http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2010/oct/30/punditry-match-of-the-day
Why punditry is a game the English cannot win
- Failing to stay away from cliches on Norwegian television has given me a new found respect for Alan Shearer
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Sport/Pix/columnists/2010/10/29/1288367008665/Unlike-their-English-coun-006.jpg
Unlike their English counterparts, Norweigan pundits have heard of Hatem Ben Arfa.
Throughout the recent swell of public harrumphing over the quality and content of Match of the Day – and specifically its punditry – I have found the experience of watching the show increasingly awkward, and even a little heart-rending. Alan Shearer was rightly called to account for suggesting nobody knows anything about the widely known-about French international Hatem Ben Arfa. But you sense the criticism stung. A programme that posits the notion of leonine alpha-male big beasts of the suburban conservatory sharing tobacco-smooth post-snifter badinage – not even behind a desk, but right out in front on the crotch-fanning plinth of the low-slung sofa – suddenly became noticeably stiff‑backed and taut, its banter infused with fresh levels of glazed menace.
As a viewer I too may have occasionally found Shearer over-reliant on cliche, perhaps lacking in forensic skills, emitting – if you really insist on saying it – through a lantern-jawed rictus his clenched put-puttering of gaseous think-spurts. But now I know now that these are uncharitable thoughts. I know this because last week I made my own competitive debut as a jobbing one-off live TV pundit (of a sort) on Norway's TV2 channel. It was, on the whole, an unsettling experience, one that made me sympathise a great deal with Shearer and anybody else exposed to the unblinking disintegrator ray of the TV camera lens.
I did learn a lot. The first thing I learnt was why football pundits wear those shirts. You know those shirts: dandy-ishly stitched, nipple-clamp tight, glimmering with nightclub sheen and always verging towards a peaty deep maroon. It turns out TV cameras demand dark shirts. It also turns out if you try to buy a dark shirt the selection on offer tends to go a certain way.
Emerging from Gatwick duty free with my own brand-new silky-black hip-hugging tunic I duly felt a sense of having crossed some invisible line of initiation. I had a pundit shirt.
When it came to the business of actually passing comment on live Premier League matches I only had one plan: not to use cliches. This was my sole ambition. To at least be dull and pedestrian in a way that seemed natural and unstilted.
Disgorged at Bergen airport, ferried across town, urgently powdered and de-shined, I found myself arranged around the illuminated table alongside TV2's Jon Hartvig Børrestad, Morten Langli, and Aleksander Schau. Before long the moment duly arrived and I opened my mouth to speak. "To be fair it's a game both teams want to win." Moments later I was back: "It's a red letter day for the blue half of Merseyside as they take on Harry Redknapp's north London charmers." And so it went on. Two banks of four. Playing a high line. This stuff, it appears, is just in there, waiting to fill the empty space. By the end I'd adopted a new tactic of delivering my cliches with a simpering smile and a coy incline of the head, hoping to imply somehow that I was using cliches artfully, conferring some ironically-couched deeper meaning behind the cliche. And you know what? I really think that came across.
It turns out there is only one way to be good at TV punditry. You need to be pumped and prepped to the eyelids. You've got to be riffing, noodling and belching football. My studio companions really were very good: passionate, not just about football, but about knowing about football. They spat illuminating stats, they interjected song lyrics amusingly. They frightened you out of your torpor. They appeared to know, not just about Ben Arfa, but about the assorted personnel of the Spanish and Italian leagues as well as the private habits of Marcus Hahnemann (doesn't brush his teeth before a game, apparently).
Of course, they had several advantages. Norwegians still love English football with an inherited passion that is itself rooted in TV: the first English match televised there was in 1961; the Norway team didn't get a full live televised game until 1992. Secondly, Scandinavians are, geographically and culturally, the world's in-house nerds: intelligent, sombre, pale, wised-up, sardonic, often to be found indoors. Finally, these professional broadcasters were all professional journalists, too: career information-hoarders, lifetime stat-mongers and detail-ferrets, reliably neurotic and competitive in their amiable one-upmanship.
This is perhaps a point of distinction. English pundits are almost exclusively ex-players. This confers obvious advantages: ex-players know what it takes to win at football. But being able to communicate this under pressure is an entirely separate skill, one that needs to be honed and worked at. In England there is a sense that simply "being" ex-international centre-forward Trevor Sprockington is enough, that Trevor Sprockington's opinions will have weight simply by means of their provenance. Tied to this is English football's enduring distrust of wider learning, academia, abstract thought and anything that suggests acquired and theoretical knowledge.
Struggling uphill into the teeth of these twin cyclones, it is hardly Shearer's fault if at times he seems a little exposed. Norwegian TV turned out to be quite instructive. The suggestion is that just turning up and being yourself in a shirt may not actually be enough. Not when it makes watching you hard work – or at least like hard work not done.
