james dawson

I admitted last week that I’ve stopped enjoying Match of the Day. And this week’s programme illustrated exactly why. Just look at the way Mark Chapman opens the show. Flat. Lifeless. Almost uninterested. Football is about passion, enthusiasm, banter, anger, love, joy and despair. Yet the BBC has somehow managed to package its highlights into a programme almost entirely devoid of emotion. Chappers, as he’s affectionately known, comes across well on the radio. But on Match of the Day, he looks bored rigid. Like the last person on earth you’d want to sit down with for a conversation about football. To be fair, Steph Houghton and Martin Keown did a reasonable job. But as somebody pointed out in response to my previous post, where’s the humour? Where’s the fun? Where’s the sheer joy of football? Everything is so painfully serious. The pundits deliver their analysis within such tight parameters that the whole thing feels sterile. Bill Shankly famously said football wasn’t a matter of life and death. It was more important than that. But the real point is that people love football because it makes them feel alive. Watching Match of the Day these days is like observing a post-mortem conducted by a forensic pathologist who regretted his career choice years ago and is now just counting down the days until he can collect his pension. Surely, in the post-Lineker era, there must be a better way of presenting football highlights? Give us people who love the game. People who can laugh, joke, argue and get carried away. Give us proper analysis, certainly, but make it feel like the conversations we have with our mates down the pub. And for those chauvinistic throwbacks who complained about women presenting men’s football, let me say this: of Match of the Day’s three presenters, Chapman is comfortably the worst. Give me Kelly Cates or Gabby Logan any day of the week. Someone needs to have a word in Chappers’ ear. Tell him to bring some of his radio personality to the television studio. Because his dry, bored, dead-eyed delivery is sucking the life out of a programme devoted to a sport that should be anything but lifeless. Football is supposed to be fun. For God’s sake, can somebody tell Match of the Day?