructed a bit more, and explained, in the Lee Dixon style. We might want to know why Andrey Arshavin is a ghost of his old self or how Kenny Dalglish has altered Liverpool's playing style. To be confronted with a re-run of some of Andy Cole's best career moments is merely an invitation to head off to bed.

Away from the live action itself, Sky clearly aims its coverage at what you might call the impassioned fan: hence Phil Thompson, Charlie Nicholas and Merson on Soccer Saturday. At least it has thought about its audience. The BBC, on the other hand, displays a curious urge to present football as light entertainment. Thus Gary Lineker, who could say plenty about the specifics of a game or passage of play, is trapped in the role of smooth presenter and link man, settling us all down for the ancient Saturday night ritual.

In American sport the talking heads who fill the gaps between games are emboldened by their masters to be provocative as well as highly detailed in their technical analysis. The result is entertainment plus enlightenment (plus earache, sometimes). Here, in football, there is no ante-room between the end of a playing career and the start of a life in broadcasting, which is television's fault.

To ex-players, and their agents, TV should recite some rules. There would be no easy hour on a sofa without training and preparation. The viewer beyond the camera is not a docile consumer of celebrity chatter but someone with a deep interest in the mechanics and nuances of the game. Football on TV is too often talking to itself.