Punditry is a peculiar profession.
On the one hand it is home to some of the brightest and most thought-provoking football minds around such as Jamie Carragher, Gary Neville and Irishman Richie Sadlier. Go back a few years and you’ll also find that it was television punditry which helped Jurgen Klopp deliver his revolutionary gegenpressing agenda to the masses in Germany.
With the good comes the bad, however, and boy howdy is there no shortage of diabolical punditry out there too. I won’t name any specific people, but you know the type.
Out of work managers who would much rather gush about passion and nationality than tactics and technical prowess, as well as the former pros whose sole contribution to the conversation is once having shared a pitch with very good footballers.
This is bad, but it’s not the worst aspect of modern punditry, far from it actually. That accolade is reserved for a very special form of punditry indeed, one which is extremely prevalent in today’s world.
He'd certainly come in handy right about now https://t.co/u7Gzm4C1bK
— FootballJOE (@FootballJOE) January 8, 2018
The type of punditry I speak about, dear friends, is the passing of judgement without ever seeing a footballer play.
We see it all the time on weekend shows sponsored by shaving products, where the guffawing panelists compete against each other to see who can utter the most ignorant statement about a player they’ve only just found out existed.
I speak about this type of punditry today because of statements made by Danny Murphy on Sky Sports’ The Debate last night, which were subsequently quoted by Football 365.
On the show, the former Liverpool player expressed doubt at RB Leipzig midfielder Naby Keita’s ability to improve the Reds midfield.
Here are the exact quotes, you might want to sit down for this:
“I’m not sure (about Naby Keita), from what I’ve seen. Subconsciously you can look like you’ve downed tools when you’re protecting yourself a little bit, I wouldn’t judge him on that. I don’t know him well enough to say that.
“What I would say is he’s obviously very athletic, got a lot of qualities – a bit like Jordan Henderson has. Professional, good athlete, does his job really, really well.
“But he isn’t creative enough if you want to challenge for the title and the Champions League. Someone like Gerrard, Souness, Alonso, Mascherano – these type of players.”
Okay, so, where do we start? Firstly, let’s go to Murphy’s suggestion that Keita has downed tools, shall we? Looking at Keita’s statistics for the season, you might think he has a point. He has two goals and one assist in 12 Bundesliga starts, and six goals and one assist in 21 starts in all competitions.
This isn’t amazing, sure, but that is to negate the form that RB Leipzig themselves are in. Yes, they sit two points shy of second place in Germany, but this is a side widely perceived to have been pretty knackered prior to the winter break, with many observers suggesting that their intense style of football has caught up with them.
It is also a team which has just played its inaugural Champion League campaign, so lower performance levels are surely not unusual.
“Very athletic….”
Next up, we go to Murphy’s second line. “Very athletic” is a phrase used by many pundits to described a very specific type of player, the likes of Paul Pogba, Romelu Lukaku and now Keita. Players who are so often praised purely for their physicality than for their technical prowess.
In place of “very athletic” you will also likely see the words “powerful”, “pacey” and “raw” used.
The Coutinho transfer saga summed up… pic.twitter.com/HHLt7epxHP
— FootballJOE (@FootballJOE) January 6, 2018
Comparing Keita to Henderson though is extremely odd. Keita is a dynamo in midfield, weaving in and out of tackles with the sort of technical ability that the former Sunderland man could only dream of.
Henderson is a very decent player, but he is a different player to Keita and to compare the two illustrates a simple lack of knowledge.
Lastly, and most deliciously of all, is Murphy’s insinuation that Keita – a player who scored eight and assisted seven in the Bundesliga last season – is not creative enough.
The coup de grace
This is ludicrous enough, but Murphy then pulls out his coup de grace and quite possibly the greatest piece of sporting satire the world has ever seen: he says that Liverpool need more creative players like Javier Mascherano.
Remember Javier Mascherano? That swashbuckling centre-midfielder who skipped past tackles, dummying and shimmying his way through embarrassed defences while pitching in with ten goals a season? No, of course you don’t, because that Javier Mascherano doesn’t exist.
Here Murphy betrays his lack of knowledge by not only claiming that Keita isn’t a creative player but by inventing attributes for a player who never possessed them, purely to prove his misguided point.
Herein lies the problem with certain sections of modern punditry. Some pundits would rather embark on a long-winded and utterly fabricated account of a footballer, rewriting history as they go so as to beef up the argument, rather than simply admit that they’ve watched very little of the player in question and, as such, cannot in all good conscience offer a clear assessment of his abilities.
Unfortunately in football, as in much of life these days, it appears more acceptable to say something unbelievably uninformed and stupid, than to simply admit you don’t have all the facts.
When knowing what you’re talking about is essentially the brunt of your job, that’s inexcusable.
