Sport on TV / Misty-eyed, and tongue-twisting the night away

THE key word was 'era' - as in 'whole new' and 'the Venables'. 'It's a whole new era,' said Gerry Francis. 'The first goal of the Venables era]' shouted John Motson. 'It's a new era,' chorused Martin Tyler, Trevor Brooking, Alan Ball, Phil Thompson, Uncle Tom Cobbly and the entire casts of Live Football (Sky Sports) and Sportsnight (BBC 1, Wednesday). No vain hype, as it turned out: it was still 0-0 after 10 seconds, which represented a resounding improvement on last time.

On screen, in the pre-match stages, things hadn't looked so promising. As the teams filed pensively down the tunnel, the camera closed in on the side of Matthew Le Tissier's head and, weirdly, remained there. It may well have been the beginning of a whole new era if you were crammed into that buzzing Wembley Stadium; for us stuck at home, it just looked like the start of a whole new ear.

Meanwhile, the words which everyone was avoiding using were 'Graham' and 'Taylor'. It's a tribute to the restraint of all involved that in nearly four hours of punditry, only Phil Thompson, the former Liverpool player and a member of Sky's discussion team, broke with the taboo. 'No disrespect to Graham Taylor . . .' he began, before saying something to the effect that it was nice to watch a team that knew the goals were located at the ends of the pitch rather than in the stands and, all in all, showed some evidence of having a manager.

We didn't get much of a view of Terry Venables heading to the bench for the first time because all the other camera crews getting their shots of Venables heading to the bench for the first time were in the way. (I don't know who manages the BBC camera team, which provided the pictures on Wednesday, but it may perhaps be worth bringing someone in to play in an aggressive sweeper role, pushing forward from the back.) Still, that didn't matter because, for television viewers, the prime and over- arching question on all international footballing occasions is: what kind of a start will John Motson get off to?

A flyer, you'd have to say. 'Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it's certainly brought Wembley to life as England start a new era.' The most fastidious Motson-

spotter would have been happy with that. When he followed up swiftly with an extended alcohol metaphor, it was pure bonus. In this 'intoxicating atmosphere' we were to look out for 'the new, sparkling wine' (Darren Anderton), 'the vintage wine, bottled up for too long' (Peter Beardsley) and 'an unpredictable cocktail, the mercurial Paul Gascoigne'. Poetry. A shame that Gazza had to ruin it by playing like a mug of cold Ovaltine.

There was a telling comparison to be had with Martin Tyler on Sky who, on the subject of His Royal Fatness, could only offer us: 'Gascoigne: the perennial joker in the England pack.' Score nil for Keatsian invention there. 'Graeme Pierre Le Saux,' he mused later. 'A name that suggests French ancestry.' He doesn't miss a trick, that Martin Tyler. But top marks to any commentator casual enough to set themselves a tongue-twister in the heat of the game: 'Shearer has been synonymous with sharpness this season.' Try saying that, 10 times quickly.

Before the game, in the Sky studio, Alan Ball had confessed: 'There's lot of things unknown tonight.' And one of them was just how fervently patriotic Ball was going to become as the evening wore on. 'When things are against us, we all get together. That's the English people,' he said at half- time, misty-eyed at the 1-0 scoreline. Maybe he was stirred up by comments from the commentary box during the second half (Francis: 'This is what England's all about - football.' Tyler: 'I think it's the Dunkirk spirit again'). But when we came back for the post-match chat, it was over to Major Ball, standing now in a specially constructed trench in the studio, wearing combat fatigues and a helmet. 'The important thing is that the people are back with England again,' he said, as Phil Thompson next to him played 'Land of Hope and Glory' on a harmonica.

There were pitifully few chances to admire David Seaman's whole new, Venables era goalkeeping kit. This spring, David is wearing a banana yellow abattoir- worker's smock with a fetching inlaid testcard motif, which is attractively repeated in a pair of radioactive side panels on his lycra-style shorts, for that fire- damaged tarpaulin look. Interestingly, the shorts themselves descend almost to the ankles, a timely reworking of the tired 'trouser' formula. Dumb grin, model's own.

After the game, Gazza was interviewed in the tunnel, where he gave a sober analysis of the virtues of the passing game coupled with some quiet disappointment at his own failure to score - the whole delivered without belching, crying, producing a suggestive vegetable or attempting to remove the interviewer's shirt. A mature period for Gazza? This really is a new era. Era we go, era we go, era we go.