Well this is just great news, isn’t it? It’s great because Colin Murray won’t be on my TV screen anymore and it’s great because of how funny the reason is.
(A gay guy called Alex Hoffman showed me this.)
I had a quick scan of Twitter and various comment sections of articles and it looks like most people seem to think this is a bad thing. There’s an article from the Guardian by a guy called Barney Ronay that everyone keeps spreading like it’s the best thing since sliced bread. Barney mourns Murray’s axing as if it represents everything that is wrong with Match Of The Day and the BBC as a whole and goes off on a massive tangent culminating in this sentence about the pundits on the BBC:
“…who above all seem to speak to an attitude that goes beyond simply television and the BBC, but which often has seemed to pervade the upper end of English football as a whole: the boorishness, the closed shop anti-intellectualism, the sense of incurious minds and of an overly complacent hierarchy.
Got some fancy words there Barney but you seem to have missed the crucial problem here: Colin Murray’s voice is excruciatingly irritating.
That’s all there is to it. The debate about the quality of the punditry isn’t relevant here. The BBC got rid of Colin because he sits there with his cheeky grin and his shit banter and his self-entitlement to give his opinion and most of all his goddamn voice.
☛ More Football: 20 Years Of Ryan Giggs In Merlin Football Stickers
I understand that the quality of the punditry is pretty awful on MOTD, with people like Alan Shearer and Mark Lawrenson reciting cliches for a living, but frankly I don’t really care. No one turns it on to hear whether Lee Dixon reckons your team deserved a penalty or not, and no one is waiting with baited breath to hear Alan Hansen say – with all his years of experience and insight – that, yes, United are probably going to win the title again this year. You can have that discussion with your mates.
You turn it on after a fat zoot to see Mata and Hazard dancing around defenders, Torres missing, United scoring in injury time, Wenger throwing his bottle around, Balotelli getting sent off, Stoke… erm… well, no one wants to see Stoke, but you get my point – the Premier League is the most dramatic and entertaining show in the world. It’s more than enough on its own. We don’t need a load of old men in boring shirts talking about it. I don’t believe in expert analysis. It’s not a complicated game. If you’re a fan, and especially if you play yourself, you know what’s going on. Or you can form your own opinion on what’s going on. Or, at least, form enough of an opinion to go and argue about it at the pub, or abuse some rival fans on the internet. If I was put in charge of MOTD I’d sack ’em all and just have the highlights back to back. Sometimes you’ll be listening to Dion Dublin drone on about Javier Hernandez running into the right spaces and you’ll suddenly become extremely aware that you’re wasting valuable high-ness. It’s a really annoying feeling.
☛ More Football: Kevin Prince Boateng Deals With Racial Abuse, Abandons Game
So yeah, I’m in a good mood now because the other pundits pulled rank and finally did something about Colin Murray’s voice raping my ears every Sunday night. There’s more to the reason Colin Murray rubs me up the wrong way but I’d have to go and listen to him speak to put my finger on it and I’d rather not ruin my evening.
Loads of people seem to hate Alan Hansen but my mates and I think he’s a boss. I know he rarely says anything insightful or interesting, but he has this endearing attitude that says, “I can’t believe I’m getting paid so much to just sit here and chat about football but it’s almost not worth it because of how much I hate everyone here” and he always calls someone up on asking a retarded question, which is always funny. I think it’s partly due to how much he takes the piss out of Colin Murray that makes us like him so much. There’s a brilliant Hansen-Murray banter/bullying moment in this video, and it’s ten times funnier now that it is definitely what happened for realz. 3:13:
(Oh and by the way, Mark Chapman is replacing him. I don’t really have a strong opinion on him but he definitely doesn’t irritate the crap out of me so that’s a start.)
[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8X3swd0rZE’]
And here’s a spot-on MOTD spoof that I’d hope most of you would have seen already but it’s worth making sure:
[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfQarImZ97Y’]
☛ More Pundits Getting Ripped: Chelsea Fan Drops Absolute Bomb On Stan Collymore Live On Radio
Follow @Gav_Rap
