Channel 4's coverage of the Ashes won four prizes at the Royal Television Society's recent sports awards. No surprise there—Mark Nicholas and his team reinvented cricket coverage. They gave us new technology (Hawk-Eye, super slo-mo, revealing sound), detailed expert analysis from Simon Hughes and a large team of smart commentators.
Compare this with football coverage, which has barely changed since the 1960s. The technology has improved, of course. In 1966 we saw the action replay for the first time, during the opening game of the World Cup between England and Uruguay. The BBC was besieged by calls from puzzled viewers asking whether the match was live or recorded. Since then we have gone from the black-and-white of "They think it's all over" to the colour of Gazza's tears at Italia '90. Now we have the BBC's HDTV, red-button interactivity, and live streaming of matches on the internet, and ITV's computer graphics showing the number of shots on (or off) target. What is strange, though, is how uneven this revolution is.
Watching and re-watching Argentina's first "goal" against Ivory Coast—did the ball cross the line or not?—it was hard to believe we were still relying on conflicting points of view, as if we were back with the Russian linesman in 1966, when cricket and tennis would have had the question resolved by Hawk-Eye. In general, the hardware has changed. The software, however, has not.
Today, it is hard to imagine how few black footballers played in the 1960s and 1970s. Now the Africans have landed. No great team is without its African players: Eto at Barcelona, Drogba, Mikel and Essien at Chelsea, Touré and Eboué at Arsenal. The same is true of South American players: Crespo, Ronaldo, Ronaldinho.
On British television, however, our football coverage remains the same. First, the weary old format: a commentator or two, a studio presenter and "expert analysis" by a dour mix of ex-pros and/or managers. For the big events we are force-fed a diet of clips, interviews, panel chat, dire competitions and perhaps a location filmette. Take England's opening World Cup match. Kick-off was at 2pm. "Coverage" started at 12.40. This is a circle of hell all of its own.
At the centre of this conservatism is an obsession with a certain kind of pundit, with their mix of badinage and "analysis." This time, ITV has rung the changes by bringing in Stuart Pearce and Sam Allardyce. Not, we note, Mourinho, Benitez or Wenger. Of course, viewers expect familiar British voices. However, it is not really about language and accents. What we get with Hansen and Shearer, Allardyce and Pearce, is not so much an accent as a worldview. What we want is an obsession with 1966 and 1970. Hence those images behind Gabby Logan of Hurst and Charlton and, just as revealing, of Pelé and Moore from 1970 and Maradona in 1986. Everyone else has moved on. But we still live in a Miss Havisham world where Banks will always be making that save from Pelé and Maradona will always be cheating our boys with "the hand of god." Our folk memories go back to when we mattered: the second world war ("never write off the Germans") with Bobby Moore, while the fans sing the theme from The Great Escape.
The second distinctive feature of the British pundits' worldview is our state of denial about the present. How many times have we been told that England has so many world-class players? Hence the crisis after England's opening match, when none of these world-beaters turned up against Paraguay (but don't worry: we got off to a slow start in '66 too). A revealing moment in ITV's coverage came on the first day when Ruud Gullit coolly said he wouldn't have brought Rooney. It was like a Bateman cartoon. Pearce and Allardyce couldn't believe it. Fortunately, Gullit wasn't asked whether he would have brought Owen. Foreigners don't have the same sacred cows.
Put together this strange English nostalgia and our fantasies about the present and we have a familiar problem—a strange inability to give up our past and see how fast the rest of the world is changing. If we had Wenger or Mourinho as pundits, do you think they would be going on about 1966 or 1970? Rather than talking about Michael Owen, they would tell us about some amazing new African or South American star we have never seen—but who they have bought because they heard about him from a colleague at Porto or Monaco. Football has gone global, but our television coverage stays the same. Our pundits are either heroes from the past or also-rans in the present. What does that tell us?
Sports executives will say that football has a mass following, and that a mass television audience doesn't want any fancy stuff. We want pundits who share our memories and our fantasies. But isn't multi-channel coverage supposed to be about choice? When it comes to football, there is no choice. Everyone cheers on "our" boys, dodges tricky issues, goes for the lowbrow option. Why will no one break the mould for an audience who want something a bit different?
