Football Crazy!

Taking the piss out of ITV football commentary is like shooting fish in a barrel. In fact it’s like shooting really big fish in a really small barrel with a really big gun, the sort of cartoon gun that Elmer J Fudd used to go hunting ‘wabbits’ with.

But there’s good reason for that and the weekend presented another glowing example of how terrible the whole ITV football team really are.

For a start studio anchors Matt Smith and Andy Townsend are like two kids who have been given the controls of an expensive fighter jet and rather than treat it with respect – and just that little bit of awe – they verbally speed around from here to there with no coherent meaning anywhere inbetween. They’re like an excited pair of Alan Partridges made real.

Then there’s the commentators themselves…

I watched the bulk of the Trinidad and Tobago v Sweden game on Saturday and at one point the commentary team of Gareth Southgate and Clive Tyldesley got so bored you could almost hear the slow drip of ennui escaping their very beings. Interesting facts used to fill in this type of commentary void but they’d either not researched enough or simply had some sort of verbal rigor mortis set in, hence Tyldesley repeating his mantra that T&T were the ‘smallest nation ever to compete at the World Cup.’ Yawn…

The other memorable bits of the commentary for me were when Tyldesley started adopting a sentence structure that made him sound a bit like Yoda. ‘Fantastic result… for Trinidad and Tobago… this will be…’ he uttered at one point.

Then, of course, there was Gareth Southgate’s comment that ‘The Swedish fans are booing the Trinidad lads for time-wasting, but they don't realise that's the pace they move at when they're not playing.’ Oh my aching sides… Racial sterotype anyone?

But this was topped when one of the duo managed to work in a phrase that went something like: ‘They’ll be deliriously happy and there'll be the exotic smell of some sweet spices in the air tonight…’ which to me seemed to suggest that the whole T&T team and its fans would be stoned off their tits.

ITV is a commercial channel and as such it has limitations – but even if the bulk of its output is lying in the gutter the World Cup is one of the few occasions where it can look up at the stars.

But as per usual it’s just making an utter arse of it…