Filed under: Media, FA Cup, Football
The problem with the FA Cup in modern times is, there's too many people starting columns with phrases like "the problem with the FA Cup in modern times is". Truth be told, the old pot might not be in the greatest nick any more, but it's not half bad, and it's all we've got. (Note for Birmingham City fans: the FA Cup is not all we've got.)But there is nonetheless a little something missing. Watching the games on ITV and ESPN last weekend, it was difficult to put one's finger on exactly what's not right. The football itself was pretty good: a genuinely rip-roaring tie between Birmingham and Bolton, an old-fashioned dogged battle between Stoke and West Ham, a four-minute cameo of psychotic madness by Paul Scholes and the chance to rubberneck at the slow-motion car-crash involving Arsene's Aesthetes - just stick your foot through it, for the love of God - and 90 minutes of rip-roaring entertainment involving Manchester Cit... well, OK, but the point stands.
So was it the coverage itself? Well, yes, and no. If we're making comparisons with the FA Cup's glorious past, then neither broadcaster is doing much different, or much wrong. ESPN, despite their penchant for making Ray Stubbs and his pundits graze the pitch before kickoff, on the whole keep things refreshingly old-school: there's little of the whoosh and wallop you get on Sky or the BBC, no overly intrusive on-screen graphics, simple transitions between the live action and replays, reasonably understated commentary, simple Q&A chat at half- and full-time without too many bangs and whistles. ITV, meanwhile, is also keeping it 1970s: their coverage was awful then, and it's an egregious disgrace now. At least they haven't cut away to adverts when goals have flown in for a good eight months now, which for them is staunch work.
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No, all that's missing, in fact, is a decent theme tune. The Premier League, and before it the First Division, was always better on the BBC. Not just because their presentation used to be so much better - Jimmy Hill, Des Lynam, David Coleman, John Motson and Barry Davies trumped Elton Welsby and Brian Moore any day of the week - but also because Barry Stoller's theme tune demands you get in from the kitchen and concentrate, because the games are about to start, much in the same way Noddy Holder rings in the Xmas holiday period. "IT'S FOOOOOT-BAAAAALLLLL." The original 1970 version has a trumpet solo in the middle, incidentally, which is the closest a BBC theme has ever come to free jazz. You can't knock it. And neither can the BBC ruin it, no matter how many lumpen sound effects they employ over it these days. Stop meddling, will you, for God's sake.
Meanwhile it's no coincidence that the modern cup competition with the biggest reputation - the Uefa Champions League - has thundering theme music, a tweaked version of Zadok the Priest. You can't get a higher profile theme-tune composer than Handel; not even the great Ronnie Hazlehurst, of Some Mothers Do Ave Em fame, comes close. Just like the Match of the Day theme, the Champions League effort evokes a Pavlovian response in the viewer. "Die Meister! Die Besten! Les grandes Équipes! The Champ-ions!" Come on, admit it, your appetite is so whetted you could even sit through 90 minutes of Chelsea versus Copenhagen right now.
So ITV really need to up their game here. In the last couple of years, they've served up one of those sepia-tinted caterwauls usually reserved for the rugby world cup - Abide with Me works as a pre-match hymn but not as a call-to-arms theme tune; don't ask me why, I don't write the rules - and a piece of corporate indie rock by corporate indie chancers The Enemy. "Be somebody!" shriek the corporate indie rock chancers, earnestly. If you want to win the FA Cup, presumably. Did the likes of Matt Busby and John Lennon work their fingers to the bone only for it to end up like this?
It's not good enough, frankly. But there are options. ITV's treatment of football may have always been risibly awful, but credit where it's due: some of their theme tunes have been corkers. Commissioned in the days before committees and focus groups, presumably by a balding chain-smoking shambles sitting in his dingy LWT office waiting for the lunchtime trip to the Dog & Depression, any of their retro numbers would suffice.
This one, written by the bloke who played moog synthesizer on David Essex's Rock On, conjures up images of Ricky Villa dancing through the Manchester City defence, or balls rearing up uncontrollably off QPR's plastic pitch. That'd do. Or how about this beauty, a nice pompous blast of brass to grab your attention, then breaking down into something much looser to get the juices flowing?
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Source: http://www.fanhouse.co.uk/2011/03/17/media-itv-espn-bbc-fa-cup-coverage-scott-murray/
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