England beat Israel 3-0 and I watched the game on the BBC. BBC coverage is good because it’s free-to-air for the whole country, but the commentators are a pain.
I know I’m not alone in my dislike of BBC One’s John Motson. Indeed, spoof “let’s kick motty out of football” t-shirts were on sale during the last world cup. It helps that Mark Lawrenson is on hand as summariser and comic relief when Motty gets a bit carried away, but I hope that the over-excitable Jonathan Pearce gets the commentating duty for the next match… at least the tv listings don’t show Motty yet.
On digital TV, you can switch to the BBCi channels and have the Radio Five commentary along with the pictures instead. (You can’t do that with a ordinary radio because of the differing delays between radio and TV reception/decoding). While Mike Ingham [no biog? is he ex-commercial?] is usually fair, the radio switches commentators halfway through each half, leaving us with Alan Green for the other 23 minutes.
He’s a good commentator and not a bad phone-in host, but the overall impression you get is that he’s amazingly negative about the England team. Also, yesterday, Chris Waddle was the summariser, who I find irritating for some inexplicable reason. Graham Taylor offers occasional expert comments and almost (but not quite) redeems the show. Unfortunately, the radio listings already show Green and Waddle covering Wednesday’s match.
There used to be fans’ commentaries and crowd-noise-only coverage on BBCi - where have these gone and please can we have them back, if we can’t have decent commentators?
That said, maybe the FA should be thanking the BBC for this irritating coverage - it makes me wonder about finding out about ticket prices for those empty seats at Wembley, so I can see the match without Motty or Green…
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