TNT sidestep Champions League final ‘pool of vomit’ but platform ‘spectacularly crass’ Ferdinand one last time
Rio Ferdinand bid farewell to TNT with some ‘spectacularly crass’ nonsense, with Johnny Nic left ruing the lack of originality in covering the women’s game.
It’s the Euros for the women in July – amazing to think we’re defending champions.
Last Friday saw England play Portugal in the Nations League on ITV4. I wish the presentation mode wasn’t the same as for men’s football, the whole pitchside, desk, presenter and pundits thing. Creating a separate style and identity seems an obvious move to make, especially as the status quo is tired and over-worn as a concept. The game deserves better and I don’t know why they don’t, other than lack of imagination.
The Google Pixel ads that peppered the broadcast and the later game were cringing and horribly contrived. Who thought they were a good idea? Is that the best they can do, a pretend ‘interaction’ purportedly between ‘normal’ people talking about the game but in such general terms they think they can be used in any interval of any game? They probably think that’s clever but they look designed for kids’ telly. Surely the cocaine creation of an ad agency that never watches football. ‘Anything can happen in the second half,’ says one. I don’t think so; the game was 5-0 at half time and the comment was obviously inappropriate and sounded stupid, as such a contrived concept was always likely to. Fools.
England monstered Portugal, especially in the first half.
I strapped in for five hours of TNT’s Champions League final coverage on Saturday. In the past it was free on YouTube as well, but now to see it free, you have to sign up for a TNT account, which many would be put off by. Seems like a deliberate attempt to restrict the audience and keep the tourists at bay. You’d think they would want viewers so they can sell ad space, instead of just showing their ‘back soon’ screen, but obviously not. This is a big game for the channel and that no English team is involved made it better. There’s no pro English brown-nosing. Steven Gerrard and Rio (thankfully offski after this) wear a bizarre origami collar. If Gerrard is looking forward to it, he forgot to tell his face. And he raises the events in Liverpool to say he didn’t want to raise the events in Liverpool, which no-one was going to do anyway. All of which seemed very odd.
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They drew on all their usual people. I wish they’d stop pretending the Champions League final is the same as the European Cup final. It’s an entirely different tournament. Of course, the ownership, what Jonny Liew in The Guardian called ‘Despotism v Capitalism’, isn’t mentioned, despite it being pretty fundamental to understanding each team. I really don’t know why not; it’s like there’s a conspiracy of silence. Why is knowledge to be avoided? Is it football’s notorious anti-intellectualism? It won’t make the actual football worse, just add real world intelligence about the clubs. As a result, it feels like a big dirty secret to keep quiet about.
There’s no shortage of people who could talk knowledgeably about it. I don’t expect it to be something one of the pundits talks about in a ‘obviously, at the end of the day, it’s not an ideal system’ sort of way, a la Alan Hansen about apartheid, but there are articulate, knowledgeable people more familiar with the truth. It’s a five-hour show so there’s no shortage of time. It’s really important for the future of the game and is one of the reasons PSG won the final and are so good, but it was wholly ignored like a pool of vomit in the bar that you have to step around.
Ignoring problematic news so as not to harsh the buzz is not only a betrayal of the oppressed people, it fails to realise it wouldn’t even harm their paltry viewing figures. People don’t want to hide from the truth.
A stylish Laura Woods was good at smiling and pretending to listen, while being talked to in her ear. After 70 minutes of build up, I was flagging. Please just start. Donnarumma’s hair looks like he fell asleep in a skip and it was gnawed at by rats. Owen, Rio and Stevie end up looking like three blokes, ties off, talking football at a wedding reception.
For some reason Linkin Park played some noise for a few minutes, sounding like rock played by a Eurovision entry and a violinist playing Seven Nation Army who was frankly no Eddie Jobson (ask yer music nerd grandad). All utterly fatuous.
Then at last, the football started and from the first minute this young PSG tore Inter apart and dominated. A step too far for the Italians. “Some might say this is a win for football,” says Rio, the man in the Qatar Airways ads. Qatar, a wealthy place where women can still lose their right to financial support if they refuse to have sex with their husband “without a legitimate reason” – and that’s just one of many heinous laws.
Get that man a bisht. Spectacularly crass for which he was panned widely in the media. Yeah, 100%, Rio, 100 percent. Now f**k off, son, eh. Your propaganda for oppressive autocracy will not be missed and I hope TNT had the moral heft to not renew his contract… but it wouldn’t be a surprise if they were fine with autocratic investors.
As Nasser Al-Khelaifi, the sinister PSG president whose ultimate responsibility is to the Emir of Qatar, is there beside the equally sinister UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin, it was like watching aliens that have completed their takeover of earth. Mutants now so perfectly disguised they get mistaken for good, true men, celebrating with their expensively assembled team. We were watching sportswashing in real time; they grinned while inserting their dirty, icy, greasy fingers into football’s seams, tearing it apart and feasting on its flesh.
As people put the blinkers on for the inevitable context-free CL fallout, the naivety and wilful blindness of some appalled, ‘urgh, I knew you’d say sportswashing’ was typical from people who have no empathy for those living under terrible oppression.
Attention then moved on to the Nations League game as Spain hosted England.
Seb Hutchinson, who I like very much, did the game on ITV with Lucy Ward. Let’s take a moment to reflect on her rise to be a go-to co-comm for men’s and women’s football, first on the producer’s speed dial. Displaying impressive ubiquity, she’s also being deployed as an interviewer, talking to Arsenal players on the pitch after their Champions League win. There’s an attraction to the former Leeds player’s soft, flat West Yorkshire vowels and sensible tones. She brings a relaxed, ‘normal’ discursive element to commentaries, so often missing from some more verbose and vacuous pundits. And she doesn’t appear in ads for human rights abusers either.
England were totally outplayed for 90 minutes and did well to only lose 2-1 after being 1-0 up at half time.
And so the season came to an end unless you wanted to pay Prime to see Germany play Portugal and Spain v France, which Prime had paid for, so charged to watch, just to bloat football’s finances more, wringing blood out of the stone one more time. They must have been delighted Spain v France was an exciting 5-4 with Lamine Yamal starring but I bet they don’t release actual figures of how many signed up for it.
There’s the World Cup qualifiers, Club World Cup (which you can watch for free on Dazn and some games are on 5), then there’s the Euros with England facing a tough group. That’ll take us to the end of July and the Championship starts a week later. It never stops. How different from the game many of us grew up with. My calves hurt just thinking about it.