Dirty Leeds helped expose a bizarre Sky Sports commentator problem
Ever wondered what the comms are like in Australia? No? Well this is for the less parochial. You don’t want to be one of those people who said ‘I don’t care if I’ve got no freedom of movement, I don’t want to go anywhere.’ That’d make you like Chris Wilder, the multi-millionaire Brexit idiot. Stop bringing actual life into football articles, Johnny. I want to forget about the real world and escape into the sporting arms of dividend hungry, brutal asset-stripping, human rights abusing, autocratic dictatorships.
Let’s watch Australian football.
Down Under, football plays second fiddle to hard-looking men enjoying violent Aussie rules football in homo-erotically tight shorts. Didn’t we try to predict eight score draws on Aussie rules football in the ’70s? Hadn’t a clue.
These days, TNT shows the men’s and women’s A-Leagues. Auckland are top of the men’s, Melbourne City the women’s.
Pokuah Frimpong is the commentator for Newcastle Jets 1 Sydney 0 from a nice, small municipal-style ground. It might be low key but it’s well fought. Comms are quite studious. Standard is good but the match lacked goalscorers.
Adelaide v Brisbane is played at a noisy Coopers Stadium in 34 degrees. Commentator Robbie Thomson is super keen and upbeat. The home side coach looks hewn from granite. Irishman Roy O’Donovan, who Roy Keane signed for Sunderland and I remember playing for Hartlepool 15 years ago, does co-comms. The heat makes it hard for the players and it finishes 1-1. The comms sound quite fresh and enthusiastic. It’s a good game all things considered, perhaps like a top of League One match. There is something definitely and uniquely Australian about it.
Western United v Wellington is also played in the heat. The home side is managed by John Aloisi who you might remember playing for Portsmouth in the late ’90s. The home ground, Ironbarks Field in Tarneit looks very hot and as Australian as a koala’s pouch. It’s 4-1 with the home side much superior. The commentator, whose name I didn’t catch but may have been Teo Pellizzeri, was very full of beans. In fact that goes for most of them. There’s a lack of cynicism in both the commentary and play. Almost like it’s all new to them and they’re just happy to be there.
Melbourne Victory, managed by Patrick Kisnorbo (remember him playing for Leicester between 2005 and 2009?), play Central Coast Mariners who are managed by Matt Jackson from Leeds, who played over 130 games for Scunthorpe. Simon Hill is the commentator with Daniel McBreen, the ex-Falkirk and York City man. The crowds aren’t massive with impressive-looking stadiums half-empty. Melbourne won 3-0 and it’s a dominant performance. Not much tension.
Can’t say Saturday’s matches really offered a surfeit of fun. Dawn says they look bigger and heavier than Premier League players. They haven’t got the merkin haircut fashion yet, but I saw two cracking mullets. Play is often bogged down in midfield in the games I saw. Everyone was keen but it wasn’t exactly Serie A.
Let’s have a look at the Championship. It usually provides fun football and of course Sky shows all the games simultaneously, along with a raft of Leagues One and Two matches in an attempt to counteract TNT’s broadcasting of the Champions League. I opted for Boro v QPR of course, ignoring the multimillionaire Brexit fool Wilder and his Sheffield United v Bristol City which Sky were throwing the spotlight on. They might be promoted – ironically if they are, he’ll be sacked by Christmas, but avoid promotion and he’ll keep his job.
Cameron Pope is the accentless commentator with Irishman Stephen Kelly but it’s not stated, which seems unfair of Sky towards its workers. They’ve got 15 working tonight in the EFL. A quick flick through all the EFL games and I couldn’t hear one accent; there may have been some south-east variations that I didn’t recognise but certainly no Brummie, Scouser, west country, Manc, Sheffield, Leeds, Cumbrian, Teesside, Geordie or anything in between. Weird as only a small group of people in the country are accentless. Why use them as a default? Co-comms are diverse, but not commentators.
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Surely they’re not old-fashioned enough to think an accent wouldn’t be understandable, because they’d be accepting that their co-comms are unintelligible, if so. Accents are part of the cultural architecture of the country. Divorcing commentators from that is a poor, narrow-minded choice and the result is all 15 commentators are essentially interchangeable and thus hard to identify or memorise. We have many great accents in Britain, why discriminate against them? Sky lacks enough really distinctive commentators. We don’t all think being accentless is normal. Quite the reverse, it’s odd. It suggests a bias against those voices, a London-centric thoughtless assumption.
On Wednesday there was another raft of five Championship games. I chose the dirty Leeds v Millwall, commentated on by one of those accentless commentators, this time Andy Bishop. The state of commentary reminds me of a comment made about modern comedians: ‘every one of them is a solid 7/10, but there are no real stars.’
The proliferation of commentators required in any week is extensive but no-one stands out. When you watch the EFL, you’d think someone would want to make a big impression with a unique voice and style, but no. It’s always an anonymous 7/10 performer. It’s hard to tell one from the other. I can’t say, in this case, that Andy Bishop isn’t any good. He’s on top of the game and the facts and figures. Like the comedians that have been to comedy school, he’s perfectly adequate and doesn’t scare the horses.
If there was even one commentator with an identifiable voice that you could look forward to being in the company of, like on the radio, where you can hear a proliferation of different voices, it would be a big asset. Safety-first seems to be the Sky approach. But if you attract neither praise nor criticism, that indifference isn’t the win Sky would appear to think it is.
It’s a good game for dirty Leeds and enjoyable, as their home games usually are. They are better than their 2-0 win.
Am I unreasonable in wanting something more colourful and characterful? Is it too much to ask to better represent regional diversity? If Sky are going to continue with this all-the-games-live concept, they need to look harder in the regions for commentators to inject some originality into their commentary. Admittedly no-one is watching most of the games, especially further down the EFL, so it’s the perfect chance to blood some new talent and develop an alternative to the volume pedal-style of SHOUT-NAMES-LOUDLY-IN-FULL as they hit the ball, then going quiet, before SHOUTING LOUDLY again. Other ways are possible.
It was another brave Andy, Andy Fisher who turned up to work the League Two game between Bromley and Walsall when TNT were showing eight Europa and Conference League games, including the unfulfilled prospect of laughing at Manchester United. But in fairness, other football exists outside of United and their misguided, double-speaking, corporate truth wrangling Catweazle-like co-owner and thank God for that. Those roots will never be understood by a man cosplaying as a football business expert.
It’s a great 5,000 sell-out at the Hayes Lane Stadium and that was probably Sky’s viewing figures for this clash too. Despite my criticism at the lack of diversity of voices, I do enjoy how he tackles this game with enthusiasm. There’s no hint that this is the fourth tier, a tier increasingly ignored as irrelevant by the monied leagues, who don’t seem to understand that you can’t be at the pinnacle of the pyramid without the actual pyramid.