Rooney is a disaster on Match of the Day

Spectator

2 hours ago

Match of the Day is back and, for the first time in a quarter of a century, without Gary Lineker. That's the good news. Saturday night's anchorman, Mark Chapman, is so much better than his smug, virtue-signalling predecessor. Perhaps it's because he's a professional broadcaster rather than an ex-player. This means he asks questions that fans want to hear answers to, rather than share some anecdote about when he was playing the game.
However, not even this could save MotD's return from being car crash TV. No matter how good Chapman is as a host, there remains a problem: Wayne Rooney. Now carrying even more timber than he did in his playing days, he sat rigidly in his seat like a man facing a firing squad.
Great footballers do not always make great pundits (nor do bang average ones such as Jamie Redknapp and Robbie Savage) but are often hired because they have played the game at the highest level. Not unreasonably, one would expect them to be able to provide some kind of insight into the mind of the professional player, how managers work and so on. But the BBC would have got more out of Mickey Rooney than Wayne Rooney, who is being paid an estimated £800,000 of licence-fee money. He was a great footballer, a rubbish manager and now a pretty awful pundit.
It would be easy to put it down to nerves but as the programme wore on (and at one hour 20 minutes, boy did it wear on), instead of settling in to his expert role, Wayne simply got worse.
At first he spoke too quickly, tumbling over his words more clumsily than a Jack Grealish dive in the penalty area, before slowing down to an almost catatonic state. So much so that even Alan Shearer would help out his pal by finishing his sentences and taking over. It comes to something when an analyst is so bad they make Alan Shearer look like Sigmund Freud.
Last November, when Lineker announced he was leaving the BBC to concentrate on podcasts and Palestinian propaganda, I wrote that Match of the Day was largely an irrelevance, though I hoped Mark Chapman would take over. I saw little on Saturday night to change that view. The theme tune remains. One suspects there would be Epping-style riots if they scrapped it. There are more fancy graphics on the opening along with some bizarre sound effects, possibly done by a 15-year-old son of a BBC executive, and the usual studio set with three middle-aged white men in nearly ironed casual clothing. There always was a '19th hole at the golf club' look to the show. This may change as the programme now has a rota of presenters with Gabby Logan and Kelly Cates, both experienced presenters and both daughters of top-level footballers.
Chapman is very good. More so considering he had spent the best part of the day anchoring BBC Radio 5 Live's sports coverage too. Rooney was awful and Shearer was, well, the same as ever. But none of this matters. Whatever the BBC does to shake up the programme, it won't make any difference. There is a hardcore of traditionalists who will watch it. Then there are the younger generations who get their football through other means.
I suspect the BBC keep MotD because it's part of the furniture more than anything else. Sky and others get the live games and anyone who wants to watch their team simply visits one of the many streaming sites. I'd spent the day making my usual 250-mile round trip to see Spurs – my 43rd year as a season-ticket holder. On the train journey home I had enough time to go on YouTube and see all the goals, incidents and other talking points, not just from the Premier League but from other games too.
With so few games now being played on a Saturday, Match of the Day is often reduced to featuring fewer than half the weekend's fixtures – and on Saturday that included the stupefying 0-0 draw between Villa and Newcastle. However it still manages to ramble on for 80 minutes, getting close to midnight.
Many of those who watch Match of the Day do so on iPlayer because they can fast-forward the analysis and the fancy graphics and the meaningless stats (on Saturday this included the revelation that Sunderland had scored two goals with a header in the same match for the first time since 2014). Others just tune in to see their team – if they win – or simply turn off when they realise the commentator on the next set of highlights is the insufferable Jonathan Pearce.
Every week the presenter of the BBC news programme immediately before MotD turns to the day's football with the half-hearted warning 'if you don't want to know the score, look away now.' Except everyone already knows the scores. Like West Ham's start to the season, Match of the Day is all rather pointless.