'ITV's Euro 2024 coverage is wiping the floor with the BBC'

Shortly before Gareth Southgate’s men kicked off their most recent attempt to master top class football at Euro 2024, ITV’s main commentator Sam Matterface had some advice for all within the England camp: “Ignore the noise.”

Matterface was referring to the media storm that had engulfed the national team following its stuttering start to Euro 2024, although he stopped short of pointing the finger at that lot on the other side for whipping it up in the first place. At least, I think Matterface’s advice was meant for Harry Kane And His Boys.

Thing is, in almost the very next breath, he introduced his regular partner-in-crime Lee Dixon — so you’ll forgive me for wondering whether he was in fact offering some words of encouragement to the millions of long-suffering ITV viewers instead.

Who knows, he may even have been making a sly reference to ITV’s pitch side pundit Karen Carney.

Prior to kick off, the unfortunate Carney — who is usually one of the more reliable faces among our new breed of pundits — had set social media alight with a shouty performance that suggested the OBE after her name does not stand for 'Outside Broadcast Expert'.

Either that or no-one at ITV had bothered to tell her that you don’t actually have to yell into a microphone for it to work.

I say unfortunate, because Carney’s shouty slip was subsequently held up as all the proof the online mob needed in their quest to banish women like her from The Men’s Game. Nonsense, of course, and Carney would be well advised to ignore the morons.

Still, she can take some solace in the fact that with the knockout rounds to come, she is part of an ITV team that is in red-hot form.

ITV has wiped the floor with the BBC so far, and I’m certainly not unhappy about the news that the commercial network has nabbed the lion’s share of the last-16 matches: ITV has five to the BBC’s three, including the England v Slovakia match on Sunday.

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I know some viewers still hate the ad breaks, but I’d much rather watch some celebrity sellsouls trying to flog me something I’m never going to buy than have to sit through another round of “Here’s what to watch on BBC iPlayer.”

Now all ITV’s heads of sport need to do is what everyone has been urging Gareth Southgate to do: Make some bold selection decisions.

I know football is all about opinions, but can anyone who has ever experienced a Matterface/Dixon commentary box water boarding really deny that England games would be a lot less torture — not to mention a lot more fun — if Clive Tyldesley and Ally McCoist were the first names on the team sheet instead?

I’d also put Andros Townsend ahead of Dixon, by the way. Along with Rachel Corsie on the BBC, Townsend has been a major candidate for breakout star of the tournament.

Tyldesley and McCoist are not just the best on ITV either. No one on the BBC can hold a candle to them, although I must admit I did enjoy Jonathan Pearce over pronouncing the Italian players’ names the other night, like your dad reading out the menu at Bella Pasta.

If you are foolish enough to even attempt to dispute the Tyldesley and McCoist supremacy, I would invite you to watch back their coverage of Georgia versus Portugal.

If, as rumoured, this is to be Tyldesley's final tournament behind the mic, then he was going out with a bang even before he dropped the line of the tournament thus far, when the referee was sent to the VAR screen to take another look at a potential penalty for Georgia.

“Once he makes the TV sign you may as well put the cap on it,” Tyldesley demurred. “He's not being sent over there to watch Coronation Street.” (Bonus point there for trolling soap fans who are livid about their fix being moved for the football AGAIN!)

As for McCoist, when the heavens opened towards the end of the match it wasn’t so much the fact that he actually went there with the “they’re used to a rainy night in Georgia” gag that sealed it for me. It was the half a second delay before he whispered, with genuine shame, “Apologies.”

In a nutshell, Tyldesley and McCoist are clearly having fun and it feels like they fully appreciate that they are lucky to be there and wish we were there too. With Matterface and Dixon you get the sense they’d rather be anywhere else with anyone else.

Luckily, they are the only weak link in ITV’s team. A team that has become even stronger with the inspired decision to place No Nonsense Aussie Ange Postecoglou next to Roy Keane back in the studio.

Postecoglou immediately realised that the way to get the best out of Keano Bear is to gently poke it, a tactic that the canny studio director had already employed at the very start of the tournament when they “accidentally” had Keane standing behind a desk that made it look like he was wearing colourful pantaloons down below.

ITV’s team has succeeded in smoothly transferring the polished banter of Gary Neville’s Overlap podcast monster into the studio.

By contrast, podcast magnate Gary Lineker appears irritated by the fact that BBC constraints dictate that he cannot do the same. Perhaps that’s why the BBC’s coverage has been bordering on the moribund at times.

And perhaps that’s why Lineker went too far with his crude criticism of England on his The Rest Is Football podcast. He could never come out and call them “s***” on the BBC — and rightly so.

Maybe his outburst was a simple case of “naughty schoolboy pushing the boundaries”. Likewise with him appearing to promote pieces from his own 'Off-Duty Cops On A Golf Day' range from Next while hosting England v Serbia on BBC One.

Or maybe there’s more to it than that. Maybe Clive Tydesley isn’t the only big name who’s considering bowing out after this tournament?

England vs Slovakia will air on ITV at 5pm on Sunday, 30 June.