Worst Take of the Week: Female Commentators vs Cheeky Iraqi Refugees

Welcome to Angus Take House – a weekly column in which I will be pitting two of the wildest takes the world's great thinkers have rustled up against each other. This is your one-stop shop for the meatiest verdicts and saltiest angles on the world's happenings. Go and grab a napkin – these juicy hot takes are fresh from the griddle.

TAKE #1:

What's the story? Oxfam sharing touching images of Iraqi refugees playing football, something they are able to enjoy again free from ISIS control, despite now being displaced.
Reasonable Take: The familiar warm feeling you associate with seeing people play football in the face of adversity.
Interventionist Lasagne: Cheeky buggers.

Look at these photos of some displaced Iraqi children playing football, despite the horrors of their past and the uncertainty of their future. How does that make you feel? Yes, that's right, me too. Disgusting, isn't it? Ungrateful little sods! I'm joking, of course, but Labour MP Graham Jones very much wasn't, as displayed in this biting tweet where he takes either the NGO Oxfam, or the refugee children themselves, to task for not appreciating that if it weren't for Western intervention there would be no football at all!

The obvious badness at the core of this take is that most people agree that the brutal form of jihadism embodied by ISIS was in large part spawned by the US (and UK) invasion of Iraq in the first place. This was a long held logic of most people who opposed the war, of course, who were vindicated by intelligence files released as part of the Chilcot report two years ago. To start bragging that "those kids can only football because the west helped liberate them" is a bit like running someone over and then expecting a bunch of flowers for calling an ambulance.

Yet, there's more than that festering between the lines here, particularly in the loaded phrasing "the Iraqi people with help from the west" – a winking line which somehow patronises both the refugees playing football and the Iraqi people for liberating them. To show some sort of grinning pride over how the UK have "helped them help themselves" is not only in poor taste, but also pretty irrelevant. Unless Tony Blair authorised aid-drops of Mitre footballs and little plastic cones, I’m not sure how "the West" can claim any credit for the scenes depicted in these pictures. Their strength isn't your victory.

More than anything though, Graham, why say it? If I were to suspend belief for a moment and pretend I was an arch-Blairite Labour MP – the sort who actually puts "working class" in his Twitter bio, despite consistently criticising Corbyn's welfare policies as fiscally irresponsible – I still can’t quite comprehend why you’d say this out loud. Even if I was drunk, and I genuinely thought either Oxfam or some refugee children weren’t grateful enough to Daddy Blair, I can’t imagine it getting any further than a belched mumble before I realised: no, I’d better not, that won’t land.

Can you imagine actually having a "the cheek of these displaced children" hot take in the bank in the first place? Let alone alone tweeting it. So often, when writing this column, I find myself asking the same question: why did you say that out loud? In what universe did you say that out loud and it went down well? Please, Graham Jones MP, get in touch. I must know.

TAKE #2:

What's the story? Vicki Sparks became the first female commentator for a live World Cup match last Wednesday.
Reasonable Take: Well, you can't exactly say there are "too many women" in football, can you?
Cumberland Sausage: Look, right, not sexist, but I have to say, if I'm being honest, personal preference, I don’t like shrill over-excited voices.

Look at this, gang: a video featuring Piers Morgan where he’s not the one with the bad take!

Now, this is obviously a great video, but the best thing about it is Jason Cundy trying to make what is a cast-iron, meat-and-two-veg sexist opinion sound, actually, very reasonable. It’s a tactic people employ a lot: they have an objectionable opinion about something, but don’t like being thought of as an objectionable person. So they keep saying things like "that’s just my opinion", or "personal preference" over and over again. Whenever somebody argues back they say, "And that’s fine, that’s what you like, that’s fine," as though it makes them actually a really decent fella.

In this case, Jason is trying to make "women can’t commentate because their voices are all high-pitched and annoying" sound level-headed. And there’s something spellbinding about it. The deadpan, gentle confidence with which he keeps repeating "in the heightened moment of drama" as though it’s the most normal, understandable opinion in the world. And then he reaches the apex of the entire routine, with the absolutely devastation of: "Would you like to listen to Joe Pasquale commentate?" I can’t get enough. All women sound like 90s comedian Joe Pasquale, and sadly this is why they cannot commentate football matches, by Jason Cundy.

Obviously his entire routine falls down when it’s pointed out that plenty of men have higher voices than women, and vice versa, which just sort of leaves him floundering, saying "personal preference" at Piers Morgan like it’s a safe-word he forgot to agree with anyone beforehand. Cundy has since apologised, tweeting: "I want to sincerely apologise for the comments I made on Good Morning Britain. I came away realising just how foolish and out of order they were and how I deserved the backlash I have received."

Sadly, the truth is, this isn’t about women or men. There is no such thing as a good commentator, full stop. Regardless of their gender, they are all trapped in the same routine. Monotonously listing players' names as they ping the ball between them, muttering things like "at least somebody’s enjoying themselves" about people in the crowd wearing funny costumes, and then busting out the odd "THAT WASN’T IN THE SCRIPT" in that strange, repressed shout they do when somebody scores. It’s no life, really.

PRIME CUT: Graham Jones MP wins this week, but that’s just my personal preference.

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