Suzanne Harrington: 'It’s not the football I hate, it’s the punditry'

THE real reason so many people — particularly female people — have no interest in football is not because it involves 22 athletic men zipping around a pitch performing balletic acts interspersed with Oscar-worthy dramatic interludes of falling, rolling, gurning, clenching, gasping, and emoting. It’s not that. That’s dead entertaining, and frequently exciting.

Also, unlike their lumpen rugby counterparts, football players are always installing new hairdos, which makes them a lot like boy bands, except faster and fitter. Dreads, quiffs, mohawks, skinfades, hair carving, and ill-advised colour experiments, thy name is football. Phil Foden has a new bleach job and so the tabloids have compared him to Gazza, which is clearly wrong, given how he’s channelling Depeche Mode, circa 1985.

Foden says that if England win the Euros, the team will go bleached, like the Romanian team in 1998. (No need to rush to the Boots bleach aisle just yet chaps, but you never know). Others retain the same football hairdo for ever, like Gareth Bale’s unfortunate manbun, and Luca Modric’s attachment to his hairband, but, overall, footballers are a tonsorially adventurous lot. Between that and scoring all those beautiful, heart-stopping goals, what’s not to like?

And yet, so many don’t: Like it, I mean. So many tune out, turn off, walk away. I think I know why. VAR aside — and it’s a big aside, one that needs to be picked up and hurled out the nearest window — antipathy to football has got nothing to do with the magic on the pitch. No, it’s the stuff that happens back in the studio: It’s the pundits.

With the possible exception of Roy Keane, who consistently presents as a furiously disappointed PE teacher, football punditry has elevated blokespeak — the art of saying absolutely nothing for hours on end — into an artform. Except without the art, or the form.

When a woman hears a man on the telly saying to another man on the telly, ‘They’ll be wanting goals in the second half”, something inside her snaps. There they are, sitting in the studio with their manscaped eyebrows and luxury casual wear, getting paid the equivalent of a small house to say, ‘They’ll be wanting goals in the second half.’ Apart from Gary Lineker, we all know golden retrievers, if not actual hamsters, in headsets who could do a better job.

Obviously, viewers at home can walk away at half time to make a soothing cup of tea, but when we come back, they’ll still be sitting there talking shite, except with infographics and circles and arrows, as though they were analysing astronomical trajectories in distant galaxies and not 22 overpaid haircuts running around a pitch.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a fan. I would happily watch Brighton versus Barnsley in the rain, while idly wondering how much Botox lives in some players’ faces, or how proud Marcus Rashford’s mum must be. It’s just the blokespeak I can’t stand.