What do you do with an ex-player who wasn't a good enough coach to keep Newcastle players motivated and in the Premiership, the best Scottish defender of the last thirty years, and an Irish international who was born in Preston and wore shorts so short they could bring a tear to a grown man's eye? You put them together with the blandest person ever to appear on TV and hide them away on a Saturday evening.
Does the BBC's football coverage really have to be this dull and this poor. This is a programme where platitudes reign supreme, where real criticism is so rare that when it does occur (as in recently with what amounted to a character assassination of Wayne Bridge) it makes everybody sit up and take notice.
We have Sky's slick coverage, fronted by Mr Slick himself (Richard Keys) but their programmes on Spanish football (Revista La Liga) and the Football League (The Football League Programme) offer more concise coverage in one hour than MOTD does in a month of Portsmouth away wins. Even ESPN have better presenters (Ray Stubbs) better studio guests and better analysis.
The experts on MOTD don't want to upset anybody and therefore try very hard to criticise anybody just in case the BBC has it's coverage reduced at some point in the future in the same way they lost England internationals after being 'overly critical.' What is wrong with a little honesty, most people who watch football programmes are, by definition, football literate. We can see bad defending, we can see when somebody misses a sitter and we can definitely see when we are being sold rubbish.
4 comments:
I must admit I haven't seen it for years! I wouldn't know how bad it was ...I didn't know Ray Stubbs was at ESPN (wasn't he on Final Score not too long back?)
P.S. aaaanyway, just popped over to say you caught me in mid post update so not sure if you caught the last bit I added!
Although I am slightly biased, having been to school with Mark Lawrenson, I am inclined to agree. These lot nearly always seem to "state the bleedin' obvious" and avoid anything contentious. It's not just the pundits, the editors are just as guilty in that controversial incidents are not even shown sometimes.
This season we've stopped watching "Final Score" in favour of the equivalent program on Sky Sports News. I thinks it's called "Soccer Saturday". One day, Phil Thompson will have a seizure caused by a late winning goal: far more entertaining than the pontifications of Garth Crooks!
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Soccer Saturday is much better than Final Score, the day that Adebayor ran towards the Arsenal fans at Eastlands was a particularly good day for Phil Thompson's cardiologist.
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