Welcome, everybody to Soccer 101. My name is Taylor Rockwell. Thank you, as always, for joining us. This week, we're diving into

the world of pundits. What do pundits do? Why do they do it? Do we focus on them a little bit too much

these days? How long have they been around? And very importantly, we'll look at what makes a great

pundit, what makes a terrible one, whether former pros are actually better at it, and how much bias is too much bias, because you're never not going to have a little bias when it comes to former pros. Isn't that right, Graham Ruffin? Yeah, I'm really excited, Taylor, to talk about all the crass and tacky people who talk about soccer for a living. I personally couldn't envisage being, you know, such a person. No. I'm really looking forward to this episode. Definitely not. It's a strange one, right? Because, like, as I said, talking about some of these people critically and what we don't like, there's definitely probably similar things that could be said about us. Maybe me, more so than you. I don't think anyone ever says a negative word about Graham Ruffman, because how could you? He's a delight. I mean, there's an England fan in our YouTube comments. The bitter

Scott, as I'm known. Yeah, I mean, I guess one thing to say right at the top of this episode is,

I actually think this is a harder job than a lot of people give it credit for.

Give credit to pundits for.

Because I think coming up with opinions that you can back up with analysis and just speaking for as long as pundits do on national TV where people put such weight in what you say,

I think is a pressure that we personally don't

have, we don't experience. And, yeah, I can imagine that that makes things more difficult. So,

well, we probably will be quite critical of, we might not mention them by names, but certain

molds and types of pundits, I do accept that this is quite a difficult invocation.

Yeah, because I mean, like, in doing this show, we try not to have edits, we try not to have

stopping points, but we do sometimes, and we have to kind of reset and make sure we're going

in the right direction we want to.

When you are doing a live broadcast and the producer throws to you, it's like, break down

this highlight.

I think it is also sometimes a thankless job in terms of how foolish you can end up looking through no fault of your own because you've got to say something, you've got to kind of cover

for 30 seconds of silence and figure it out as you go.

But I think ideally pundits are allowed time to prep and watch the game and get their data together and get their analysis together and come up with key points along the way.

And I think the other thing to say, and I have a little bit of experience in this, because I actually did a long time ago, maybe like 10 years ago, I did a behind the scenes sort of feature on a show in Scotland that's called Sports Scene, which is the TLDR is essentially Scotland's match of the day, right? And so I spent a day with their pundits. These are guys that listeners will not know, Michael Stewart and Stephen Thompson. You're just going to have to take my word for it, that those are like the Alan Shearer and I guess like Ian Wright of Scottish

football and it's a long day like I don't think people fully appreciate that like they don't

...