The commentator is stepping back from Sky after three decades and his perennial presence and enthusiasm will be missedAt Sky Sports, they still called him “the Voice”. Richard Keys, the long-serving anchorman to Martin Tyler in the commentary box, claimed this weekend this was because Tyler “definitely didn’t have a face for TV” – throwing us back to a now distant, coarser era of broadcasting.At 77, Tyler is the perennial who floated above the eras. Viewers of 40-plus will recall his career extending far further back than before football began in 1992. At both the 1982 and 1986 World Cups, Tyler acted as ITV’s main commentator while Brian Moore stayed in a London studio before flying out for the latter...
The football analyst has consistently leveraged his ample platform and gravitas against reproductive rights and LGBTQ people – and it doesn’t seem like NBC or the NFL careNo sports league does more than the National Football League to encourage the stereotype of the glass-chewing, expletive-spewing coach. Tony Dungy, though, was more Kenneth Parcell than Bill Parcells – a soft-spoken, clean-cut ex-defensive back whose winning pedigree and strategic ingenuity rightly earned him pride of place among the titans of his profession. That Dungy is also a Black pioneer makes him especially useful to commissioner Roger Goodell’s efforts to “protect the [NFL] shield” from the seasonal assaults on its undying legacy of racial and gender inequality. Since transitioning to a lofty post-retirement...
The longtime NBA player has shined in his rookie year as a basketball analyst, but his viral takedown of Chris Russo this week on ESPN’s First Take showed what makes him specialJJ Redick’s emergence as a rising star for ESPN since joining the network as a basketball analyst in October has been one of the more notable stories in US sports media over the past year.The 37-year-old Redick, who launched a popular podcast while he was still a player, spent 15 seasons in the NBA after a decorated four-year stint at Duke, where he was the consensus national college basketball player of the year in 2006. He’s brought the keen insight and deep knowledge of an ex-pro to the broadcasting...
Coverage on Channel 4 can help put the game back into the national conversation at a time when Test matches have rarely been more excitingFrom this distance, it looks like Joe Root is holding himself a little differently these days. You can see it in his press conferences, where his answers seem as self-assured as his footwork at the crease. Watch him at work after England wrapped up the first Test match, politely brushing aside insistent questions about whether he should have declared on the fourth evening and briskly dismissing everyone else’s enthusiasm about what he and his team had just achieved. “We can’t be happy with what we’ve done,” he said.Root is sure of himself, where he used to...
Amazon’s major selling point, that you can watch all the games, is the worst thing about it. You CAN watch them all. Add in social media, and being an armchair fan becomes exhaustingTV to the left of me, laptops to the right, there I was, stuck in the middle with Amazon Prime. Primed for prime on a Tuesday night – waiting like all other broadcasters who hadn’t been asked to take part to see if it fell apart.A centre-forward relies on the service from the wide men. Here Gabby Logan and friends depended on the service of your broadband. And I had no complaints. It ran smoothly and the football happened. Like it always does. Related: Amazon creeps into football’s...