LOOK, it’s going to be a cup of two halves, and we are all as sick as parrots, so forget all thoughts of early baths for England and let’s hear it for the footie commentators, the blokes who so often make it sound as if they have two left tongues.
The Plain English Campaign, and you can’t get plainer than that, tells us in a nutmeg: “Football pundits do a very good job and make relatively few errors for the amount they say.” Which is saying a lot, of course.
Surely the awkward squad who brought us Colemanballs, the gaffe-strewn column in Private Eye which has been running as long as our kitchen tap, and Ronglish (the neologisms of the inimitable Ron Atkinson, whom everybody loves to imitate), can’t be falling down on the job just when we are at our most seriously gutted and most in need of verbal sustenance?
John Lister, who speaks for the Plain English Campaign, insists: “Football commentators are speaking at great speed and never have a chance to rewind what they say, so inevitably they start mixing their metaphors and tripping over their tongues. They have a wide audience and put things in a popular way but make it accessible without being patronising.”
Of course. As when, for instance, John Motson told us: “The World Cup . . . a truly international event”, or observed lucidly: “That shot might not have been as good as it might have been.”
Advertisement
Or when Mark Lawrenson elucidated: “If England get a point, it will be a point gained as opposed to two points lost.” Or as Garth Crooks explained: “Football’s football: If that weren’t the case it wouldn’t be the game that it is.” Mr Lister’s parting shot, keeping it tight at the back in the broadcasters’ defence: “It isn’t the kind of language you would use in public information. It’s a conversational language and appropriate to the situation.”
Go on then. One game at a time. They’ve probably got some fresh legs up their sleeves yet. Give it 110 per cent. We’re loving it.