The A-Z of Lost Football Culture, Treasures and Pleasures
by Derek Hammond and Gary Silke
Pitch Publishing, £19.99
Reviewed by Roger Titford
From WSC 299 January 2012
If you were born between 1960 and 1970 and still miss getting the Topical Times Football Annual for Christmas, this might be its ideal replacement. The book takes as its text the notion that "football used to be better in the past" and celebrates many of the juvenile and adolescent aspects of the game's culture.
My Autobiography
by Gary Neville
Bantam Press, £18.99
Reviewed by Joyce Woolridge
From WSC 297 November 2011
"Put ‘Gary Neville' and 'wanker' into Google and you'll get about 10,000 results." Neville is a man with no illusions about his popularity. The English generally like their professional footballers to be either thick or humble, preferably both. Gary Neville is neither and has taken plenty of flak about what are deemed to be his ridiculous pretensions, such as planning to build an ecohouse and daring to have opinions.
Dear WSC
In response to my letter published in WSC 275, Mark Brennan Scott accepts that we send someone to each of the weekend’s Premier League games, to commentate live, but not unreasonably asks whether Match of the Day commentators ever “re-record bits they are unhappy with”. Not exactly, but the beauty of an edit rather than a live game is there is scope for tweaking both the sound and visuals by transmission time. Every now and then, a commentator will, for example, misidentify a goalscorer and then correct themselves, in which case we have been known to remove take one in the edit. I’ve found a copy of a letter I had published in WSC 240 in which I said: “If a commentator gets something wrong at the time we may even spare him his blushes at 10pm by removing the odd word.” That remains the case, but most of the time the commentator’s natural reaction works best. If it takes a couple of replays before they identify a deflection or suspicion of handball, that will nearly always feel more authentic than trying to look too clever after the event. In shortening a game for transmission, we may occasionally “pull up” a replay or remove a few words, but would almost never re-record any section of a commentary unless there’s been a technical problem. Furthermore, in all cases the commentators go home after the post-match interviews and a producer back at base edits the pictures and sound recorded at the time. In early days of the Premier League, only two or three games had multi-camera coverage and commentators present, so there were occasional attempts to add a commentary to single-camera round-up games, for example, for Goal of the Month. However, not every commentator was a convincing thespian and one or two “Le Tissier’s capable of beating three men from here and curling one into the top corner. Oh my word, he has…” moments did slip through. With multi-camera coverage and a commentator at every game, that no longer happens.
Incidentally, call us old-fashioned but there was a degree of pride in this office in MOTD’s recent use of “crashed against the timber” as cited in Steve Whitehead’s letter. Better that – or maybe “hapless custodian” – than some unpleasant modern notion like “bragging rights”.
Paul Armstrong, Programme Editor, BBC Match of the Day
Ian Plenderleith uses websites like YouTube to discover a metaphorical gold mine of bad punditry from around the world
Who is the game’s worst broadcaster? The debate has embraced a wider cast of dubious characters now that we can head to YouTube to hear the gibbering vacuity and perverse analysis of commentators and pundits from around the world. And, thanks to the internet, British viewers were well warned ahead of the arrival on their screens this year of the lead candidate for football’s most nonsensical TV goon, ESPN’s diminutive, smooth-topped Irish export, Tommy Smyth.
Jamie Redknapp's face seems to get everywhere these days. Simon Tyers tunes in to watch his latest role in Football's Next Star, Sky One's follow up to Football Icon
Jamie Redknapp is exactly the sort of screen presence Sky Sports had in mind when the Premier League started. Bearer of a boyish smile, conventionally handsome looks, artfully constant two-day beard growth, wardrobe’s worth of designer suits and familial connections with just the sort of people the image thrives on, his role seems as much advertorial as analyst.