ls, noise of pundits game’s new theatre
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 thing 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.’
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 cameraphone 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 yesterday 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.
This sent the drama into a new pitch by early afternoon, as Carragher was submitted to an extraordinary 14-minute crossexamination 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 is certainly not the only analyst with some decisions to answer for. When Sportsmail asked Stan Collymore yesterday 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.