ANALYSING FOOTBALL ANALYSIS

JONNY BRICK LOOK AT HOW THE MODERN GAME IS PORTRAYED AND SUGGESTS WE NEED MORE THAN JUST 'BANTZ'...

- JONNY BRICK

LAST September, Times writer Alyson Rudd hit the nail on the head with her comments that focussed on the audience of football media.

Although BBC 5 Live seeks to ‘draw in a new, younger audience’, such people are ‘busy with YouTube and social media’. Why, when TV serves an older audience, is radio trending young, and why are they so interested in appointing various Archbishops of Banterbury?

Bantz, which Aly notes is ‘not even a proper Scrabble word’, lowers football analysis to an appreciation of characters, hatred of clubs and lots of laughs. Aly praises the Monday Night Club and Sky’s Monday Night Football – both of which have a modicum of bantz – but why, she wonders, do they have to be on the same night while Aly is prepping dinner?

Welcome to era of the PFPF: the Professional Former Professional Footballer.

Aly and I have both noticed that Sky are trying to make the double act part of the schedule. I wonder if they have run the numbers, looked at Ant & Dec – and, don’t forget, Keys and Gray – and thought ‘We need to make PFPF Double Acts happen’.

With Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher, and with Micah Richards and Roy Keane, bantz is foregrounded but ‘it distracts from what they do best’, according to Aly, preferring ‘laughs over insight’. After all, insight is everywhere but only Micah and Roy are LIVE on Sky Sports.

As for 6-0-6, Chris Sutton and Robbie Savage ‘bicker relentlessly’. If you watched Chris Sutton’s BBC Sport piece on referee abuse or read his book How To Fix Modern Football (which was ghosted by the great Nige Tassell), you would agree with Aly that Sutton is ‘extremely astute’.