Tyldesley to meet ‘dodgy’ Swiss director for peace talks ahead of new season

AFTER A summer of rising tensions characterised by snide on-air remarks, ITV has confirmed that Clive Tyldesley and the ‘Swiss director’ blamed for showing super-slow motion replays of innocuous challenges instead of live 35-yard screamers, will meet to bury the hatchet.

Tyldesley will meet with the director at the UN in Geneva ahead of a fiery potential meeting in the Champions League should Swiss powerhouse FC Basel, as expected, progress past the third qualifying round.

The director’s legal team hope Tyldesley will agree to disagree about camerawork, lighting, and mise-en-scène; shake hands; and enjoy tea, coffee and a selection of continental biscuits.

However, while Tyldesley has provisionally agreed to take the gentlemanly English stance, the director has heatedly defended his work. Speaking to the Swiss paper Chapuisat, he said: “I was well aware that my efforts were met with scorn by those in the UK but I fear Clive Tyldesley, Gerald Sinstadt, and the other one have ignored the phenomenon of cultural relativism, or they are too intellectually torpid to take it into account.

“While the rules of football in Switzerland are of course the same, in our country we appreciate different things. For instance, many replays of block tackles followed by a montage of disputed throw ins were shown at my daughter’s wedding, and yet footage of Mick Channon in his prime makes me want to vomit the ash of a dead child.”

The foreign director problem has dogged international football coverage in Britain, since the Italian director in the 1990 World Cup made the mistake of showing unremarkable footage of Paul Gascoigne crying and completely missed Paul Parker taking a short corner. Brian Moore was later disciplined by ITV for describing the incident on air as a “f**king debacle” and was left with egg on his face when the footage scooped the Palme D’or, ahead of the other nominees May to December and Sportsnight.

Published September 25, 2008

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