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How Commentators Can Turn A Beautiful Match Ugly And An Ugly Match Beautiful
Goal.com's Subhankar Mondal ponders on the role that football commentators play during matches and explains how they can make a beautiful match ugly and an ugly match beautiful.....
17-Jun-2009 7:29:51 PM
The Santosh Trophy final on Sunday might have ended 0-0 after
extra-time and Goa and West Bengal could be separated only on penalties, but it
was quite an intriguing match with both sides having enough chances to settle
the score. An eventful first 45 minutes was followed by some feisty second half
action and then of course there was the 'lottery' of the penalty shootout.
But listening to the match commentary on TV you wouldn't have realized that one of the biggest matches in Indian football was going on. The Santosh Trophy is a historic and traditional football competition in India and is played among the various states (mostly) and the final of the 63rd edition of the tournament was the match that many thought would decide whether the power of football in India has truly shifted from Bengal to Goa. But the commentary on TV hardly implied that it was such an important match.
And that's the point. No, the commentary wasn't bad and the two respectable persons chosen for the match were doing a decent job but the tone, the pitch and the phrases used were not different from what they employ for a regular I-League match. Football commentary is supposed to make the game more interesting to watch, informing the viewers with some trivia as well as entertaining them with the high-pitch screams and pump up their adrenaline.
Most of which were absent on Sunday, thereby mitigating, if not eradicating, the huge significance and excitement of the Santosh Trophy finale, leading one to ponder on just how important football commentaries are for the game and how they can turn a beautiful game ugly and an ugly game beautiful.
Those who have a penchant for radio commentary must marvel at the high pitch and vociferous tone employed by the Bengali commentators. Be it a national league game between East Bengal and Mohun Bagan or a Kolkata league fixture between the bottom two sides, the Bengali commentators never sound humdrum or wearied, always sustaining a high tempo and smoothness in their commentary. At times they tend to take their romanticism over the top, pulling out some rather weird metaphors from their literature bag.
When this columnist was a kid and was just being indoctrinated into football, he happened to listen to a commentary on a Mohun Bagan match. Legendary player Jose Barreto had scored a simple tap-in but the commentators credited that to him hailing from the land of Pele and having Brazilian blood running through his veins.
The rhetoric was as much ridiculous as exciting, sending a shiver down this columnist's spine and making him a 'fan' of radio commentary forever, often leading him in the subsequent years to turn off the TV volume and listen to the commentary on Premier League matches by BBC's Alan Green, one of the most enjoyable voices on radio.
Of course radio commentary is different from that of TV commentary and there are stories of how European commentators in the pre-TV days used to manipulate the details of the matches in their radio commentary for commercial reasons, making the dullest of matches the most interesting of encounters. TV commentary is paralyzed for the basic fact that a commentator cannot 'add' anything; he can only relay what he sees- and what millions of others see- and can only interpret the match according to his intellect. Such is the nature of football that his interpretation is often different from that of the viewers.
Often these (wrong) interpretations of the football commentators tend to mislead the people. Goal.com Greece's Michael Paterakis recounts one such incident, "In February I was in Spain for the Villarreal-Panathinaikos match in the Champions League. From the press galleries we were all agreeing that Gilberto Silva was Panathinaikos’ best player along with Giorgos Karagounis. I wrote that in my post-match player ratings piece. A few minutes later I received a call from my brother in Athens. He exclaimed, "Are you serious? Gilberto was the worst player on the pitch!” I later found out the commentator would often remark that the Brazilian was playing badly. That way he totally altered the reality of the game."
The situation in Scotland is not very different either. Goal.com International’s Editor-in-Chief Ewan Macdonald explains, “Scottish commentators are obsessed with Rangers and Celtic, which is fair enough as these are by far the most important topics to the average viewer and listener in Scotland. The only problem is that they can be quite ignorant of the footballing world beyond their borders, and this occasionally seems arrogant.”
Football commentators are part of the media that often tries to influence people wrongly. In his article "Italy Hell, England Heaven – Stop Fooling Us SKY!", Goal.com's Italian football editor Carlo Garganese illustrated how "SKY markets the Premiership as the 'best league in the world', even (probably) paying their pundits extra money for uttering this motto as often as possible", which perhaps explains why Peter Crouch is a world class striker and Ashley Young is as good as Cristiano Ronaldo while Lionel Messi is overrated and overhyped.
But perhaps these rather comical comparisons and expressions do tend to make the football matches more interesting and more controversial to watch. And controversy sells.
And perhaps in that- selling the game- Indians have lagged behind. Commentators as well as football journalists play an indispensable role in endearing football to the public and it is obvious that India lacks top class football commentators in the mould of Michael Robinson, Martin Tyler, Gerry Armstrong and this columnist’s personal favourite Kevin Keatings.
Of course, there are a number of reasons why Indian commentators lack that charisma and charm- the lack of pace in matches, dearth of supporters making the stadiums burst with noise, the typical Indian accent, absence of recognition- but the bottomline is that football commentators in India are paralyzed when it comes to selling the game.
Which brings us to the same old problem: how to make Indian football more interesting.
Subhankar Mondal
Now all of our breaking news is at your fingertips. Meet the Goal.com Toolbar, the new and exciting way to take the passion of football with you!
But listening to the match commentary on TV you wouldn't have realized that one of the biggest matches in Indian football was going on. The Santosh Trophy is a historic and traditional football competition in India and is played among the various states (mostly) and the final of the 63rd edition of the tournament was the match that many thought would decide whether the power of football in India has truly shifted from Bengal to Goa. But the commentary on TV hardly implied that it was such an important match.
And that's the point. No, the commentary wasn't bad and the two respectable persons chosen for the match were doing a decent job but the tone, the pitch and the phrases used were not different from what they employ for a regular I-League match. Football commentary is supposed to make the game more interesting to watch, informing the viewers with some trivia as well as entertaining them with the high-pitch screams and pump up their adrenaline.
Most of which were absent on Sunday, thereby mitigating, if not eradicating, the huge significance and excitement of the Santosh Trophy finale, leading one to ponder on just how important football commentaries are for the game and how they can turn a beautiful game ugly and an ugly game beautiful.
Those who have a penchant for radio commentary must marvel at the high pitch and vociferous tone employed by the Bengali commentators. Be it a national league game between East Bengal and Mohun Bagan or a Kolkata league fixture between the bottom two sides, the Bengali commentators never sound humdrum or wearied, always sustaining a high tempo and smoothness in their commentary. At times they tend to take their romanticism over the top, pulling out some rather weird metaphors from their literature bag.
When this columnist was a kid and was just being indoctrinated into football, he happened to listen to a commentary on a Mohun Bagan match. Legendary player Jose Barreto had scored a simple tap-in but the commentators credited that to him hailing from the land of Pele and having Brazilian blood running through his veins.
The rhetoric was as much ridiculous as exciting, sending a shiver down this columnist's spine and making him a 'fan' of radio commentary forever, often leading him in the subsequent years to turn off the TV volume and listen to the commentary on Premier League matches by BBC's Alan Green, one of the most enjoyable voices on radio.
Of course radio commentary is different from that of TV commentary and there are stories of how European commentators in the pre-TV days used to manipulate the details of the matches in their radio commentary for commercial reasons, making the dullest of matches the most interesting of encounters. TV commentary is paralyzed for the basic fact that a commentator cannot 'add' anything; he can only relay what he sees- and what millions of others see- and can only interpret the match according to his intellect. Such is the nature of football that his interpretation is often different from that of the viewers.
Often these (wrong) interpretations of the football commentators tend to mislead the people. Goal.com Greece's Michael Paterakis recounts one such incident, "In February I was in Spain for the Villarreal-Panathinaikos match in the Champions League. From the press galleries we were all agreeing that Gilberto Silva was Panathinaikos’ best player along with Giorgos Karagounis. I wrote that in my post-match player ratings piece. A few minutes later I received a call from my brother in Athens. He exclaimed, "Are you serious? Gilberto was the worst player on the pitch!” I later found out the commentator would often remark that the Brazilian was playing badly. That way he totally altered the reality of the game."
The situation in Scotland is not very different either. Goal.com International’s Editor-in-Chief Ewan Macdonald explains, “Scottish commentators are obsessed with Rangers and Celtic, which is fair enough as these are by far the most important topics to the average viewer and listener in Scotland. The only problem is that they can be quite ignorant of the footballing world beyond their borders, and this occasionally seems arrogant.”
Football commentators are part of the media that often tries to influence people wrongly. In his article "Italy Hell, England Heaven – Stop Fooling Us SKY!", Goal.com's Italian football editor Carlo Garganese illustrated how "SKY markets the Premiership as the 'best league in the world', even (probably) paying their pundits extra money for uttering this motto as often as possible", which perhaps explains why Peter Crouch is a world class striker and Ashley Young is as good as Cristiano Ronaldo while Lionel Messi is overrated and overhyped.
But perhaps these rather comical comparisons and expressions do tend to make the football matches more interesting and more controversial to watch. And controversy sells.
And perhaps in that- selling the game- Indians have lagged behind. Commentators as well as football journalists play an indispensable role in endearing football to the public and it is obvious that India lacks top class football commentators in the mould of Michael Robinson, Martin Tyler, Gerry Armstrong and this columnist’s personal favourite Kevin Keatings.
Of course, there are a number of reasons why Indian commentators lack that charisma and charm- the lack of pace in matches, dearth of supporters making the stadiums burst with noise, the typical Indian accent, absence of recognition- but the bottomline is that football commentators in India are paralyzed when it comes to selling the game.
Which brings us to the same old problem: how to make Indian football more interesting.
Subhankar Mondal
Now all of our breaking news is at your fingertips. Meet the Goal.com Toolbar, the new and exciting way to take the passion of football with you!
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