BBC – Towns of Two Halves

12 March 2020

Momentito!

Football is having a moment. As in so many other regrettable cases, foreign imports are to blame.

‘Moment’ is the word on almost every manager’s lips, and of one or two players. When they are not using it incorrectly they’re using it too often, and the habit is spreading into journalism.

First it was the managers. Perhaps because time is such an elusive quality, their otherwise exceptional English lets them down when it comes to expressions of time. Even the best succumb. “Right now is maybe the best moment in their season,” said Pep Guardiola about Manchester United before the derby on 8 March. “We had a few good moments,” Ralph Hasenhuttl reflected after Southampton’s home defeat by Newcastle. Mikel Arteta produced a masterclass after Arsenal’s FA Cup win at Portsmouth on 2 March. Of his young players he said: “I knew that they were going to have difficult moments during the game, they have to learn from those moments, they have to manage their moments better than we did in the first half in some moments.” The first mention is justified and accurate, the rest are increasingly redundant flourishes and the effect is of an arpeggio. Magnifique, Mikel!

English managers are not immune. Frank Lampard, speaking after Chelsea’s 2-0 cup win over Liverpool, said: “We’ve got to celebrate these moments.” It’s not exactly wrong, but there are better words. ‘Wins’ springs to mind, or ‘days’, or even perhaps ‘anomalies’. It’s important that such alternatives don’t disappear altogether; it could happen, especially as the habit is spreading beyond the game into the media.

The commentator at the same Southampton match called the winning goal “a brilliant moment for Allan St-Maximin, a horrible moment for Yan Valery”. The BBC’s Laura Scott commented on 3 March that the coronavirus “was mentioned at several moments” during a FIFA meeting. We can expect rapid contagion. BBC personnel already show signs of trimming their vocabulary down to a single adjective, ‘iconic’, a single future time expression, ‘anytime soon’, and the general-purpose ‘epicentre’ when the location of almost anything is at issue.

What is a moment? In cosmology, there’s an adjunct to the Big Bang theory known as Cosmic Inflation. According to science, Cosmic Inflation lasted from 10^-36 to 10^-33 seconds after the ‘singularity’ that is regarded as the start of the universe. That’s a very short period of time. Even for a moment, it’s quite brief. But it makes the point. Moments do not last long. They turn into something else – seconds, periods, intervals etc – when they are extended.

All is not yet lost. “It’s been a difficult period for us,” said Deli Alli in early March. The young man’s choice of the word ‘period’ to cover the months since Harry Kane’s injury offers grounds for hope.

13 November 2019

The Emperor’s Green Clothes

floodlight, tokenism, BBC Sport, Sport Positive Summit

The BBC is making a big deal today of initiatives by Premier League clubs to do their bit for the environment. Research by BBC Sport and the ‘United Nations-backed’ Sport Positive Summit puts Arsenal and Manchester City at the top of its ‘sustainability rankings’.

Arsenal and Manchester City, you can’t help but notice, are both sponsored by airlines.

But long-haul pre-season tours did not feature in the research. Nor did the multiple strips the clubs change every season to sell anew to supporters. And yet the producer of the research claims it focuses “on categories that clubs control”.

If you accept the science of the climate crisis, as the BBC affects to, this all looks suspiciously like a form of tokenism known as ‘green-washing’.

* Towns of Two Halves concentrates mainly on Shank’s Pony and public transport in guiding you round the attractions of towns with football clubs, green or otherwise.

4 August 2018

Screen Test

The BBC’s TV programme schedules for Saturday 4 August were depressing for what they omitted. On the first day of the new football season, there was neither Final Score nor Match of the Day. With what by common consent was the conclusion of the most dramatic Test Match since the last most dramatic Test Match, there was of course no cricket at all.
The absence of any football coverage is presumably explained by the fact that the Premier League doesn’t start until next weekend. So that’s a single upright finger from the British Broadcasting Corporation to all fans of English clubs outside the Premier League and of other British clubs outside Wales.
There was one forlorn hope. An inexplicable break in the published BBC1 schedule at 4.45pm separated European Championships 2018 from European Championships 2018. The witching hour for football supporters begins at 4.45pm. In the event, nothing happened at 4.45pm apart from Chris Hoy talking engagingly about his early career. While the football results could have been screened, the BBC showed the Women’s 800 metre Breaststroke Final, 16 lengths, with no British interest, for eight minutes plus. How long does it take to read the football results? Five minutes? Meanwhile on BBC2, Flog It! began on time.
Where cricket is concerned, the BBC threw in the towel a long time ago. It talks a good game. The fetish object that is Test Match Special sits smugly on the pedestal sustained by the rest of the corporation. On Radio 5 Live, the pretence that people might actually prefer their sport without moving pictures is repeated daily, many times, as if that might eventually make it true.
The results are dispiriting. The BBC becomes a cheerleader for events that other broadcasters will screen. In a hole and continuing to dig, it surely drums up interest in subscriptions to BT and Sky. Carried away by its own enthusiasm, it loses a sense of perspective: how can a Test Match be a ‘classic’ when only two of the four possible outcomes are available by tea on the third day? And perversely, in its news bulletins, it subsequently broadcasts spoilers.
Online, by contrast, its sports service is comprehensive. Football scores are automatically refreshed, details of individual games are available and ‘virtual’ league tables are updated to reflect, pointlessly, fluctuating fortunes. (This service may not be entirely reliable: the Oldham v Milton Keynes fixture had apparently not kicked off by 3.11pm. Meanwhile, MK Dons had gone up 0-1 from a penalty.) In the red-ball game, cricket scores are updated ball-by-ball.
Perhaps this is how sport will be ‘consumed’ from now on: live, on television, only for those able to afford the appropriate subscription (or canny enough to find a streaming portal); or verbal/textual, regularly updated and free. If the latter, it’s almost a return to the early days of ‘live’ Ashes Test Match commentaries. In the 1930s, audiences in Australia listened through the night to ‘live’ wireless broadcasts put together ball-by-ball from cables. It’s Teletext all over again. It doesn’t feel like progress. It feels as if supporters of second-class clubs are second-class citizens.