With two words – “We’re back!” – Gary Lineker got the ball kind-of rolling on the BBC’s return to the broadcasting of top-flight football after an absence of 32 years, three months and 14 days. It was the corporation’s first live sport of any description for more than three months – unless you count the tactical missteps, managerial howlers, missed targets and frequent own goals that have characterised the government’s daily press conferences.
A Premier League match live on the BBC is in itself an exceptional circumstance, and this one the result of even more exceptional circumstances, prompting Lineker to immediately lead his two-man studio panel of Alan Shearer and Ian Wright in a discussion about how disappointing everything was.
“I just miss the fans,” complained Wright. “It’s totally different, Gary – it’s not ideal, but it’s football,” added Shearer. “It’s a bit like training, but important training,” surmised Lineker. It was all pleasingly frank, if not exactly encouraging.
Lineker swiftly segued into a conversation about how poor much of the play has been in the opening fixtures of this strange simulacrum semi-season. The seven games completed by then had featured a combined total of two first-half goals – one of which had come in stoppage time, plus another that didn’t count because the goalline technology failed – a trend of slow starting that Shearer bemoaned. “Everyone’s going to have their dinner now and come back in 20 minutes,” fretted Lineker. Inevitably the game that followed started brightly, with two splendid goals in the first 23 minutes.
Much has been made of the fake crowd noise that has been added to broadcasts in an effort to make the experience of watching these behind-closed-doors matches as normal as possible. The announcer at the Vitality Stadium for the BBC’s big match between Bournemouth and Crystal Palace presumably had the same idea in mind when he decided that before kick-off his choice of music – and occasionally his own voice – should be amplified to the normal match-day volume. This all particularly inconvenienced Alex Scott, who struggled make herself heard as she gamely reported from the ground.
Every club has had to decide how to replace the thousands of vocal humans who normally populate their stands, the universal response being to display enormous banners bearing some of the phrases the humans might have been saying had they been present.
These banners obscure empty seats but the discovery of the resumed season – one that perhaps could have been predicted – is that some of the things that add pleasingly to the atmosphere when they come from the mouths of fans are extraordinarily banal when written down.
Take “We are Brighton, super Brighton from the south”, for example, a song that is not only derivative but also geographically imprecise, and which was splashed behind a goal during the victory over Arsenal on BT Sport. Then there are slogans such as “I’m forever blowing bubbles”, as seen in West Ham’s defeat to Wolves on Sky, which lacked a little integrity when declared by inanimate, two‑dimensional and emphatically non‑bubble-blowing objects.
There were a few genuine fans to be seen, with broadcasters able to cut to a panel of 16 supporters of each side, watching along from home, for instant reaction to key developments. Spotting the one whose feed is lagging a few seconds behind the others’ and is looking po-faced rather than pleased has swiftly become one of the more entertaining distractions of our new-look game.
Beyond the empty stands and enforced novelties, however, the sport has as always been split – not entirely fairly – between the dreary and the dreamy. It’s not ideal, in short, but it’s football.
