All you people that are crying about the different pundits and commentators and I realy dont get why. Most of them if not all of them have played, managed or both so clearly they no more about football than any of you. If you dont like it, try the mute button on your TV remote.
Let's take a simple example - marking at corners.
Andy Gray and a lot of his fellow players grew up with one way to do that which is of course man-marking. Whenever a goal is scored from a corner and the team is man-marking (which is actually quite rare now as most top flight teams use either pure zonal or a blend of zonal/man-marking), nothing is said. There's another way used by a lot of teams which is a zonal marking, where players mark 'space'. Over the past five years the teams with the best defensive records from corners have all used this method (Liverpool, Chelsea and Aston Villa) but whenever the concede a goal the former players point to zonal marking being the problem. The idiocy is compounded when they whitter about players not being assigned on the posts, which is of course part of a zonal defence...
Few of them have done the research prior to the match to highlight, say, the effectiveness of having tall players upon defending set pieces (classic example - for three seasons Liverpool were the best at defending from corners, but as the average height of the team started to come down, so they were more vulnerable from set pieces).
Being born in a stable doesn't make you a horse, and a career in the professional game doesn't automatically grant you the intelligence to analyse the game. People born and bred under 4-4-2, kick-and-rush who have no desire to see anything 'furrin' 'corrupt' the English game really do a disservice when trying to explain what you see on the pitch.
Negative football of Benitez is exactly the same thing as the positive football of Ancelotti as they are both followers of Michels' and Sacchi's thinking on how the game should be played, the inability of most pundits to explain this is a damning insight into the level of analysis available in Britain. I was pleasantly surprised after two seasons of Pat Nevin running Lucas down on a regular basis to see him present a balanced analysis of the function of the position Lucas plays on Channel 5. That gave me hope until I heard him start the same old tune on 5Live again at the next Liverpool league match as if that 5 minutes on Channel 5 were suddenly wiped from his memory. Either that or he's playing to a different audience. Maybe they do know but they dumb it down so much that they grossly mislead their audiences?
You see nothing like the in-depth work done in the Spanish and Italian media as part of the mainstream. It's perhaps related to why English teams who adopt continental approaches do better in Europe than those who don't.
I think that is one problem they have is qualified people that would want to do it that arent working on TV in the own countries.