LICENCE TO CHILL

Holed up in a Greater Manchester studio for four weeks, the BBC’s pundits leant into the relaxed mood of their late-night get-togethers

By CAMERON CARTER Illustration GARY NEILL

Everything is here, all at once. Bon Jovi hydration breaks, vicious reverse passes by diminutive playmakers, Jay-Z, the Canadian underlap, touchline indiscipline of the Paraguayan unused substitutes and Kelly Somers’ open questions. According to its website, the BBC was “supercharging how fans experience the tournament” by offering targeted multi-platform content, but it also used the World Cup to demonstrate a fiscal neediness, its presenting teams grounded until the semi-finals in a Salford studio and a licence fee QR code on the screen pointed out by their commentators at the start of each second half, in a bid to counter falling sales.

On one multi-platform, Somers and Sami Mokbel brought us England Camp Debrief from a patch of grass outside the England team’s media centre. This appeared to be a low-budget independent film about a man and a woman who believed that anything they heard might be important. Mokbel described hearing Jordan Henderson describing Jude Bellingham some time previously and both gave their initial impressions of the building itself. Heart-rending stuff.

The presentation was largely painless. With their game on June 13, the BBC had first opportunity to be Brazil-fuckers and Kelly Cates’ “Brazil are about to get the World Cup underway” hurtfully ignored the previous five games and three opening ceremonies. After this, though, her stewardship was typically to the point and laced with humour, channelling Des Lynam’s bedside manner for the Scotland v Haiti match at 2 am: “Still awake? Just waking up? But you couldn’t miss it could you. It’s been a while.”

Mark Chapman and Gabby Logan maintained the balance of natural conversation and professionalism, like workers recently promoted to management who will allow controlled periods of badinage but draw the line at flip-flops and saloon bar language. The pundits had varying degrees of impact. There was a not unpleasant fermenting tension whenever it seemed Olivier Giroud might not find the right word to finish a sentence. Micah Richards was probably necessary, given that many of the games took place in the vaporous hours before dawn, but it might be nice if he treated punditry more like work, like Stephen Warnock and Theo Walcott do, both diligently relevant, one eye on their Annual Performance Review. Joe Hart doesn’t so much answer questions as repel them. He has spent most of his life commanding a small but clearly defined area and this is how he approached his studio shifts, perfecting the art of the unanswerable opinion through the prefacing of “Trust me”. Thomas Hitzlsperger was insanely personable. Steph Houghton gave a steady performance but had the presence of a cranefly.

Glowed-up Wayne Rooney was a revelation. Slim, shiny, shaven, eyes a dazzling pre-school blue, he appeared to be speaking from inside The Wizard of Oz while everyone else was in The Seventh Seal. Not a natural, or taught, communicator, evidenced by the fact that his flawed breath control made him occasionally sound like a child that has just run out of a cold sea, but Rooney was honest, insightful, funny.

As always, the famously impartial BBC devoted hours of word and film to the England team. On the night of England’s opening game against Croatia, with Portugal v DR Congo swiftly dealt with, there was time for 25 minutes of dissection of Jude Bellingham, followed by a few seconds on how old Luka Modric is. The build-up to the Argentina semi-final included Benedict Cumberbatch murmuring us an inspirational prose-poem. The BBC will be relieved that England’s failure to reach the final spared them the expense of hiring Sir Ian McKellen to read the lyrics of Wonderwall by a guttering candle.

While England’s progress was debated gravely and at length, the coverage of Scotland boiled down to memories of past heroic failures and how amusing the fans are. At one point Logan asked Theo Walcott to discuss their joie de vivre , which is a bit unfair because Walcott has clearly had joy trained out of him at the age of ten. Among the commentators, Liam McLeod spent Scotland games at the strangulated pitch of someone watching a toddler on a tricycle cross a dual carriageway, but he relaxed in other games, real pleasure in the spectacle coming through in his commentary with James McFadden on Uruguay v Cape Verde. When Telmo Arcanjo performed a Cruyff turn in his own half and ran 70 yards until fouled, McLeod said: “James is laughing, to my right here, and little wonder…” A wonderful moment of unguarded football, unguarded comment, in a tournament systematised, marketed and monetised to a greater degree than ever before. From the resulting free-kick, McLeod’s interruption of his description of the defensive set-up with “Oh my goodness!” as Kevin Pina’s shot thumped into the net was a nice throwback to how commentary used to be. Guy Mowbray, on the other hand, touch-squirted “Cry ‘God for Harry, England and St George’!” when England scraped past DR Congo in the round of 32 and had nowhere to go after that. Producers sometimes get lucky with moments of artistic juxtaposition, as when Danny Murphy discussed Ivory Coast’s attack ing limitations at half time in front of a big screen of the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders punctiliously demonstrating what joie de vivre would look like if Americans had invented it. As all long tournaments do, this one had its own reliable punctuation points: shots of Gianni Infantino in the box seat at every game, looking like a supervillain created by Gerry Anderson, maddened into psychopathy by exposure to thousands of possession- keeping square balls. There was a motif of slow-motion shots of players whinnying with exasperation at a missed chance. But old favourites, like cloth-brained shorthand for foreign nations, are still with us; Australia v Egypt foreshadowed musically by Land Down Under , with Egypt, the country that introduced the world to writing, timekeeping and metallurgy, culturally encapsulated by Walk Like An Egyptian and Night Boat To Cairo .

Joe Hart doesn’t so much answer questions as repel them – he has spent most of his life commanding a small but clearly defined area and this is how he approached his studio shifts

With the money saved on hotels and travel, the BBC gave us experts. Darren Cann, falsetto referee expert, had about a 50 per cent success rate on predicting the decision his colleagues on the pitch would arrive at. When France were denied a penalty against Senegal, Cann told us that his phone had lit up with people disagreeing with the decision. Going by Cann’s brief studio time, his phone wouldn’t light up if you lay it on a bed of fine-grade steel wool and put a match to it. Jim Dale, Senior Meteorologist, was summoned to give advice on coping with hot weather. For Mexico v England, we were offered “altitude expert” Nick Hart, a Senior Performance Analyst. There was a suspicion that the BBC might have saved a bit of money here, as a Junior Performance Analyst could probably have told us that thin air reduces oxygen availability, but this seems ungrateful, as if the BBC were a parent in reduced circumstances, giving us a bath towel for Christmas and us not thanking them nicely.

Ultimately, the people who seemed most pleased with the BBC’s coverage were the pundits themselves (Micah Richards – “Joe summed it up perfectly”; Joe Hart – “Wayne described it brilliantly”; Micah Richards – “Wayne nailed it brilliantly”), so we should really be pleased for them. They did a good job, they think. And, you know, they’re the experts.