Another win for the witless banter brigade

SHE didn’t sound impressed, the teenage girl. ‘Will you stop it now?’ she asks her father, who does not seem as enraged as he should by the fact she is now wiping Jamie Carragher’s spit from her face. Daddy, meanwhile, is still driving with one hand, while filming with the other, having lowered his daughter’s window to better engage in witless banter with a celebrity he has spotted on the road. Let’s hope he gives her whatever money he received for selling his tawdry footage, otherwise she really is little more than collateral damage in this. Which is not to defend Carragher, whose actions were shameful, particularly as he had thinking time to decide what to do. It wasn’t as if he was suddenly confronted in the street, with the swirling impulses of flight or fight. Stare straight ahead and drive on. He is battling to save a lucrative media career, and understandably so. Setting aside the disgusting nature of the act, what this calls into question is impartiality. Fans know Carragher was a Liverpool man, just as Gary Neville was Manchester United or Matt Le Tissier was Southampton. Yet they invest in the idea that these allegiances, or prejudices, are put aside when they sit in the studio as pundits. To see Carragher, then, reacting extremely to defeat undermines that belief system. He appears no different from the average one-eyed fan, provoked to the point of lunacy by a gloating, crowing representative of the opposition. For someone employed to deliver cool, informed analysis, this is a horrible look. When can Carragher next opine on a match between Liverpool and Manchester United without appearing compromised? When can he talk negatively of a player losing his head, or lacking responsibility, without his viewers remembering his reaction to pressure? As competition and the demands of social media make television pundits more outspoken — and that could be one reason why Carragher was so wound up — the barbs coming back at them from inside the game have grown sharper. If Neville goes in hard, he is often reminded of his time with Valencia. One imagines Jose Mourinho, for instance, would not shy away from revisiting Carragher’s foam-flecked past in similar circumstances, if his players were criticised. It is a pity because Carragher has proved an excellent broadcaster and diligent analyst and appears generally remorseful, not just for the sake of saving his career. He knows he reacted poorly, he knows he was wrong — and second chances have been awarded in far more serious circumstances. Sky most certainly will not want to lose him and his profoundly apologetic interview on Sky News yesterday (above) may have been the first step towards rehabilitation. They didn’t afford Andy Gray or Richard Keys the same opportunity. Yet Carragher’s credibility cannot be restored easily and he surely needs to take the rest of the season off, to put some distance between this and his next public appearance. Another triumph, it would seem, for the merchants of banter. That little girl must be so proud.