ITV football coverage: Urge To Kill Rising

Fuck Andy Gray

ok. You go first.

OK, I'll rephrase it, Fuck An Andy Gray

^^^helpfully including the terrible, awful, lumpen, crappy, root-of-many-problems Charlton striker

he was banging them in for me on FIFA. Admittedly he had me whipping the pinpoint crosses onto his head

I like Andy Gray, he so desperately wants you to know more about football. Alan Hansen just wants you to know that Alan Hansen knows about football

Annoyman, he can head the ball in from close range and occasionally do similar with his feet, but stick him up against a half-decent defence and he'll a) waste possession like a lottery winner and b) not engineer himself any chances, but depend on people to land it on a plate for him

Also, his purchase was a horrible, terrible direction for our inward transfers, and I'd argue it's contributed strongly to our decline

yeah I mean he has his limits, that's why I signed for Valencia at the end of the season

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

If there's ITV coverage tomorrow evening, that shall decide my vote once and for all.

who is the studio host for the FA cup highlights? that guy's awful

Steve Rider, the greased-up condescending paedo-avuncular platitudinous cliche-mill

what you guys need is some Ray Hudson

No wait, jergins, Steve Rider's the live host

The studio guy is the aforementioned overgrown work-experience kid Matt Smith, to whom cadence, charisma and rhetoric might as well be glasses where one side flips the view upside down

My vote is between those two, to be honest.

I've never seen ITV coverage but it can't possibly be worse than some of the clowns that cover MLS/internationals/Champions League in the US. Andy Gray shows up now and again and is much better in comparison. The main problem with US announcers is they NEVER STOP TALKING in a vain attempt to cover up for the fact they don't know a very much about the game. It's actually sad that ESPN fired former USA int'l Eric Wynalda, because he was a loudmouth who routinely brought the lols -- and that was what got him fired.

Is American coverage the kind of "And he's kicked into the goalbag, that's 1-nothing to the Manchester Reds!" we always assume it is over here?

Ray Hudson, on the other hand, knows his shit *and* brings the laughs. For example:

“Matador. Look at him, so languid, look at him walking. He’s like a big, beautiful zombie, Riquelme, like a big, beautiful zombie. He just strolls around languid like, like smoke off a cigarette, you know. And then he jump out and just draw your blood.”

xp Sort of. They definitely say 1-nothing, and they definitely aren't shy of saying shit like "the old onion sack".

his 'shock' at the way 'small' (ie: from 5th place down, or non-Spanish/Italian/English clubs in Europe) clubs refuse to lie down and be beaten by 'big' clubs (Clive T).

This is one of THE most infuriating commentary habits. Even the actual pitch Tyldo or Drury's voice goes to in a situation where even a vague underdog is putting it up to a G14 one is intensely grating. And the incessant "NOBODY TOLD ROTOR VOLGOGRAD TO READ THE SCRIPT TONIGHT" etc. Do they actually think when you watch Liverpool scrambling past some team with an awful performance you're sitting at home in shock and awe at what's happening. It's practically what you expect!

What TV football so badly needs is some genuine argument. I've never actually seen RTE's covearge of football but based on the huge amount of second-hand evidence, the kind of sometimes pertinent, sometimes ill-founded, but never irrelevant comments by Dunphy, Giles and co is something British TV desperately needs.

Maybe but people idealise the coverage on RTE. There are occasions when Dunphy or Giles just make negative points because it's their selling point, like an exact inverse of Sky. EG after Liverpool beat Besiktas 8-0 last year they both slated them, and a long tedious "but they won 8-0" argument began.

Similarly Dunphy will randomly spew "Ronald/Torres/Pele, he's a nothing player, FOUND OUT this evening, right here, live on RTE". Or he has a real penchant for just hyping the fuck out of fashionable prospects like Aguerro or someone, "this guy is the real deal, the bees knees" etc when you know Dunphy has never seen him play.

so basically: challops, the football show

Townsend, just because he was a nasty fouling cunt as a player.

^^^this guy needs to post more to the Premiership thread

Me?

Yeah, with the zingmaster crushing kittenforce that you bring. Bad attitude towards certain players always helps.

I think that everyone idealises the sports coverage outside of their own nation, but I do think that the Irish Challop Roadshow, the Italian "IT'S OFFICIAL: MILAN IN CRISIS" after they "only" take 10 points from four matches, or the American "Here's 7,000 stars that obscure everything else on the screen" styles are all preferable to the UK coverage.

Anything is preferable to the anaemic gushing of the obvious tbh

I was about to say "I don't mind MotD" but then I remembered that I ALWAYS fall asleep during it. But I generally am full of wine when it's on, and last Saturday night I'd had sex before it even started so fuck knows how I only missed the Everton footage.

Managed to watch Casualty, though.

I was about to say "I don't mind MotD" but then I remembered that I ALWAYS fall asleep during it. But I generally am full of wine when it's on, and last Saturday night I'd had sex before it even started so fuck knows how I only missed the Everton footage.

When did Lawro start posting on ILX?

ok lol

I said Townsend, but also Beglin, as he's always moaning and I've no idea who he is. Did he play football?

I see Andy Gray crept nastily in further up - he is more evil than any of the ITV pundits. I actually hate him.

I like Pleat, both for his refreshing pronunciations of foreign players' names and his generally cheerful and generous analysis of the game, and of course his 'Evening Clive, evening everyone' opener.

The winner is - Andy Townsend - for he is utterly useless, as has been pointed out above - that awful thing of describing the replay to you that you can see in front of you on the tv in front of you, only surpassed by the time I saw the generally likable Hasselbaink describe quite a lengthy slo-motion replay of a goal thus

'And he passes it and.... er.... that's the goal!'

Beglin is indeed tiresome, a cut price Gerry Armstrong.

Andy Gray is awesome.

Hmmm. I hate him. I hate his mean spirited 'what they should have done' commentary, I hate his continual carping about officials (if officials made as many bad calls as he did in his commentary they'd quickly find themselves confined to their static in Zeal Monachorum), I hate his smugness borne of everyone else pandering to him the whole time, I hate his laughs intended to show humour but which are actually because his nasty bitter reductive little soul can't bear being thought of as the nasty bitter reductive little soul it is. I hate his smile. I hate his pseudo-authoritative BULLSHIT. I hate his pointless use of computer graphics. I hate the way he appears in the pre-match flummery, the commentary and the post-match over-analysis. I hate the way he gives himself all the excuses as to why his opinions are wrong and shit, and no one else the excuses ever. I REALLY REALLY HATED when he was called upon to talk about the run in last year and upon his face wore an expression of such SHITTINESS compounded of self-regarding wisdom and gratified but self-deprecating humility that it almost made me smash the tv in with my fist and instead made me crash my fist down on the table causing me to bruise my knuckle. I like the story about him in his tartan socks and him saying 'it's only a little scottish willy' but only because it makes me laugh and also hate him even more. I really really fucking hate Andy Gray and his voice and his face and him.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

that night in barcelona

Gama, please by all means hate Andy Gray, but his analysis is at least analysis (and, on the rare occasions I've caught it, quite plausible analysis) and not just a re-run of the goals with an '...and that's a great finish' voiceover. I do agree with you, though, about the tedious ref-baiting, not just on the part of Andy Gray, but among TV pundits in general; who needs endless replays in order to prove that the officials got it wrong? That doesn't shed any light on why my team lost and why our manager got his tactics wrong again.

Not sure I'd agree with taking Gray to task on ref-baiting. I don't have sky any more, so he may have got worse over the years, but he certainly used to be the one pundit who criticised referees sensibly, by things like:
- realising that they have a pov of their own, even using a ref's-view-cam graphic on occasion
- expressing the view that where e.g. an offside is marginal, the ref is entitled to call it either way (a massive conceptual leap in punditland, where the orthodoxy now is that the ref can't do anything unless he's 100% sure)
- saving his greatest wrath for pedantic 'booking for shirt off'-type refereeing

All other pundits/commentators are worse. I hate Jonathan Pearce most - his sanctimonious outrage when, five minutes after some passage of play that passed without comment, a lackey comes up with a replay that suggests that maybe the ball brushed a hand during the build-up

Gray's worst innovation was calling players by their first names. I don't want cosiness, I want pundits who don't care whether the platers like them or not. That's where it sounds like RTE have it nailed

haaaaaaaahahahahahahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaahahahahahahahaaaa

I was about to bump this :)

Aye, me too. Fucking class. Well done.

the commentary itself is fucking infuriating...they speak way too much but never say anything worthwhile. also after gerrard limped off to hear them carping on in worried tones for 20 mins must infuriate both sets of fans.

lovely dream sequence interview with gosling there.

http://italy.theoffside.com/files/2008/01/intermission.jpg

lol another fuck up.

the sellotape connecting the news to the football match has torn

Christ, they don't know what the fuck they're doing now.

please cut to townsend smoking and drinking a can

it's what rte would do

somewhere, a hamster lies dead inside a cog

they need to take the snowed in workplace approach to this and just shut the place down if it's not resolved in five minutes

And now, embarrassingly, a clock...

jesus, I'm actually hoping this gets a cheeky Lineker zing on Saturday

"Justice for the England eleven"