I have, this evening, figured out the single biggest threat facing modern football. While all the press talk about is Didier Drogba and his inability to understand the simple question “Do you dive?” (I know footballers are hardly candidates for Mensa but they can’t be that retarded, can they?), I have realised there is a much larger threat facing football today.
And that threat is David Pleat. or rather the rare and contagious disease that he carries called Pleatitis.
Why have so many commentators started going down with this condition? It is the disease where you suddenly start mispronouncing easy to say names into ones that sound nothing like the player they are attached to. For instance, Kolo Toure suddenly becomes Kolo Tor-eh? and Jose Reyes becomes Jose Ray-ez. (I’ve just been watching Arsenal’s CL game on ITV, in case you haven’t already twigged) He’s dreadful. Why on earth ITV still hire him I’ve got no idea, especially when they’ve got the excellent Jim Beglin to call on. I really don’t get it. And the really worrying thing is, more and more commentators are starting to catch it. Peter Drury is another one who has slowly come under with a bad dose of Pleatitis. Get those two commentating together is the commentating equivalent of someone running their fingers down a blackboard. And please, for the love of god, don’t get me started on Jonathan Pearce.
Something needs to be done about this now. Perhaps I should start a fundraising drive to help ITV secure a proper commentator. Surely Ian Darke or Rob Hawthorne could be tempted to move from Sky. They could do with the regular work. That said, if they did make the move, for god sakes keep them away from David Pleat.
Monthly Archive for March, 2006
Is this the start of something beautiful or will this be like the 17 million other blogs created today and just be dismissed as the ramblings of someone craving attention? I guess finding out will be the fun part.
This would probably be a good time to explain what the hell this is all about.
Primarily, the main purpose of this blog is to write about one of my great passions, namely Liverpool Football Club or the Reigning Champions of Europe as I like to call them, seeing as that’s what we are. Shame we wont be defending the trophy but that’s for another time and place.
I manage to catch most games in one form or another, so I think it’ll be pretty constructive to write about each game especially as it gets the old creative writing juices flowing, so managing to combine two passions in one go will be beneficial all round. I’ll generally look to get my match reports/reviews up within about 48 hours of the game ending, but don’t hold me to this as I can be quite irritable when lazy.
Also, don’t be too shocked either to see the odd video game or music review appear on here either. I consume alot of both, so, again, reviewing them once I’ve worked through them will help the old creative writing.
This is probably a bit longer than the usual “testpost, testpost, this is a test post” that most blogs start off with, so I’ll probably leave it for now as I suspect you’ll need a strong coffee to wake you up. If you’re still reading this, thank you for your patience. If you aren’t, then you’re probably an Everton fan, in which case there is nothing that anyone can do to help you.
Best & Worst Football commentators
I’ve done a couple of long rambling posts, so here’s a nice (reasonably) quick one.
Best Commmentator
Martin Tyler. Without doubt one of the best ever. Mainly extending from the fact that I didn’t have Sky for about a decade, so I never had the chance to tire of his voice in the same way I have say John Motsons. I don’t think doing commentaries for the FIFA games has helped Motty either but that’s getting away from the point. Put simply, Tyler is the Guv’nor.
Worst Commentator
For a long time I would have said Rob Hawthorne. But he’s grown on me as a commentator and he appears to have added a bit of personality to his commentary which was probably lacking a year or two ago. Now, I would have to say that Jonathan Pearce is easily the worst commentator amongst the big three broadcasters. He should have stayed on Five with John Barnes. If ever a presenter and commentator deserved each other, it was those two.