Big Ron’s fall increases our need for big brother
On Thursday night, Big Ron Atkinson was incarcerated in the Celebrity Big Brother house; surely the final lap in his decade of repentance for that night in Monaco.
At his very best, Ron would have the measure of any player in a word or a phrase; he could squeeze the essence of a footballer into a bespoke label he’d tailored himself.
A bit milky. An amusement arcade. A solid citizen. An insurance man.
It is a very different business he is involved in now, the world of very minor celebrity; where no sane human could be expected to assess what some of these chancers are about.
But when he stuck a reducer, early doors, into a clown from The Only Way is Essex, Ron showed he can still nail his man in a few words.
‘Where are you from?’ ‘Essex.’ Beaten already.
But Ron’s once-magnificent succinctness, his ability to cut to the chase, is no longer prized in football coverage, where both time and space, still the most precious commodities available to a footballer, are in long supply.
Vast studios, interminable build-ups, Batman-level gadgetry. A cast of thousands.
Perhaps the tipping point in the bloating of televised football came last Saturday, when BT Sport had both the time and space to roll out Primal Scream for a live performance in advance of the Liverpool v Stoke match. In an environment like this, there is no incentive to nail your subject in a few well-chosen words.
Amid all of the razzmatazz and information technology whiling away the hours on other stations, RTÉ’s pared-down coverage can seem old-fashioned, particularly when RTÉ has pared down its Premier League coverage to the point where it no longer has Premier League coverage.
But every now and again — maybe six or seven times a year — I think we ought to take time to consider what we have in John Giles. And realise that no amount of machinery could replace him.
John Giles wouldn’t, you sense, be all that comfortable heading into the Big Brother house. Indeed Gilesy would never say the kind of terrible things that would shunt his television career into a long detour via the Big Brother house.
But the man who was as good as anyone at making time and space for himself, is still Big Ron’s only realistic rival in the noble art of brevity when it comes to encasing footballers in nutshells.
In his book A Football Man, Gilesy told us he has never felt nervous on the RTÉ panel, because he had done all the preparation he needed on the football fields of Dublin, Manchester and Leeds. He appears to have been strict in his observance of that policy over the years, because he can now name a very small percentage of the footballers he adjudicates on.
But that is a modest handicap. Gilesy’s methodology is different to Ron’s. Rather than coin a phrase, or customise the language, Gilesy slips back into the middle of the field, lifts his head and sees things as clearly as he ever did.
It is a place where stats and camera angles and gadgets can’t quite reach.
Watching Arsenal in Europe this week, Gilesy saw the thing that vexes and baffles him most; a man doing the wrong things most of the time. “Walcott; I think I’d choke him if I was playing with him,” he said, at half-time.
Of course Walcott would go on to more or less win the game for Arsenal, almost despite himself. On Sky, they felt Walcott had a great game. And maybe he did, in his unique way.
But that wouldn’t make Gilesy wrong. In fact, judging by a contortion of despair and rage late in the game from Tomas Rosicky, after he won a tackle and gave the ball to Walcott, then watched him give it away; perhaps Gilesy came close to being righter than he has ever been, in calling the first Champions League crime scene.
Truly the only Big Brother we need.
It has been a mixed summer for technology in sport.
In the cricket, the computers have driven them cracked, the same way self-service checkout in a supermarket tends to drive everyone cracked; because they have tried to delegate too much to the computers, while still wanting to keep a geezer hovering nearby, for old time’s sake.
In the Premier League, meanwhile, there is tremendous excitement at the new gadgetry. So anxious were TV companies for a goal-line moment last weekend, they pestered Hawk-Eye every time a ball hit a post. If this level of interest keeps up, expect the system to soon throw up some additional labelling: Goal, No Goal, What Do You Think, Genius?
Then it turned out that we might have underestimated the GAA’s Hawk-Eye installation. When the technology was put into Croke Park, we thought it would only be able to tell us when points were scored. Nobody realised it would act as policy advisor too.
Earlier this year, tech scientist Peter van der Made told us we were finally in the age of the thinking computer; that we have reached the next level of artificial intelligence where machines can learn for themselves.
Surely that’s what happened Sunday, when Hawk-Eye blinked during the minor match because someone had input football settings rather than hurling?
A summer of disciplinary confusion — with referees seemingly on football settings too — can’t have escaped the notice of the machines. Was Hawk-Eye’s high-profile gaffe telling us that it’s time, once and for all, to split the administration of the two games?
While the UK sports media allocates 95% of its journalistic resources to speculation over if, when and how Manchester United, Arsenal and Liverpool can prize funds from the pockets of American billionaires to purchase footballers — a percentage that will climb to 99% in a week’s time — a couple of interesting stories broke Stateside this week, from which you can construct your own conspiracy theories.
The New York Times reported that an anonymous study carried out for the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) found that at least 29% of athletes at the 2011 World Athletics Championships had taken performance enhancing drugs. The results had to be leaked rather than published because WADA had parked the study after the International Association of Athletics Federations decided it wasn’t scientific enough.
Then there was the decision of ESPN — whose growth has been largely built on American football — to disassociate itself from a documentary on concussions in American football it had been working on with US public channel PBS. That film was set to be called League of Denial and it should still go ahead.
But untangling where denial begins and ends across all sport, and perhaps media too, may never be possible.
At least when the window closes we might get a closer look.
HEROES & VILLAINS
Davy Fitzgerald: Might he pack more intensity per cubic inch that any other being on the planet? During pre-match interviews anyway.
Maria Sharapova: A week-long, worldwide promotional stunt, at no cost, before an event she wasn’t even going to compete in. Sugarpova certainly has the media sweet.
Stephane Pauwels: Belgian commentator facing legal action from Charleroi striker Harlem Gnohere, whom he called ‘fat as a pig’. What implications might this have for Eamo and any fresh fat-and-a-clown-a-fat-clown-for-all-to-see rants?
Jose Mourinho: Quiet enough so far, but it’s starting isn’t it; the same old guff.
