There was a time when Manchester United colliding with Liverpool would reverberate through football for days, though it took a great deal less than Carra-gate to consign Saturday’s Old Trafford clash to the margins of the conversation.
An £89million acquisition — Paul Pogba — wasn’t fit to play and Liverpool’s expensively assembled defence vanished, but Jose Mourinho was soon asked about what a Dutch pundit, Frank de Boer, had said about Marcus Rashford on BT Sport. Mourinho, who plays this media game like a maestro, did not disappoint, eviscerating de Boer as ‘the worst manager in the history of the Premier League’.
We are accelerating into a world of controversialism in which the football has been lost, drowned out by the sound and fury of the pantomime which surrounds it.
The noise and debate whipped up by television pundits is now football’s new theatre
If the events of the past 24 hours haven’t taught us that the game itself is no longer enough to sustain the demand for instant sporting gratification, consider a few numbers. Manchester City’s Champions League match against Basle attracted just 79,000 viewers on BT Sport last week. A clip of Jermaine Jenas declaring on the same channel’s Premier League Review Show that his Newcastle team-mates lacked ambition secured 1.25million hits within a few hours.
Into this new space step the controversialists — analysts who are looking to fulfil the broadcasters’ clamour for attention and hits, as the audience gravitates from TV to digital devices, and who are ready to bite people’s heads off in pursuit of them, if they have to.
Jamie Carragher and Gary Neville have become the two arch- exponents: a slightly uncomfortable pairing at first, considering that visceral Liverpool/Manchester hate, but one which seemingly now operates in tandem. Neville, ever the shop steward, seems more naturally disposed to dishing it out. But Carragher, inherently the more thoughtful, has followed along.
It’s in keeping with the kind of blue-collar players they were that each puts in the hard yards, backing up any criticism with a level of knowledge and insight which leaves all the rest trailing behind.
Sky Sports pundit Jamie Carragher was filmed spitting at a car after Liverpool-Man United
Carragher told Sarah Hewson his actions were ‘disgusting’ when he appeared on Sky News
This newspaper’s own expert analysts, Jamie Redknapp, Martin Keown and Chris Sutton, are equally trenchant in their opinions, which are often unflinchingly strong on these pages as we plot the course of the season.
In one of the Monday Night Football post-match debates which have become a football broadcasting sub-genre all of their own, this approach to co-commentary and studio analysis recently became the subject of a compelling discussion. (‘Analysis of the analysis’, as Neville tweeted in response to Sportsmail’s discussion of his work on these pages, two weeks ago.)
‘We never go into any single game thinking, “I’m going to criticise him, today” — never, ever once,’ Neville said.
‘I have, now and again!’ Carragher said. ‘There might be a few you don’t like!’
Neville also made the entirely valid point that the print media amplifies the noise, by frequently making pundits’ commentary the focus of their questioning.
‘The first that happens at media conferences is it’s being put to managers that: ‘So-and-so is saying this about you. What do you think’,’ Neville observed in that discussion. ‘The managers are reacting. I don’t know whether they want to react or are just emotional.’
Carragher was photographed arriving at London’s Euston Station on Monday morning
Carragher told reporters at Euston he would apologise again to the family on Monday
It’s actually more complicated than that. In the homogenous, buttoned-up place that football has become, full of anodyne player quotes and over-zealous media management, people like Neville and Carragher are a source of colour. They take the place once occupied by players and we connect with them.
The episode which has left the 40-year-old Carragher suspended by Sky and fighting for his professional life was a controversy for the digital era: death by camera-phone with an accompanying moral outrage. It was evidence of the nasty little society we live in, you also have to say.
Carragher’s spitting was vile and repugnant, though it takes a particular kind of despicability to goad a motorist, film his reaction while driving your 14-year-old child and chuckle after the event.
‘Jamie Carragher spat at my daughter. Nice,’ the father says, as he films. The teenager is the wise one. ‘Stop it now,’ she tells her father.
Carragher, who is devastated, says he did not see the 14-year-old in the passenger seat and by 7am on Monday he was on a train to London to make that clear to Sky, for whom the issue went way above Sky Sports managing director Barney Francis.
The former Liverpool defender apologised on Twitter after video footage emerged on Sunday
This sent the drama into a new pitch by early afternoon, as Carragher was submitted to an extraordinary 14-minute cross-examination by Sky News presenter Sarah Hewson which clearly went beyond anything he had been submitted to in 17 years of Premier League football. Or anything most football interviewers would accomplish. What began with him being asked to watch his own behaviour — ‘I’m recoiling at that because it’s disgusting,’ Hewson told him — ended with him very close to tears, barely able to complete the question when he was asked what his own children had thought of him. ‘Disappointed, obviously, and a little bit upset…’ he said, briefly overwhelmed in that moment.
In the court of public opinion, Vinnie Jones and Joey Barton piled in, informing Carragher how he should behave, with Jones — who has two criminal convictions for assault in his past — condemning his ‘absolute filth’.
But Bob Wilson, a pioneer at the BBC and ITV, feels some sympathy with those who tread this path now. ‘I honestly think these pundits know they won’t be asked back if they don’t come out with the “wow factor” moment,’ Wilson told Sportsmail. ‘They’re under too much pressure to shock.’
The decibel levels of these times are not for the faint-hearted. Neville’s old friend Paul Scholes made much noise when he moved into match analysis for BT Sport. But he felt he was being turned into a Manchester United attack dog and is now appearing less often — only 15 times a season.
Carragher will hold talks about his future with Sky after the video emerged on Sunday
Carragher’s Sky Sports colleague Gary Neville came to the defence of his television partner
Carragher is certainly not the only analyst with some decisions to answer for. When Sportsmail asked Stan Collymore on Monday whether he would continue working for the Kremlin-funded Russia Today TV station, in the light of the Salisbury attack, the former striker responded only with a personal attack on this correspondent and this newspaper.
Carragher took his contrition to the BBC and ITV before the day was done. ‘I can only give words now after the event about what I think and about what I did which was disgusting and not acceptable and I’m sorry,’ he told ITV.
It would be good to think that this society is a place where remorse counts for something and that good can come from mistakes.
Football broadcasting would certainly be far poorer without Carragher. But we are operating within a loud new world order. The old rules don’t always apply.