Watching England on Channel 4: Thank goodness the punditry was better than the puns
There was a moment on Channel 4’s coverage of the Italy vs England game that was so unexpected in football broadcasting I had to rewind the live television to check it had really happened.
James Richardson, the veteran presenter of the channel’s glorious nineties staple Football Italia, had been tasked with bringing us a pre-match travelogue profile of the city of Naples, where the game was to be held. And, as he introduced us to a pizza parlour and a bloke with a lock of hair extracted from the local adopted deity Diego Maradona, Richardson came up with a pun so magnificently convoluted Oscar Wilde would have nodded in acknowledgment. Standing in front of a mural of the great Argentinian painted on the side of a house, he said: “they’re not dwelling on past glories here, there’s past glories on a dwelling.”
Thank goodness, then, that when the cameras returned to the panel of pundits standing pitchside ahead of the match, Joe Cole was able quickly to return to standard football language. The current Napoli side, he suggested, were “up there with your Real Madrids and Bayern Munichs.” It was a theme Steven Gerrard alongside him warmed to. Italy’s midfield, he pointed out, were the strongest since the days of “your Pirlos and your Tottis.”
James Richardson bringing back that Football Italia flavour 🇮🇹#C4Football | #ThreeLions pic.twitter.com/jdIBHXiRpC
— Channel 4 Sport (@C4Sport) March 23, 2023
Still, good on Channel 4 for at least trying to find their own talent. The proliferation of football coverage has delivered an almighty pundit carousel, with the same faces cropping up whoever might have the broadcasting rights: Sky’s Roy Keane doing a turn for ITV, Match of the Day’s Alan Shearer putting in a shift on Amazon Prime, Micah Richards going anywhere they are prepared to tolerate his relentless cackle. But here in the south of Italy, Channel 4 had brought in something different to the touchline: Steven Gerrard, even since he lost his managerial job at Aston Villa, a rarity in football panels. And he turned out to be a smart signing: sharp, concise, to the point.
“It’s a bucket list moment to be here,” he said. Presumably he was referring to being in the Diego Maradona Stadium, rather than standing there with a microphone decorated in the Channel 4 logo. He was honest too about his own contribution to the less illustrious byways of English football history. After an interview was screened with Harry Kane, talking about his penalty misery in Qatar, he said:
“I missed a penalty myself in 2006. I understand where he is coming from.” Yup, we remember it well.
Alongside Gerrard and Cole was the queen of the jungle Jill Scott. The former England midfielder, as the presenter Jules Breach was quick to point out, differs from the two blokes beside her in that she actually has won an international tournament. And how she, too, was enjoying being there, watching the England men scoot into a half time lead.
“We all lived through that penalty miss,” she said of Harry Kane’s record-setting strike from the spot. “So to see that bouncebackability, it was, yeah, a bit emotional.”
Indeed Channel 4 may have come up with something here. The three they had assembled made an attractive, fresh and different trio. Not least, in the geographical spread of English accents they were far more pleasant on the ear than the woeful singers who had made an aural mess of the two national anthems.
