Neil McNicholas: Calling foul on BBC's World Cup coverage

Okay, I can accept that you have to have a commentator at a football match to provide a ball-by-ball running account of the action, and, of course, in the case of the Beeb that means someone for the television and someone for the radio. Quite whether you also need an ex-player in the commentary box with him to provide additional observations I’m not so sure, especially when that means double the pay, the expense accounts, the airfare, and the cost of accommodation.

What would seem totally unjustifiable is the need to have a presenter and three ex-footballer pundits just to introduce a match, to be the “filler” at half time, and to provide their observations afterwards, and, of course, it seems to require a different set of four for each game.

But, even if you can justify their involvement, it’s surely impossible to also justify their actually being in Russia to do what they do (with the fourfold cost of their pay, expense accounts, flights and hotels).

They could just as easily be sitting in a studio in this country with a back-projection of Red Square behind them and no one would be any the wiser and it wouldn’t make any difference. They and the technical personnel involved in the studio could do exactly the same job as they are doing in Russia but at a fraction of the cost and be home on the bus in time for tea! This is what the BBC did for the Commonwealth Games earlier this year.

In the case of ITV, I suppose it’s up to them how they choose to spend their advertisers’ money, but in the case of the BBC they are past masters at enjoying (and, I’d suggest, squandering) the largesse made possible by licence-payers’ money.

To paraphrase the 1960s western, “have fun, will travel”, and they do, and they don’t even send us a postcard.

Another thing that always annoys me whenever the World Cup comes around is commentators referring to the “Mexican wave”. Exasperated, I once emailed the BBC’s Barry Davies to ask if he was aware that even though the rest of the world had first seen the wave during the Mexico World Cup (in ’86), it first started five years earlier at Seattle’s University of Washington (American) football games.

I was amazed when my phone rang later that day and it was Barry Davies himself acknowledging that, yes, he was aware of it but he felt it was probably better to refer to it by a name that most people would be familiar with even if it didn’t give the credit where it rightly belonged. But wasn’t that nice of him? Sadly it’s still being called the “Mexican wave” even though, technically, it isn’t.

I haven’t heard an explanation for why exactly no English match officials were appointed, but as much as we may criticise their performance at times, they’d have been head-and-shoulders better than some of the referees we have seen in the Cup. And without VAR it would have been even worse. It’s all very well selecting the best of a country’s officials, but “political correctness” doesn’t allow for their inexperience at refereeing top-flight football week in and week out, and being familiar with the egos and talents and temperaments of world-class players as referees are in many of our European leagues.

Quite apart from the eventual outcome of the World Cup, I wonder how many other people have noticed one particularly good thing that has come out of the contest. Again and again we have seen players being tackled and falling to the ground as if they had been poleaxed only to leap to their feet again when the referee didn’t blow his whistle.

Thinking about the current woes of the NHS and in particular the shortage of staff to deal with the demand for its restorative services, I thought I might suggest to the new Secretary of State for Health, Matt Hancock, that he simply pay the out-of-pocket expenses of a number of football referees to go round the wards of our hospitals and not blow their whistles. If everything goes to World Cup form, patients will be leaping from their beds, instantly fit and well, and they too could be home in time for tea. It’s worth a try.

Finally, win or lose, there is at least one English winner and that is Gareth Southgate, one of the most articulate and politely spoken managers we have had in recent times. If he also comes home with the World Cup in his luggage, all the better.

Neil McNicholas is a parish priest in Yarm