Sofa so good for new pundit Hartson

The most impressive performance of this weekend? No, not Scott Parker at Upton Park; nor Ben Foster at Wembley; and certainly not Mark Clattenburg’s lenient interpretation of what constitutes violent conduct - apparently it’s not deliberately smashing your forearm into someone’s face. No, the best performance of the weekend was on the Match of the Day 2 sofa, and it came from John Hartson.

Hartson during his Celtic days

Hartson has been increasing his appearances in front of the cameras following his retirement from the game and successful fight against cancer, and on Sunday night he joined Mark Bright on the sofa as part of what many might have thought a weak team of pundits. And yet, Hartson’s eloquent but passionate performance put many seasoned pundits - Bright included - to shame.

He had that rare quality in a football pundit of being able to combine genuine views with decipherable delivery. As a result he came across as someone who not only had something to say, but could actually say it in a way that people at home could understand. Bright must have been marvelling at Big John’s technique; feeling his own combination of idiocy and unintelligible stuttering had suddenly become woefully inadequate.

Hartson was measured throughout, yet his knowledge of the game always shone through. Whilst analysing the West Ham v Liverpool game, he picked out not the standard issue inspirational performance from Scott Parker, or the surprisingly poor display from Steven Gerrard, but the tireless running and defending from the front of Demba Ba and Frederick Picquionne. It showed an eye for detail that most newer pundits - many of whom are given their debuts on the Match of the Day 2 sofa - don’t possess either initially or ever at all.

It remains to be seen whether Hartson earns a permanent place on the Saturday night Match of the Day line-up, or in the newly non-sexist studio of Sky. What will hold him back if he doesn’t will be the fact that most of his career was spent away from England’s top four: that his delivery is excellent, he is passionate about the game without talking in clichés and isn’t afraid to offer an alternative opinion to the mainstream will matter not unfortunately. Pat Nevin suffers the same fate, despite being far better in the studio than Shearer, Hoddle, Redknapp and many others.

Hartson is someone for whom it’s difficult not to have a huge amount of respect for. He has battled cancer bravely and won, and has since continued to talk freely about his devastating experiences to raise awareness about the disease. I’ve heard interviews with him that were sometimes difficult for the listener given the frankness of their content; he pulled no punches and left audiences in no doubt of either the size of the challenge he faced or the pain he went through.

It’s changed my opinion of him: during his career and especially his time at West Ham, I felt there was a top class player just waiting to get out, only for a lack of motivation to hold him back. Too often he would score a great goal and disappear from games having felt his work was done; once ahead of an FA Cup tie against his beloved Swansea, he told the press that he hoped a chance didn’t fall to him as he didn’t want to score against his boyhood heroes. He also spent the best years of his career in the SPL with Celtic, when maybe with a little more application he could have been scoring hatfuls in England’s top four. 

But that’s not what Hartson wanted from life. He managed to play a very good level of football whilst still enjoying himself off the pitch, and his career saw him become one of the last members of Arsenal’s famed drinking club, whilst still managing to play Champions League football with Celtic. 

I remember reading an interview with Hartson where he spoke of Dennis Bergkamp’s shock at Arsenal’s drinking culture in the mid-90s before Arsene Wenger came along. Bergkamp was apparently bemused as to why someone would want to spend all day on Sunday in the pub with a copy of the News of the World - as Hartson was known to do at the time and many of you probably did yesterday.

Rather than express regret that he had wasted his talent or draw on hindsight to speculate what he might have achieved with more application, Hartson still maintained he loved his Sundays at the pub and wouldn’t have changed a thing. 

This attitude won’t gain praise from conditionists or even today’s press, but as fans, there is something in this that we should applaud. It shows that Hartson never once forgot his roots and remained a fan throughout his career, and may even go some way to explaining his effectiveness as a pundit. 

Given that he so nearly lost his life, the fact that Hartson got exactly what he wanted out of the game, not what others expected of him, should earn him praise and not criticism. Maybe we were wrong and there is more to life than football?