PUNDITRY SHOULD BE GRAMMATICALLY AND ACCURATELY CORRECT

Flux - mutability, transition, unrest, mutation, instability, modification, flow, fluidity, motion. A constant or frequent change or a flowing in of the tide. It is what is. It is all around us. There is indeed a tide in the affairs of men, and it is all around us. One feels adrift on a peninsula.

In response to this state of drift, I have been watching, on and off, various world cup matches.  Inevitably one is also caught up in listening to, and watching, the various pundits and presenters who front the transmissions. Of course one does not have to listen to the pundits as one can just turn the sound down. When watching the games, however, it is nice to have the sound up so as to absorb some of the atmosphere in the various stadium. This does make it more difficult to avoid the match commentators opinions, comments and mangling of the English language. Usually a person’s manner of speaking is of little concern. It does not detract from a person’s individuality or intelligence. The constant repetition of phrases and unstructured words without any sense of tense or grammar is disconcerting and one wonders at the level of education on display. I find it difficult be believe what some people were not taught at school, or whether they were even paying attention at the tome. 

I am not suggesting that footballers are thick, merely inattentive. Indeed some pundit’s speech has improved grammatically over time and they are, as a result, better able to communicate and explain their views about certain situations. I am being snobbish, I know, but I am sure many people feel the same. Grammar does matter and can easily be improved. 

Some of the opinions however are more difficult to accept, particularly when repeated as a means of emphasis of a view. There is an instance during the match between Germany and Paraguay, when the Moroccan referee Jalal Jayed disallowed a possible winning goal by Germany’s Jonathan Tah for a foul on Paraguay goalkeeper, Orlando Gill, by Waldemar Anton. The incident was shown several times from different angles and after close inspection by the referee, he not only disallowed the goal but issued a yellow card to Waldemar Anton. Commentator Alan Shearer was firmly of the view that it was the wrong call. Football is a contact sport, he kept saying, and the offence as seen by him was nothing out of the ordinary, let alone deserving of a yellow card. He was very firm in this view and made his feeling emphatically.  

From my point of view as a spectator, and an ignoramus when out comes to football and its rules, the referee was absolutely correct. I had seen during the game’s several corners, the same Waldemar Anton getting in the goalkeeper’s face, bustling and jostling and physically applying pressure on the Paraguayan defenders, whilst waiting for the cross from the corner. This had also been observed by the referee and he had verbally cautioned Mr Anton, as well as the defenders about the ‘sporting contact’ in the goal mouth. What Waldemar Anton did was no more than a continuation of this contact to deliberately impede  the goalkeeper. Falling down was maybe, I repeat ‘maybe’, Orlando Gill exaggerating the contact, as Mr Shearer commented; but, if one looks at the totality of Mr Anton’s behaviour on the pitch and particularly in the goal mouth, he got no more than he deserved, a yellow card and a disallowed goal. If the ire of the German squad was directed at anyone, it should be at Waldemar Anton and not the referee. 

Whether or not this incident caused the German squad to feel robbed of a goal, and consequently affected there subsequent performance, is questionable. As professionals they should have put the incident behind them and got on with the job. They were certainly the better team so far as I could tell, as they had most of the possession of the football. The game seemed to be mostly played in the Paraguayan half of the field. The Paraguayans defended bravely most of the time and came out on top of the penalties, for which the disallowed goal had nothing to do. If Germany’s loss can be attributed to anything, it was down to poor finishing and stretching the ‘contact’ of a contact sport by Mr ‘Voldemort’ Anton.. He clearly missed out on his magic wand.

In any event, so far as I’m concerned Mr Shearer got it all wrong, although, I might add that, over the years he has been a pundit, his grammar has decidedly improved. 

Whose punditry is ever grammatically correct?