Radio Pundits - We deserve better! 21st December 2010

RADIO PUNDITS  - WE DESERVE BETTER!

Listening to Radio Five Live’s review of the football year tonight, ‘chaired’ by Mark Chapman and with contributions from Martin Keown, Phil Brown and the excruciating Steve Claridge, I was moved to think that we deserve better.

Perhaps it is simply bias that make me consider our local man, Chris Goreham, to be one of the best of the up and coming bunch of commentators. Having recently, owing to a geographical quirk, had to listen to our home game with Leicester City on BBC Radio Leicester, I can assure you that their version of Goreham is to football commentary what Michael Theoklitos is to goalkeeping, and we are lucky to have Goreham. Alongside him Neil Adams manages to steer a difficult path very skilfully – supporting the club, recognising weaknesses (not many these days) but managing to keep the lid on any potential hysteria.

But at the national level we are being sold short. I admire hugely most of Five Live’s full-time staff. The likes of Mike Ingham, John Murray, Conor McNamara, Guy Mowbray and Mark Pougatch are the very best at their trade. However, Alan Green is unfortunately becoming one of those who has forgotten his role and thinks he has a right to pontificate about all matters; in particular Green’s constant belittling of referees does the game no good (I once heard a caller to six-o-six take Green to task on this, asking the opinionated Ulsterman how many games he had refereed. ‘Oh no! I’m not having that!’ Green cried as he cut the caller off, recognising with all the instinct of a cornered politician that there was no way out.) One of the BBC’s brightest rising commentators, Darren Fletcher, seems to me to be suffering by association with the simply dreadful Robbie Savage.

Savage is a decent footballer if you like journeymen. However, his (or his agent’s) manipulation of the modern game to furnish him with a vulgar, brash lifestyle hardly qualifies him to comment on all matters to do with football to the listening public every Saturday evening on six-o-six. His constant refrain that footballers ‘deserve all the money they get’ is alarmingly simplistic and last Saturday his admission that had he been playing for Leicester against Ipswich he would have ‘gone down injured’ and done all that he could to ‘con the ref’ was shameful. In a game riddled with cheating and dishonesty on and off the field the BBC licence payer deserves better than to have to put up with such a poor example. His hectoring of callers to the programme and his loud put-downs of any who opposes his views have apparently led him to receive some sort of radio ‘award’. One wonders who makes such awards. What is perhaps most embarrassing is Savage’s inability to follow the thread of anything remotely resembling a coherent argument which repeatedly leads him to ‘shout down’ callers. Recently Fletcher seems to have joined Savage in a sort of laddish twosome and his own perceptive analysis of the game is in danger of being distorted.

Claridge is another journeyman turned pundit whose prattling, ungrammatical outpourings (whether on Five Live or ‘The Football League Show’) leave a great deal to be desired. I do not suggest that we must have only university English graduates on the airwaves but a certain level of basic articulacy is  surely required. Listening tonight to Phil Brown alongside Claridge deepened the gloom; this evening’s BBC strategy seemed to be to introduce a subject, let Claridge ramble, stumble, repeat and twist the language this way and that before passing over to Brown for more of the same but this time with a North Eastern accent, then expect the listener to glean some sense from it! This from the BBC – the premier broadcaster in the world.

Martin Keown was not my favourite player and indeed not all that he did on the field was exemplary. However, he represents, for me, a balanced view of the game, articulately expressed, which I find unusual amongst many of the former players Five Live uses. There are others who impress – Craig Burley and Pat Nevin to name a couple – but generally speaking this is an area at which the BBC needs to take a serious look. We deserve better!