Keys v Redknapp: Fight Fight Fight

We need to talk about Richard.

Whether somebody had stolen his favourite pair of hand-hair curling tongs or whether he has been instructed to be more confrontational (as we suspect), the Sky anchorman gave Jamie Redknapp an absolutely torrid time up in the gantry as they anchored England's clash with Switzerland on Tuesday night.

Richard's style has traditionally been that of the humble mortal given a chance to pick up some insights from the great and the good, like a golf-mad 14-handicapper who has won a charity auction to be paired with Sam Torrance for a round.

Years of nodding admiringly as your Andys and your Glenns explained the mysteries of 'hitting the ball first time and there it was in the back of the net' fell away in a trice as he took poor Top Top to task for England's World Cup, Fabio Capello's English, the national game's tactical autism and, had we not cut to commercial, surely the budget deficit too. Top Top initially flapped and floundered like John Terry facing a nippy German forward, but came back at Richard well, and the pair were soon in the middle of a good old-fashioned ding-dong.

Highlights included Jamie saying - not unreasonably, given that it was an away game against the second-best team in the group in terrible weather - that "he would take a draw". Richard looked like he might attack him physically. "But these 4,000 England fans have come to see an England win," whined Richard, adding that "we should be rolling these over".

"Do you want some then? Well do you?!" we half expected him to say while tearing off his shirt adding, "you and me outside on the cobbles, now!" But we may have read too much Joe Orton.

Jamie, to his credit, delivered to Richard not the blows around the head and neck that were his due, but instead a reasonably cogent counter-argument that could be crystallised into "er, we are not all that good". It was water off a duck's back to this new, argumentative Richard, though, who, after the final whistle, crowed "well, I'll take that".

On the subject of Fabio's ability to communicate, Richard was similarly arsey, demanding to know why Capello's English has not improved during his tenure. Jamie, again, played the sensible short pass: it doesn't matter how good his English is, it's about the results and, besides, what English manager would you have instead?

"Harry. Hodgson. Hoddle. Shearer. Allardyce," said Richard, in one of the funniest moments we have seen on TV in a while. Jamie tore that down with admirable efficiency. We found ourselves warming to JR; a sensation which left us feeling dirty.

Added to Fabio's English, native managers and beating minnows were further old chestnuts about 4-4-2, Gerrard's best position and England's number one that will be familiar to anyone who has listened to an ill-informed In-ger-lund fan bang on in the pub over the last few years. We are almost positive that Richard is smarter than this and have a very strong hunch that orders have come down from on high to make the England punditry more aggressive and less reverential, perhaps also to make Jamie seem more impartial. Given the mood of the nation towards the national side, this is an entirely sensible editorial decision. What we would really like to see is Richard trying a similarly argumentative, stroppy approach with, say, Souness, especially if Graeme was wearing football boots and in a stamping mood.

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Last Friday, ITV had their one of the pair of games. How crazy, incidentally, that the national broadcaster had neither. Anyway, where Sky's Keys would go for an irritable, "just what the hell is going on?" vibe, ITV's anchor, Adrian Chiles, reflects a different sort of England fan mood: that total disaster is always about to strike.

Adrian was accompanied by Gareth Southgate, Andy Townsend and Danny Murphy (who we like: cool and capable of expressing himself) although we feel that three pundits plus a presenter is too many for a show with ad breaks, especially when one is Andy.

Chiles' modus operandi is basically lugubrious fretting, fearing the worst and hardly able to believe anything good might happen. "We're worried," he says as they go to a pre-game ad break.

This forms a stark contrast to Clive Tyldesley's commentary, which is resolutely upbeat and full of pro-England positivity regardless of what is happening. This means he starts every game by vastly over-stating what England players are doing on the pitch.

By way of illustration, Rooney had a patchy first half, playing a good ball for Cole for the first goal but also losing possession frequently and misplacing passes.

Clive ignored these negatives and opted instead to tell us that Rooney was "setting the tone". After 22 minutes Rooney quite horribly failed to control a ball and Tyldesley called it "his first mistake" when it was anything but. It also meant that in the second half, when Rooney played really well, Tyldesley's rhetoric had nowhere to go, having been ramped up to undeserved heights in the first.

We also found the praise lavished on Joe Hart over the top. We like Hart a lot and he played well but somehow he's now England's keeper "for the next ten years" on the basis of one good showing, a decent start to the season and smiling once on saving Glen Johnson's hapless attempt at defence. This is a classic case study in how players get over-rated and then put under pressure. You could feel faces blushing when he made a couple of mistakes in the Swiss game, as though undying love had been declared too early in the relationship.

ITV's commentary team pay too little attention to tactics and are far too obsessed with making any England player who doesn't fall over his own feet into a footballing ballet dancer.

There was a constant playing to the gallery with an anti-Capello vibe that we disliked, such as selectively showing him passive on the bench when goals were scored, with Chiles imploring him to display some emotion. However, other shots of Capello showed him screaming in frustration - a clear display of emotion - but they went without comment.

However, kudos to them for Gabriel Clarke's Capello interview, in which the Italian said he's always been like this on the bench, even in the Madrid 4-4 draw with Barcelona. ITV dug out the footage and thus proved he's not indifferent only to goals scored by England.

ITV has improved its football coverage since the dark days of Steve Ryder. We like Gareth and Danny but the commentary team in both content and style fails to deliver and actually frustrates and annoys the hell out of us. With Chiles' Everyman Eeyore and Clive's cheerleading, they can vex from two different angles. If Sky genuinely do pursue a less chummy, less knee-grabbing style of punditry, it'll be very interesting to see how the other two channels react.

John Nicholson and Alan Tyers

Johnny has got a new book out: We Ate All The Pies: How Football Swallowed Britain Whole. Read all about it here.

And buy it here.

Alan's new book is about cricket, so if that's your sort of thing, it is called W.G. Gace Ate My Pedalo, it comes out on October 1st and you can pre-order it here.