Colm O'Regan: I wonder could AI take over sport punditry?
Comedian and Irish Examiner columnist Colm O'Regan pictured in Cork. Picture Denis Minihane.
Time to give some credit to sports pundits. How do they do it?
For example, Ireland were not great against Switzerland, in a similar way to other iffy performances, but under a different manager.
So what do you do with all your old opinions about the old manager now that the one you liked is in? Are they still in date, or do they have to be put in a filing cabinet, like company notepaper from before the rebrand?
It’s easier for a self-obsessed opinion columnist. I too have to come up with an opinion every week, but usually it’s about me, so I’ve some control over outcomes.
But imagine making a living just speculating about the actions of other people in games with so many variables?
You’re so dependent on them doing the thing you said they might do. Players letting you down after you praised them publicly. Or a manager you slated, going on a winning run and absolutely shoving your words down your throat.
Or maybe it doesn’t matter whether you're ever right because no one checks back any more. There is no time to spare. There's too much data.
Sports punditry has boomed in my lifetime. There is more sport on television and more television so that’s natural. But also everyone wants to talk about it all the time. Perhaps it’s part of our general wish to collect and store and parse everything that’s happened.
The internet has allowed us to watch everything ever made ever.
Now it’s possible to rerun every programme from your childhood. Including the time Michael Palin was on Home and Away.
So it is with sport. There used to be very little on, and there wasn’t much chat about what was on.
In soccer, after the air horns of the hostile away crowd announced a scandalous defeat for Eoin Hand’s team somewhere in the Communist bloc, there’d be a bit of angst about a cheating ref, and then the programme ended, and Mart and Market or A Difficult Play or Closedown came on.
Now Newton's Law of Punditry applies where the amount of analysis is proportional to the fourth power of the time spent on the pitch.
There are days of preview, two hours of a game and weeks of review. I once clicked on a link on a sports website’s Facebook page sent me to a podcast episode in which they were discussing a retired player’s ‘clapback’ to the comments of a current player in reaction to the retired player’s comments about the current player’s performance in the match.
So it was the reaction to the reaction to the reaction to the reaction to one thing that happened. Am I right to criticise this amount of reaction? Let us know what you think in the comments.
But what about the future of punditry? With any growth industry, there must be some bright spark saying “How can AI help here?”
AI is already analysing the data. How long before it just gives the opinions as well, live? It just needs to learn a bit of punditese.
New English tenses like the continuous future present perfect tense “Well as I say, to be fair, the manager will really be wanting, to have won this, at the end of the day”.
It needs to suspect players from Continental Europe of not liking it up 'em. Learn off some phrases like ‘a wand of a left foot’ and suddenly punditry with actual humans will seem like a quaint artisan activity.
But lookit, and I’m sticking my neck out here, it could go either way.
At the end of the day.
