Auntie Beeb wins the armchair war

Avid watchers of Match of the Day 2 would have noticed a new addition to the BBC’s team of expert panellists on Sunday. Yes, Steve McLaren’s old nemesis Slaven Bilic took his place next to Alan Hansen on the sofa – ready to cast his eye over the weekend’s action and presumably the Premier League’s sizable number of Croat stars.

It must be said that Slaven didn’t look entirely comfortable. For a start, he was wearing a suit. Across the world and indeed here in the UK on any other TV network, a suit and tie is standard issue uniform for football punditry duty. However, the BBC has in recent years broken ranks and adopted a more leisurely – revolutionary if you like – attitude to dress codes. Lee Dixon has even been seen sporting a cardigan this season.

On Sunday, Hansen was adorned in an open collar shirt, whilst the show’s host - Adrian Chiles - has long since given up any attempt to look remotely formal and is now seemingly even refusing to shave. Chiles’ facial hair is a curious case. I may be mistaken but I’ve read no reports of him growing it for charity, or of it being for some sort of bet. Maybe it’s a last ditch attempt to shepherd Christine Bleakley’s lips away from the pudgy cheeks of Frank Lampard, and towards his own fur-clad face?

Anyway, back to the uncomfortable Slaven Bilic. With his head and shoulders pointed in the direction of the floor and his tie loosened like a rebellious schoolboy, this was a far less charismatic Slaven to the one we remember dancing on the Wembley turf as Steve McLaren struggled to hold his oversized umbrella. He provided some fairly routine analysis, but nothing that suggests he will soon be joining the BBC’s elite team of pundits; Hansen, Lawrenson and Shearer.

Ah the holy trinity of the two Alans and the man now universally known as “Lawro”. Try as Sky and ITV might, they cannot compete with these heavyweights of the footballing sofa. Hansen is the undisputable king: eruditely tearing into defences and ruining the confidence of full-backs up and down the country on a weekly basis. Not a streak of grey tarnishes his jet black side-parting and despite not exactly appearing as though he’s a regular on Saville Row, he at least avoids the kind of fashion disasters that the other Alan, Lawro and practically every other football pundit on the planet seem to experience.

Shearer’s appeal is less obvious. At first he seems dull and of little tactical knowhow, but over time you learn he is at his best when wallowing in Northern misery and talking of troubled times – particularly if he has a pen in his hand that he can randomly jab in the direction of Gary Lineker to emphasise his point.

Lawro is another who I got horribly wrong during his early sofa work. I had him down as unnecessarily miserable and far too susceptible to an outrageously awful shirt to be taken seriously as a pundit. But as the years have gone by and his moustache has withered and died, I’ve grown to admire Lawro.

As a co-commentator, his combination of dry wit and almost camp delivery is the perfect compliment to John Motson’s ever chaotic commentary. On the sofa, he can always be relied upon for an anti-establishment view, and a huge dollop of cynicism. He’s at his best on Saturday afternoons – toying with Manish and the other reserve team presenters that get lumbered with presenting Football Focus.

So despite their ever dwindling rights to live games, the BBC still reigns supreme when it comes to football coverage. Sky may be the biggest and baddest of the pretenders, but their Pravda-like commitment to ensuring everything in the garden of English football appears perfectly rosy – however desperately dull a game might be – is infuriating.

Whereas Hansen and the gang can often be heard bemoaning the lack of quality in a game, Richard Keys would describe the very same match as “an intriguing tactical battle” - probably over the course of a post-match analysis slot of no less than three hours. Should Jamie Redknapp ever be so foolish to dare that a game has been anything less than riotously entertaining, the fingers on one of Keys’ hairy hands will discretely form a threatening fist and Jamie will know he has overstepped the mark.

Come June when the world cup kicks off, we will all be taking very long lunch breaks at work to sneak a peak of group games involving teams we have no interest in. After a week of the tournament, we will know the names of the entire Algerian squad and be well informed enough to be disagreeing with the New Zealand manager’s team selection.

We’ll be drawn towards the kind of games that are usually only screened on ancient televisions in kebab shops at 4 am. We’ll see some wonderful goals, and unearth some new world stars. Unfortunately, by the law of averages, we’ll also see some of the worst games of football in living memory.

And when those games occur, I for one am glad that the two Alans and Lawro will be there – albeit hopefully without Mark Bright squeezed on to the edge of the sofa – to tell me exactly how God awful the game is and why the Honduras left back should never play football again. Thankfully, it will be August before we see Keys’ hands or Jamie’s skinny ties again.