I know, we all thought that the gates of hell would open and the MCG would be dragged on in the second a woman was allowed to tell men something about a game a football, but it seems those fears were unfounded. It turns out, external genitalia is not the only qualification for knowing something about football.
Well done to channel 10 for giving her a shot, and for recognising that football calling is not the sort of thing one is good at overnight. For the moment they appear willing to give her the time and support to improve. I hope that continues.
I personally thought she was good. I like a commentator who is humble enough do to the research and actually knows the names of the players (I am looking at you ABC commentary box calling the Melbourne v Sydney game last week. “Is that Morton or Bate?”* ) and tells you what said players are doing on the field. If she didn’t have Malcolm Blight providing his own brand of staggeringly useless special comments, she might have even had something to work with.
I would prefer a few less newspaper articles which damn the woman with faint praise. Underwood’s has had a pretty fast rise from getting the twilight game call on ABC radio to the hot seat of the Cats v Hawks game on a Saturday afternoon, and I think she is entitled to a little time to adjust. Can we give her more than two weeks on the air before tearing her call to pieces?
Having called two cats games in a row, the fan forums are alight with complaints of bias, but seriously, even the most fabulous and virtuous caller of the game, Gerard Whateley is prone to a little bias, so is Tim Lane and don’t get me started on the rest of the special comments crowd. Still if I called a dees game, we could be down by 70 points and you still wouldn’t know who we were playing against.
There is only so much of the fan forums you can read on this topic before involuntarily tossing your computer out the window, but I would like to draw your attention to this gem, posted by melbournemartin on the bigfooty forum,
"This is the problem. She sucks (apparently, I was at the game instead) but if we say it, then we're racist."
Now that is quality analysis.
* Bate
Morton
Hard to tell apart aren't they?
2 comments:
I reckon she's been great. She's enthusiastic, and fills the gaps with much more understandable points about the game and the players, rather than vomiting catch-phrase driven dribble and whining about how the game is played these days.
I liked her, too, although I really only caught THE LAST SPECTACULAR QUARTER after having already watched it live, so I'm not sure that I have heaps to contribute on the finer details.
She does sound *different*, and as we all know, different is very, very scary to some people - I'm not surprised by the outcry, but I'm pretty sure it'll settle down and in ten years everybody will be stunned that anybody cared.
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