Hansen

[The Fish 10963]

 

Alan Hansen blazed trail for Gary Neville, Jamie Carragher and all the rest

Rory SmithMay 15 2014 12:05PM

It felt like his final roar of defiance. It was Bill Pullman in Independence Day, objectively the finest film ever made, declaring that he will not go quietly into that good night. It was Che Guevara staring down the barrel of a gun, through gritted teeth daring his assassin to pull the trigger. Shoot, coward, you’re only going to kill a man. It was his blaze of glory.

The conclusion to the most tumultuous, most chaotic season in memory had been little more than a procession: Manchester City strolling to the title, Norwich City exiting the Barclays Premier League with a whimper, Tottenham Hotspur securing a place in the Europa League. The final Match of the Day of the campaign was not – in terms of action – a classic. It was a post-coital fag; it was heading in to work when you get back from Vegas.

All of the poignancy, all of the significance came in the last 90 seconds or so. Alan Hansen was given the floor, his final contribution after 22 years’ service. This was a national institution leaving another national institution; it was – speaking personally – a rather more effecting moment than might have been anticipated.

There was a brief chat with Gary Lineker, in which the Scot explained what he had tried to do as a pundit – sitting next to Alan Shearer, pointedly outlining his disdain for the “he’ll be pleased with that” school of analysis – and then there was a montage. There is always a montage these days. It’s slightly surprising that nobody’s gone meta on it yet, and done an end-of-season montage of all the campaign’s best montages.

This was not, sadly, a montage of Hansen’s best bits. Ideally, the producers might have gone for lots of shots of him talking in slow motion. That would have been telling, given that the predilection all broadcasters have for using inordinately expensive slo-mo cameras to show people doing things that aren’t very interesting in slow motion: wincing, spitting, staring determinedly into the distance. Or they could have got Cassetteboy in, and had them do a mash-up of Hansen saying “power, pace, precision” in that staccato style, with a reverb of him saying “you’ll win nothing with kids” to fade?

Instead, they just gave him a montage of the season’s highlights. It was more than a simple roll-through of some decent goals, though. There were little digs here and there – “there are some stories that cannot be told in 140 characters” – at the way the game has gone, at the sheer deafening noise that surrounds football now. It felt just a little – but at the same time more than enough – like a message, like he was explaining why he is going.

There has long been a feeling that he decided enough was enough when he saw how Mark Lawrenson was sidelined, the BBC deciding that the former Brighton defender’s mixture of lounge-lizard shirts and golf-club gags didn’t really constitute detailed analysis of football, removing him from a front-line position on the station’s flagship show. But that montage suggested there is something else: Hansen seemed to be saying that he wants no part of this world of red buttons and hashtags and managers wearing oversized novelty headphones to speak to the studio.

Hansen’s discomfort at the way football is covered now mirrors that of the programme he has become so synonymous with. Match of the Day is a bit like the NHS, or public transport: we all sort of think it should be better, but nobody’s quite sure how. We just feel that it doesn’t work quite as it should.

That sensation has been crystallised ever since the moment that punditry changed. You can put a date on that: August 20, 2012. That was the night that Everton beat Manchester United 1-0 at Goodison Park, and Gary Neville, newly installed at Sky, spent a good five minutes in the studio detailing Everton’s blocking routines at set pieces. It was insightful, it was forensic, it was the sort of thing that only a professional would know about. It was actually quite Hansen-esque, in the sense that it did not look at a goal and it did not use the present perfect tense (“he’s put in a cross”). It was the polar opposite of what we feel like we get on Match of the Day.

Ever since that point, the BBC has felt like it needs to catch up, like it needs to compete with Sky as the home of intelligent football analysis. It has – and this is to its immense credit – tried to experiment with the format: those pre-recorded direct chats with managers, the presence of Vincent Kompany in the studio, a range of new guests, the pick of whom have been Kevin Kilbane, Danny Murphy and Dietmar Hamann. All of it is designed to break the cycle, to carve out a niche for Match of the Day in football’s firmament. To some extent it has worked. The problem is that it can only ever work to some extent, and that is because Match of the Day is not Sky or BT, either in a practical or theoretical sense.

The practical first: the BBC do not have endless air-time to fill. They cannot give Murphy and Kilbane a bank of iPads and tell them to give a ten-minute lecture on West Ham United’s front screen. They have to whip through somewhere between six and nine games every Saturday night. As Hansen said, that’s three minutes, just over, for every match. There is a limit to how detailed any analysis can be, simply because of the time constraints.

More interestingly, though, is the other side: whether that is what they should be doing. And the answer, if we are honest, is that no, they shouldn’t, because there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that that is what people actually want.

At the risk of breaking the fourth wall, there is a good chance that if you’re reading this, you are not part of Match of the Day’s core demographic. You probably take an active, detailed interest in football during the week. You’re most likely on Twitter – which is not, despite what newspapers seem to believe, a representative sample of the country, not even in London – and you probably keep regularly abridged of the latest news from across the game.

Yes, you watch Match of the Day (probably), because everyone does, but you are not like the vast majority of people who watch the programme. Most of them are not on Twitter. Most of them do not have a minute-by-minute knowledge of everything that’s happened during the week. Most of them probably don’t have Sky. And most of them – crucially – watch Match of the Day do so because they want to see the goals, not because they want forensic analysis.

This is the dilemma that faces the BBC across all of its output in microcosm: mass appeal, or critical acclaim. In this case, the critics are what might be called the football chatterati – that’s you and me – who feel that Match of the Day has a duty to be educational, who want the pundits to bestow their wisdom upon us. The mass, though, just want to see the goals. Maybe they want to have it explained to them – briefly – why the goals have been scored, but there’s a good chance that when the analysis comes on, they nip out to get a biscuit.

That is not a criticism, of those viewers or of the BBC. If anything, it is to express some understanding of the former, who are continually told what they should want by people who don’t know, and some sympathy for the latter, who have an impossibly fine line to tread; by and large, they do that very well.

Perhaps, though, there is a middle ground. There was a time when the first few games on Match of the Day got rather more air-time than the last few, basically on the grounds that they were better. Nobody – not even fans of the clubs involved – would claim that a 0-0 draw between Sunderland and Stoke warrants as much coverage as a 5-4 thriller between Tottenham and Arsenal; Match of the Day seems to.

The clue is in the name: let the better games, the matches of the day, breathe, and then rattle through the worse ones at the end. All the current arrangement is doing is making sure Manish Bhasin gets as few viewers as possible as he goes up against Babestation Extra in the late-night League One-or-drunken-Onanism slot. Maybe that’s deliberate. Maybe Lineker hates Bhasin.

That could go hand-in-hand with an acknowledgement that some games do not warrant analysis. If there is nothing of any great interest to pick out, don’t try for the sake of it: that’s when pundits will resort to cliché. Instead, shrink that down to a minute or so – as they did on the last day of the season – and allow more time for analysis of something genuinely interesting.

Perhaps that takes the middle way: as many goals as possible, with a dash of Neville-style insight thrown in. It is just a shame Hansen would not be around to do it. He has been treated with disdain in recent years, but it is safe to say that he blazed the trail for Neville, Jamie Carragher and all the rest. He is the father of modern punditry, as anyone who is old enough to remember what it used to be like will tell you. From the comfort of the golf club, he can look back at a montage of his second career and, with a smile, say: “He’ll be pleased with that.”

 

[Dr Gloom 22143]

good read, thanks for sharing

[ADP 0]

Interesting article.

 

Dylan Thomas misquote aside

[PaddockLad 17643]

Didnt do much after mmm bop did they?

[Monkeys Fist 43063]

Didnt do much after mmm bop did they?

[Ayatollah Hermione 14047]

Alan Hansen blazed a trail for shit pundits everywhere. Thank fuck.

 

I haven't read it btw.