Alan Fraser's review: Impartial? You're taking the Mickey, Ian

By Alan Fraser for MailOnline
Updated: 19:50 EST, 16 August 2009

With Reid and Wright as the studio pundits and an old-fashioned horseshoe desk in the middle of a retro set, it was very much a case of back to basics for the launch of ESPN’s Premier League coverage.

Not that the job of hired analysts — in this case Peter Reid and Ian Wright — is to teach our children good, sorry, well.

All that you can expect is a bit of footballing insight and the requisite impartiality.

Oh dear. ‘I’ve got to go with Arsenal,’ the Arsenal fanatic said when asked for a prediction.

‘I fancy Everton, funnily enough,’ the Everton man declared.

At least Reid referred to his beloved Blues throughout in the third person.

Wright, on the other hand, might just as well have donned a replica shirt, a red-and-white woolly hat and his Gooner boxer shorts for the occasion.

The ‘we’, ‘our’ and ‘us’ tripped off his tongue as if he were still employed by the north London club.

‘We should try and exploit that,’ Wright said of the Joleon Lescott affair.

‘We’re more a top four side than Championship contenders . . . when you get past our first XI . . . Sharvin is still new to us . . .’

And so on and so on.

Whereupon, someone obviously had a word in his shell-like. The personal pronouns disappeared from his vocabulary, the damage already done.

That particular nag had already bolted.

One worries about a return, however, if ESPN insist on hiring partisan pundits specific to each game.

Will we, for example, have Ossie Ardiles taking his seat when a ‘Tottingham’ match is broadcast?

What about the dreaded Alastair Campbell appearing when it is Burnley’s turn?

What price a medium giving viewers the thoughts of the late, great Sir Stanley Matthews when Stoke City make their ESPN debut?

A glass spelling out a message on a ouija board, letter by letter, would have been preferable to Wrighty. 

Everton were doubly represented on Saturday, as it happened, with former player and manager Joe Royle, a sexagenarian these days, providing a somewhat lifeless commentary alongside the highly capable Jon Champion.

Champion is none the worse for being one of those commentators who work hard in advance on their script.

‘A tribal game unified in respect,’ was how he aptly described a wonderfully sustained appreciation for the life of Sir Bobby Robson.

Thoroughly professional Ray Stubbs at the helm represented the kind of safe pair of hands that the new boys needed while Rebecca Lowe proved herself both articulate and fearless in asking the tough questions of both managers.

I liked the fact that Arsene Wenger and David Moyes were required to hold ESPN microphones for their pre-match and postmatch interviews.

Can’t wait to see Fergie doing that.

Of course, it was entirely Donald Duck, pardon the Disney rhyming slang, that the first of ESPN’s 46 scheduled live Premier League games this season should provide wonderful Arsenal attacking play and an amazing seven goals.

There is no substitute in televised football for goals.

Cheer up, Peter Reid.