Page 141 - Sport Culture and the Media

122 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

Media sports speak also reappears as a comic component in everyday speech.
It is common, for example, for ‘park’ footballers to give their own imagined,
imitated and exaggerated sports commentary when scoring goals or tries,
liberally sprinkled with ironic sports clichés about being ‘over the moon’,
‘gutted’ and ‘sick as a parrot’. By lampooning sports commentators, other
media professionals assert their technical, communicative superiority and
sports fans present their credentials as experts in decoding games. Just as is
the case with the print sports journalists discussed in Chapter 2, live television
and radio sports commentators are constantly required to justify if not their
existence (although there are many fans who wish that they would find a more
useful occupation, like selling second-hand motor vehicles), then certainly their
qualifications for taking up such a prominent place in sport. What is required of
the sports commentator, then, is to enhance the experience of watching by
various means – through poetic powers of description and evocation (as is often
said of highly regarded cricket commentators like the late John Arlott); to
provide supplementary information (as in the case of Murray Walker’s
‘encyclopaedic knowledge of the sport’; Jellie 1998: 3); or to supply the kind of
‘insider’, expert knowledge that is gained by playing sport at the highest levels
(hence the aforementioned movement of retired and even currently practising
professional sportspeople into the media). Each form of commentary is equally
open to critique – the poetic regarded as self-indulgent (‘pseuds corner’),
the informational as ‘trivial pursuit’ or ‘anorak’ knowledge, the insider as
inarticulate and untrained. The live broadcast sports commentator is subject
to exacting demands by fellow viewers and listeners because they (usually he)
are in broad terms doing the same thing, and for a separation to be maintained
between paid commentator and unpaid media spectator requires a demonstra-
tion of the superior (or at least the enhancing) quality of the professional’s
observations.
One way in which this potential for adverse or ridiculing response from those
exposed to sports commentary may be avoided is through unobtrusiveness
(low-key description and analysis with plenty of space left for the action to
speak for itself – a task rather easier in television than on radio). Good sports
commentators may, like efficient assassins, be most effective when not drawing
attention to themselves. Another tactic is to attempt to bridge the gap between
commentator and viewer by symbolically merging them. In much the same way
as, for example, politicians regularly deploy the rhetoric of unity to represent
themselves as being ‘of the people’ by using the pronoun ‘we’, so sports com-
mentators often attempt to install themselves as the eyes, ears and voice of the
media sports spectating public. This identification between commentators,
viewers and listeners is particularly effective in international sport, where an
‘us’ and ‘them’ framework can be easily established. In covering, certainly as