Keane’s genuine disgust at Man Utd was fun but smug Henry and sniggering Carragher were embarrassing

Monday Night Football used to mean something but not with a smug Thierry Henry and sniggering Jamie Carragher. At least Roy Keane still hates Man Utd.

Newcastle were the latest side to run over and through Manchester United on Sunday. It was on Sky, presented by Kelly with Roy and Sir Les who, more than most, looks like a grey-muzzled old chieftain.

Peter Drury was the commentator with Alan Smith alongside. It was a bit of a bizarre performance. Quiet for stretches of play. Total silences which make you feel Drury is disengaged are only interrupted by REALLY LOUD SHOUTING OF A NAME as a player shoots wildly. It all seems hugely inappropriate. When a goal is scored you’d think a portal to a higher plane of existence had opened up in the Gallowgate End, so effusive is the commentary. Then, just nothing.

His pronunciation of Garnacho is especially sonically aggressive, putting your ears on edge and it feels like you’ve bitten a fork. There’s no warmth or even friendliness. It’s just a series of statements and declarations which aren’t conversational at all and keep you at arm’s length. Does it have to be quite such a dramatic performance? At the end of it my ears are tired, the way they’re tired after listening to a very compressed heavy metal record in a car.

Meanwhile, in the box, Roy is brooding menacingly as Manchester United turn in a woeful second half. “They’re a weak team,” Roy says quietly in an extended vitriolic dissection. “I bet Amorim can’t believe how bad this team is,” he adds, somewhat drained and disgusted.

After the interviews Roy is steaming and his voice gets more high-pitched as he says, “Thursday, Thursday, it’s all about Thursday – does today not matter? It’s all soundbites. Meaningless. This is not an honest group.”

It’s an excellent breakdown of what we can plainly see and is subjected to revisionism later in the week. On this occasion, I think it was a genuine disgust at the lack of effort and commitment at a team that’s lost 28 games in nearly two seasons. Sir Les just let him talk it out, as though Kelly was a marriage guidance counsellor.

It’s quite compulsive and a cut above the usual post-game analysis. Quite existential in his mystification at this mediocre collection of players. The thing is, he doesn’t even have to say anything especially insightful because it’s all there in front of you, he just doesn’t sugar coat his criticism. He seems offended by the lack of effort, determination and teamwork. Roy seemed very dismissive of the often excused Bruno Fernandes being interviewed as that of a whiney, insubstantial, gutless player who seemed to suggest you can turn good form off and on if it’s a big club they’re playing. Roy dismissed this idea as preposterous. Even Sir Les scoffed at it.

Monday Night Football showed how far it has fallen with a rather smug and sneery performance from Thierry Henry with supportive sniggering from a school boy-ish Jamie Carragher. You can debate if he had a good point or not; it wasn’t the accuracy of the comments, it was the tone of them which was unpleasant, mocking, superior and uncomfortable. They made him look petty and small. Sky went as far as deleting the relevant clip from Twitter, seemingly aware (eventually) the tone was not something they wanted to be associated with.

Amazon Prime took the Villa v PSG game and ran a full hour and a half pre-show. Do they really think anyone will sit and watch it for 90 minutes? With Ashley Young, a sometimes rather isolated Clarence Seedorf, Daniel Sturridge and Wayne Rooney they had four (4!) pundits with Gabby. Perhaps more necessary with 90 minutes to fill but by 19:36 with nearly half an hour to go I wish they’d shut up and start the game. With the best will, you can only say so much about a game that’s yet to be played.

It’s always a bold move to ask Wayne, a cuddly-looking bear of a man, to be a pundit. With his dodgy managerial record, people are entitled to wonder what expertise he really brings if he’s picked to be there above a regular person for his insight. That said, he does talk wel’. There’s a lovely Sturridge package going back to Villa where he was at the academy. The bilingual interview with Ousmane Dembele by a nice smiley, enthusiastic multilingual woman, Alex, was a sophisticated touch. Nice. Especially the Geordie being impossible to translate joke with Alan Shearer.

There’s a lot of ‘Villa are good at home’ and ‘we can win’ optimism with big tifos of Ozzy Osbourne but that’s a crazy train to board… Ashley Young especially seems all talked out, but on and on it goes as it pishes down. By ten to they’re talking about controlling emotions, like they’re psychotherapists. But even then, there’s more and more. Make it stop! ‘Maybe this is Unai’s moment,’ says the voiceover. Maybe. But then again, maybe not, as they go 4-1 down within ten minutes, 5-1 down in 27 minutes and are effortlessly outclassed all over the pitch in the first half. At least Wayne knows a thing or two about being behind at half time.

Things get tasty as somewhat improbably, Villa pull two more back and should have levelled the tie. I thank god Drury isn’t commentating because he’d have had an aneurysm and started speaking in haiku. Shearer is purring and marvels at football’s unpredictability. I like that at no point did Jon Champion become over-dramatic or florid, as Villa ultimately paid the price for a poor first half and Prime Wayne says exactly that, presumably because they think it’s unattainable wisdom for literally anyone.

Pointless interview post-game with Konsa who turned out to be an existential philosopher: “it is what it is…we move on.” Thanks, mate. Will this convince producers to not ask for such interviews? Nah, they think it’s a worthwhile thing. Amazingly. There’s more endless dissection. It all seems pointless and very repetitious. It’s all far too long and ultimately flatulent. All involved have been dealt a bad hand and have been asked to do too much. Put simply, it’s a good game but doesn’t justify a four-hour show. A bloated broadcast that an excellent game wasn’t served well by.

TNT’s broadcast was also on Prime for the Arsenal game. The relentless pro-Arsenal tone was somewhat annoying but expected, I suppose. It doesn’t seem to occur to producers that a significant proportion of the audience, for one reason or another, don’t want the British team to win and certainly don’t want it assumed they do. This applies to all matches. I don’t know why they can’t be even-handed. I’m severely disinterested in either side and turn to Inter v Bayern for a better experience and likely better football with Lynsey Hipgrave (incredibly the only presenter with a distinctive local accent), Joe Cole and Owen Hargreaves, an upgrade on Martin Koewn and Macca, starting at a much more reasonable 7:30. A tense game between the Italian and German league leaders without the assumption we wanted one side or the other to win. Wesley Sneijder is interviewed and doesn’t look any older than 15 years ago when he won it with Inter.

It’s a high-quality game, the best of the quarter-finals. Fantastic goals. Inter defended brilliantly til they conceded to Kane then cranked it up and scored two great goals in three minutes. Eric Dier even scored a clever header! Bayern just wouldn’t lie down and in comparison to every other team left in it, both them and Inter look superior outfits. Not sure Inter are beatable this season.

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I notice TNT has regular ad breaks with spaces they can’t sell, which is significant because if you can’t get advertisers for the Champions League quarter-final, what chance everything else? It shows they’ve made it less popular and less desirable. Turned it into a mere product people are rejecting. Nevermind the PR waffle about popularity, available ad space tells its own sorry story. They’re ruining their own premium product with greed and UEFA’s own blinkered selfishness.

Onto Thursday’s Europa and Conference League games where no-one, absolutely no-one, shamefully, not even in passing, mentions the vast financial disparity between the Premier League clubs and everyone else, as if it doesn’t have a bearing on the results. Commenting on the games without a whisper about it. It’s so vast that it would be a hapless failure of talent, economics, organisation and mentality for a Premier League club not to win both competitions at a canter. The lie that it’s an even contest and if a Premier League team wins that they have done so in an otherwise even tie is perpetuated. It’s a sickening, ignorant or deliberate exclusion of the realities of dystopian Trumpian proportions.

Even Eintracht Frankfurt have only two players valued over €40million in the squad, but Spurs have eight and that’s one of the more even contests. Lyon have zero while Manchester United have nine. We’re not talking a marginal difference here – it’s a yawning chasm. That is, if money has a relationship to talent and what you pay means anything. If it doesn’t, the whole of football’s ecosystem is based on a delusion that the Premier League has swallowed more than most. But if it does, it suggests Premier League clubs, being regularly inadequate or too monied to recruit and develop young domestic talent, have been ripped off for their talent by better run, economically more sophisticated teams who have seen them coming and can’t dominate tournaments more than they have.

They have plenty of time to explore the economics and causes but they don’t because it’s embarrassing that the Premier League model and money is undermining European competition integrity. So they ignore it to try and not kill their product with too much reality.

They talk of Old Trafford being an advantage, though seven home losses suggests otherwise. Then go on to say how poor United have been. More pro-United talk. Odd. Won’t they ever learn people are divided and don’t want to hear their ‘hope’ or their ‘so far, so good’ talk.

The Lyon package is good and looks lovely. Nice to have a French journalist to comment on the club and Julien Laurens on the pitch. The dodgy United keeper package was fun. Overall it was a decent hour compared with Prime’s four-hour endurance test.

The comms were something else, with Robbie Savage calling Rio “Ri” as if it’s too long a name. Rio’s insight into Luke Shaw required years of international experience: “He’s just got to stay fit.”

Of course it was a clusterf*ck of a game. Just like the old days, but everyone was very happy United had let a two-goal lead slip and still won. The good times were back, at least until the next game. Pity not many were watching.

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