What does it mean to be a \u2018good\u2019 sports presenter? Really, it should mean nothing. They aren\u2019t important. They should have a sense of perspective, a sense of remembering that they are peripheral to the most popular consumer product and human activity that we have come up with.<\/p>\n
Of course, it doesn\u2019t work like that. Look at Gary Lineker. The BBC paid him \u00a31.3 million to ask Danny Murphy things like \u2018Bournemouth look to have run out of steam a little bit?\u2019 for 75 minutes a week. Such is our infatuation with sport that we end up really caring about who asks this kind of question. That person gets to be the highest-paid broadcaster in the country. We inhale sports commentary because there simply isn\u2019t enough sport to watch, dependent as it is on people made of flesh who get \u2018tired\u2019.<\/p>\n
Last year saw us take this to its logical conclusion. Lineker\u2019s thoughts on Gaza became as important as the Prime Minister\u2019s. Some generations get Isaiah Berlin as their public intellectuals; we got Gary Lineker. It\u2019s not really Gary\u2019s fault. Why were any of us ever listening to what the guy who says \u2018let\u2019s have a look at the Premier League table\u2019 thinks about international law?<\/p>\n
Before Lineker there was Des Lynam. Lynam, who is 83 and has looked 83 since the 1970s, provided a sort of ambient purr. Presenters are usually remembered by one line, and his is good: \u2018Shouldn\u2019t you be at work?\u2019 The question was posed straight to camera just before England was about to play a World Cup match at 2 p.m. on a Monday. After Lynam retired, football presenting lost its patrician haughtiness and entered the forced-banter zone, a place of half-smiles and staccato laughter. Cricket fans at least got the languid class of David Gower until 2019.<\/p>\n
Some generations get Isaiah Berlin as their public intellectuals; we got Gary Lineker<\/p>\n
Here, we entered a bizarre period \u2013 c.2010 \u2013 where Adrian Chiles was as sought after by broadcasters as Mesut Ozil was by football clubs. Before Amol Rajan, it was all Chiles. ITV paid him lots of money to host their football coverage. True, his everyman demeanour did make you feel at ease, carrying with it the authority of a smiling policeman at the church coffee morning. But the hours increasingly demanded of presenters meant there were some slips. The nadir was in 2012 when a match between Poland and England was called off because of a waterlogged pitch. Chiles, filling time, turned to Roy Keane and asked him: \u2018When does heavy rain become an actual downpour?\u2019<\/p>\n
Football presenters are increasingly empty vessels (a compliment). There is a guy on Sky Sports who presents all the most-watched football matches in the country, and not a single person knows his name (it\u2019s David Jones). When a football presenter just had to sit in a chair, their personal magnetism was all they had. Now there\u2019s technology, and David Jones has to walk around a Sky set that\u2019s as large as a ballroom, pulling levers and touching screens, like he\u2019s working at an oil refinery.<\/p>\n
Mark Pougatch has been ITV\u2019s lead football presenter for ten years. It\u2019s excellent that I didn\u2019t know that. Pougatch has some essential qualities: his voice has a good timbre, and he doesn\u2019t look weird. His affability is a kind of cricket-pavilion bonhomie. You watch him and think: I bet he\u2019s good at comp\u00e8ring charity auctions.<\/p>\n
Pougatch now has a podcast where he talks about sport with his mate Paul Hayward. It\u2019s called How It All Played Out and consists of two middle-aged dudes chatting about great sporting moments to each other. No budget; no real narrative structure. What we get is a set of Pougatchwave ambient anecdotes to get the dishes cleaned to. The 2005 Ashes is recalled: \u2018Australia had Ponting! McGrath! Warne! Langer! Hayden! Damien Martyn! Gillespie!\u2019 The analysis doesn\u2019t get much deeper than this. It\u2019s all enthusiastic re-descriptions: \u2018The harder and faster Brett Lee bowled, the further Kevin Pietersen hit him over square leg!\u2019 Do we really need much more than that?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What does it mean to be a \u2018good\u2019 sports presenter? Really, it should mean nothing. They aren\u2019t important.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":415151,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,165748,219179,596,219180,219181,219182,1591,588,85],"class_list":["post-415150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-david-jones","tag-des-lynam","tag-football","tag-football-presenters","tag-gary-linekar","tag-mark-pougatch","tag-podcasts","tag-sport","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=415150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415150\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/415151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=415150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=415150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=415150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}