Today’s football pundit must drive engagement, stir debate and emotions – never mind nuance, ambiguity or ebb and flowIt’s thrilling, visceral television. The sort of raw, unbridled authenticity that makes Roy Keane one of the most compelling pundits not just in football, but in any sport. “I’m fuming here,” he says at half-time, with Tottenham 1-0 up against Manchester United and Keane sitting in the Sky Sports studio. And in those words lie a sort of mission statement, a definitive affirmation of an irrefutable truth: football is back, and how we’ve missed it.No, that doesn’t really work. Let’s try it this way. It was unhinged, unsettling, shocking for all the wrong reasons. As he tore apart Harry Maguire and Luke...
The latest series from Julian Fellowes starts badly and barely improves but it is a reminder football has never stood stillYou can see how The English Game must have sounded in conception. It’s the birth of football. It’s toffs against proles, the rivalry of one of the great aristocrats of the early game, Lord Arthur Kinnaird, and the Glaswegian stonemason who was the first great professional, Fergus Suter. It’s about an idea going out into the world and being profoundly changed when it is taken up by the masses.But Netflix’s new series comes nowhere near what it might have been, and is little more than a mishmash of Downton Abbey stereotypes and trouble-at-mill cliches. The toffs are habitually awful, the...
As one half of Saint and Greavsie, the former striker spoke about the sport he loved with enjoyment and wit. We could do with some of that now“I am someone who believes that what we need without a doubt is more of Jimmy Greaves,” wrote the performance poet John Hegley in Greavsie, an ironic yet affectionate early-1990s paean to a then ubiquitous figure. “The more I get of Greaves, the more my life achieves.”The Premier League’s paywall model would soon be bringing down the curtain on one of the more curious and varied media careers of an ex-footballer. ITV’s failure to land broadcast rights to what the victor, Sky, would trail as a “whole new ball game” meant the axe...
Two long nights in Portugal gave me a new-found respect for pitchside reporters and an extra-time craving for a bananaIt’s the 90th minute. Cristiano Ronaldo, on a hat‑trick, cuts inside his man and whacks it in the corner of the net to seal Portgual’s 3-1 win against Switzerland in the Nations League. I am reporting pitchside for the Australian TV network Optus Sport. What an honour, to witness the second greatest player of the modern era shine so brightly in front of his adoring home support.Except I don’t see it. As Ronaldo strikes the ball, I am sprinting down five flights of concrete steps. There is a lot of concrete in Porto’s stadium and I am surrounded by it. A...
The Netflix series is fascinating for many reasons, but primarily for the insight it gives into the plight of players who have fallen just below the standards of the game’s eliteAmong the many joys of the eight-part Netflix series Sunderland ’Til I Die is a glimpse of football that is seldom seen, and little discussed in the media. Not the behind-the-scenes problems faced by managers with limited budgets and a distant owner looking to sell. That’s all fascinating stuff, though not quite as warts-and-all gripping as Premier Passions, the 1998 fly-on-the-dressing-room-wall account of Sunderland’s relegation, in which Peter Reid’s team talks would have made a stevedore blush.No, what was most revealing was the plight of professional sportsmen a rung or,...