[Swan]

Originally Posted by Ammi

…I can understand that thought process of ‘familiarity’ of watching man admired player through their career and then feeling that they have that experience to commentate on the sport…but that won’t always be the case that a great player would be a great commentator as they’re two different skill requirements…but also, there are many levels because football has always been one of those more male dominated sports …so the players that are ‘more familiar’ are going to be males more than females and it’s about bringing that change as well and as Annie said previously…opening up the game including commentating aspects to it, also…if we stay with a mindset of ‘what we’re familiar with’ in so many things then how does change and equality in opportunities ever come about…

Just wanna point out too, once great players often fail when they become coaches and managers. Lampard, Neville, Keane, Gerrard, Rooney have all failed as managers, just to name a few.

My only gripe (and it's not that deep for me, i can assure you) is that over the past 2 or 3 years women have been rushed into the men's game, commentary, punditry etc purely because they're "box tickers". It's nothing to do with their knowledge of the game, it's because broadcasters want to be seen as PC. Like i said in my previous post, it's quantity, not quality. But again, a lot of the men talk rubbish too so the problem with punditry (if you wanna call it that) is that both men, and women for the most part talk utter rubbish.

There was a bit of a thing in Germany for the CL final last season, a woman was on Commentary, Inter were losing 1-0, and the woman said (when the camera panned to the Inter manager) something like "oh im sure he just wants the match to end now". I mean, that was up there with the silliest things ever said by a commentator, male or female. Twitter pointed out that "why on earth would a manager, when only losing 1-0, with 10 mins to go, in a Champions League Final, would want the match to end?!". She was criticised for the comment and it was branded "sexist". It wasn't sexist to criticise that comment, had a guy said it he would have got the same treatment.

tl;dr - Nothing against women commentating and doing punditry on the men's game, but if they're crap, or say something stupid, they should be open to criticism just like the men are. And trust me, the men get lots of criticism, they always have.