effortlessly cool

Toady I would like to pay tribute to a true national treasure, the one and only James Richardson. For old timers like myself and football mad archivists Mr. Richardson will forever hold a place in our hearts as the man who so casually eased the average British and Irish footie fan into the continental game with Channel Four’s seminal Football Italia.

Leafing through the Italian sports pages and sipping on an espresso with the laid back heir of an off duty James Bond, Richardson was so effortlessly cool that it seldom mattered that Serie A is an essentially slow and defensive league. Quite the opposite in fact. I would dutifully tune in every weekend to be regaled with tales of bitter regional rivalries and footage of strutting, smouldering European players with nicknames like ‘the silver fox’ and ‘the white feather’. It all seemed so glamorous and exciting. Richardson was the perfect host, the quintessential cosmopolitan gentleman until the shows end in 2002.

Going on to host similar programmes on British Eurosport and Bravo Richardson carved out a further niche for himself on Setanta’s Sporting Matters alongside Rebecca Lowe. But it is on The Guardian newspaper’s Football Weekly pod cast that he has truly come into his own. His witty, likeable and self deprecating personality turns Football Weekly into a must-listen appointment every Monday and Thursday, smoothly acting as ringleader to a studio full of jaded sports writing hacks. His star presence was exemplified last year when he was replaced for a few shows by RTE pundit Ken Early. Despite Early’s charm, football know how and undoubted ability to carry off this type of show, without the presence of Richardson Football Weekly felt strangely flat and rudderless.

Beloved to his fans, Richardson aka AC Jimbo exposes the likes of Gary Lineker and Steve Ryder as the humourless company men they really are. I for one cannot bare the tone of Match of the Day, with Lineker especially talking about the basically frivolous sport of football as if he is delivering the eulogy at a relatives funeral. In Richardson’s hands the beautiful game is a noble, ridiculous and intellectually engaging business more than worthy of high brow discussion, and far from the partisan rhetoric spouting nonsense favoured by the tabloid back pages and halfwits like Ian Wright and Jamie Redknapp.

Worth a special mention is Richardson’s double act on Football weekly with Irish sports writer Barry Glendenning. Glendenning professes to favour the Irish sport of hurling to soccer, taking a caustic disregard for the world of football and an outward contempt for the professionals and fans who fuel the modern game. Together Richardson and Glendenning make a perfect pairing, often wilfully spiralling off into discussions on topics like early 1990’s indie bands, who they would ’go gay’ for, and how best to poach an egg. I for one could never imagine Alan Hansen launching into a long anecdote about getting pissed with former Arsenal player Ray Parlour, or the virtues of ‘sumptuous gay Euro disco’.

This is what makes Richardson such a brilliant broadcaster. Listening to a group of blokes talk about football is bloody boring, yet Richardson elevates it beyond the testosterone fuelled tedium no doubt experienced in pubs and football grounds throughout the world on a daily basis. And for that alone Mr. Richardson, we salute you.