Cricket Pundits vs Football Pundits- A Game of Two Halves

This summer, with no full-time job, I've treated myself to wall-to-wall Ashes coverage. Whilst watching I've wondered out loud, on Twitter and the like, how cricket punditry came to be so thoroughly excellent. At first I attribute it, as I do most things, to Sky Sports, but then I remember the ways that football punditry has stood still for the last twenty years, and I think again, desperately searching for reasons and for mitigation for football.

It is, admittedly, fashionable to knock football in the summer months, especially when every other British sport is excelling. The same arguments resurface about wages, laziness, and celebrity lifestyle, and it's easy to lump in punditry, particularly considering some of the fees that the Match of the Day talking heads command.

Football pundits- bad.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/06/11/article-1025830-017D09EC00000578-572_468x370.jpg

But I've learned so much from watching The Ashes this summer, and I was hardly a novice in my knowledge of the sport to begin with. I've learned how Shane Watson is consistently a target for LBW decisions because of the way his front leg comes across his stumps; I've learned that Jonathan Bairstow is predominantly a bottom hand player, and as such, his technique lends itself to wayward, rash shots; and I've realised that Phil Hughes doesn't use his feet. Admittedly, you don't need Geoffrey Boycott to tell you the last fact in that little list, but the point still remains.

Then I try to remember what I learned from football's pundits last year. Not a lot. Strikers who score goals 'need to be watched', defenders who make mistakes 'get punished', and big strikers 'are a handful'.

But why? Why, with so much to talk about, are football pundits getting left behind? At first I put it down to the pace of the respective sports. Cricket ebbs and flows, it has natural lulls that need to be filled, whereas football, with its frenetic pace, lends itself more to description. Yet how do you explain fifteen minutes of platitudes in between halves on Super Sunday, or an hour and a half of matey generalisations on Match of the Day?

Cricket pundits- good.
http://www4.pictures.zimbio.com/gi/Nasser+Hussain+England+v+New+Zealand+pi1ezlr8d1Zl.jpg

Is it, akin to the desire to knock football at every turn, that we want to hate the football pundits? Is it that Alan Shearer is a sad Geordie *******, Stan Collymore played for the Villa, and Alan Hansen is a dour Scot that shouldn't be commenting on England anyway? Is it a partisanship that doesn't really exist in cricket? Sure, Geoffrey Boycott is synonymous with Yorkshire, but nobody really hates another county, not unless you've got a bit-part in Richard III, anyway.

Again, partisanship is fairly irrelevant. Take Gary Neville. An immensely divisive figure whilst playing for Manchester United, he has completely altered many people's opinions with his analytical punditry. Other football pundits are loved, relics of a bygone era like Barry Davies, but this is more for their lyrical qualities than their analysis of an offside trap. Pundits have to prove themselves in whatever sport, and Shearer, Hansen and Collymore have only reinforced the negative perceptions.

A touchy subject, but is it to do with education? Messrs Hussain and Atherton achieved degrees at Durham and Cambridge respectively, and are two of the more articulate commentators on our screens. On the other hand, I'm reminded of a quote from Mike Bassett: England Manager, where we learn that winger Alan Massey 'is not stupid. He's got five O-Levels,you know, including a D in Technical Drawing'. It is harder, and a bit of a silly decision, to marry a football career with a university degree. Why, therefore, is there a reluctance to use non-footballers as anything other than the Village Idiot, a sounding-board for the 'proper' pundits? I know that Adrian Chiles has knowledge of football, so why this bizarre deference to Roy Keane? I learn more from reading the views of 'ordinary' people on forums than I do from the apparent demi-gods of ITV Sport. Alas, it was ever thus. When an analyst from the Football Manager computer game series had the temerity to put his opinions across on Twitter, Stan Collymore, that oracle of football knowledge, went off on a rant about 'playing at the highest level'. Articulate you may be, possessing a degree in Classics having studied Aristotle and James Joyce, but until you've put Des Walker on his arse, you're nobody in football punditry, says Stan.

To continue along the theme of Stan and the Stats Man, there seems to be a perception that to analyse football to an acute degree is somehow geeky and weird, something to be left to the boffins, whilst MoTD chuckle about what a 'big unit' Christian Benteke is. This Luddism has spilled over into goal-line technology- for many years, something to be feared. Cricket, thankfully, got over that many years ago, and its punditry is better for it.

Why not have a Simon Hughes prototype statistician? Why do, for example, Tottenham struggle without Gareth Bale? Why did Stoke get so much joy from utilising height at set pieces, when the LA Lakers are rubbish at football? When Cristiano Ronaldo's weird bendy free-kick stance was analysed, it was like Man had discovered fire. I want more of that.

Perhaps there is just more to analyse in cricket. Yet people get a genuine joy out of listening to the raconteurs on Test Match Special, whereas I'd have probably got more out of listening to Showaddywaddy's Greatest Hits than hearing Shearer talk about how 'he's passed it, he's shot, and he's scored'.

Catharsis Cricket

One of the joys of the newly re-branded Sky Sports Ashes channel is the ubiquitous nature of the shows entitled 'Australia/England's Best Days'. One, as anyone who followed cricket in the mid-90s and early 2000s will testify, is far more frequent than the other. It's comical, in a way that only self-deprecating English cricket fans will find funny, to imagine archivists and producers rooting around amongst video tapes, frantically searching for England highlights, until they stumble upon that most dead of dead day's cricket, Day Five of the Fifth Ashes Test, where England's Andy Caddick took a few wickets and avoided a whitewash.

Soon, the boot will almost certainly be on the other foot. In one of the few rivalries where it is still acceptable to shout the opposition's nationality in a derogatory fashion (see 'you English bastard!' or, 'you Aussie convict!' for examples), Australia's class of 2013 are doing their best to turn this Ashes series into an anodyne walkover.

When a leading cricket betting writer is advocating a five-nil whitewash before the start of August as the best value punt, you know that the series is on its knees in terms of gambling profitability. As a sporting contest, the death knell is never far behind.

A notable sea-change to the Sky Sports Ashes schedule is when they get round to showing Edgbaston 2005. Glorious, glorious Edgbaston. I was there in that bear-pit of a Saturday Edgbaston crowd, and it remains one of the finest day's sport I've ever witnessed. That day, each Australian wicket was treated with a jubilant, mischievous roar, yet undoubtedly tinted with a hint of genuine tribal glee. There was a sense of 'eighteen years of hurt', and Fatty Warne, Trampy Gillespie and Little Man Syndrome Ponting were going to get it in the neck.

Fast-forward eight years to now, and England fans are sighing disappointedly, sympathetically, when Ashton Agar, the Australian debutant number eleven, gets out on 98. Have they forgotten all those years of misery? Or are the Australians just too bad to even bother getting worked up about? Too nice, even?

06-07 Ashes- tell me that doesn't make your blood boil.
http://www.mbennettphoto.co.uk/pictures/DEFAULT/Ashes%20Win%2006_07.jpg

I've tried my best to hate this current crop, but it's just too difficult. Shane Watson, if you look at his face, should be immediately dislikeable, but he seems intent on bringing his own side down from the inside, so he should be welcomed, not castigated, on these shores. Peter Siddle, who equally has a punchable face, should be vilified by supporters, but as he's the ultimate 'whole-hearted bowler', I find myself wanting more Siddles. Even David Warner, guilty of punching England batsman Joe Root in a Birmingham club, is only hated because of his own off-field follies, rather than his tenacious batting.

This is not to say that I'm not absolutely loving this series. Non-partisan fans might ask how such a one-sided contest, especially in a sport such as cricket, which relies on ebbs and flows, could ever be considered interesting. Cynics might ask whether I found 2006-07 as enjoyable, when England were whitewashed. For the non-partisans and the cynics, the answer lies in each other's questions. This is revenge, and anyone who feels sorry for Australia needs to spend a few hours watching 'Australia's Best Days'.

Even 2002-03, right at the tail-end of those eighteen years of hurt, still held a perverse enjoyment. We might not have realised it at the time, but those one-sided cricket series were brilliant. To use an analogy, it's a bit like the film The Usual Suspects. For the first ninety minutes, I always find myself wondering why I'm watching this slow, dull, average thriller. And then, because the last fifteen minutes is so excellent, I come away thinking 'no, actually it was brilliant after all'.

Catharsis Cricket
 http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/07/15/article-2364106-1ACFA9A9000005DC-134_634x457.jpg

For eighteen years, the Ashes might have seemed dreadful, yet we kept watching. It was only in 2005, when the Ashes were regained, that sitting through all that pain became worthwhile, and, mercifully, we're still reaping the benefits now.

This summer, like none other before, is catharsis cricket at its very best.