Published: 12 July, 2012
by RICHARD OSLEY

DURING Euro 2012 Mark Lawrenson was commentating on a match, no doubt wearing a hideously stripy shirt, when he stopped to explain he didn’t use Twitter because he wasn’t “that sad”.

Now, I’m going to chance my arm here at explaining what he meant. I’m prepared to be wrong but let’s give it a go.

I’m guessing he didn’t mean “that sad” in the dictionary-definition miserable way, to mean the sadness you feel when your goldfish passes away or the last bit of your Fab lolly falls off the stick before you can eat it.

More likely, given the hip, smooth-talking wit that we all know him to be, Lawrenson meant he wasn’t “that sad” as in sad, lonely, people who have nobody to talk to but the internet.

Now Lawro might, of course,  have been trying to make a decent social point about how incessant tweeting and internet usage can blur people’s perceptions and discourage them from leaving their rooms, inhibiting and obscuring their world beyond a computer screen or a mobile phone.

He might have been. Or he might have actually searched the words “Mark” and “Lawrenson” on Twitter and found that for all his attempts at humour-marinated analysis during Euro 2012, large numbers quickly fatigued of his commentary box contributions.

Repeatedly, and with vocabularies of varying imagination, people told the internet that he was ruining their enjoyment of the match. Lawro persevered regardless, but our say should mean more.

The same thing happened on Sun­day, another momentous national sporting event which we all watched together through the BBC.

There was the drama of Andy Murray’s golden chance to win Wimbledon and we had to listen to the not universally appreciated Andrew Castle, a retired tennis player who sadly never made it past round 2, later seen on breakfast television sofas and “no win no fee” compensation adverts.

Using this admittedly scientifically unproven technique of judging public opinion, Andrew Castle might do best not to input his name into Twitter’s search box. At one point he told us the moisture under the Centre Court roof was caused by the crowd breathing out too much oxygen. Now, I don’t have a doctorate in biology, but…

We can dismiss Twitter as little more than a place where lazy journal­ists pick up “Twitter row” stories and others share pictures of pandas play­ing on a slide. And the views of every­body who said something hardball about Lawrenson or Castle might be vastly outnumbered beyond the confines of the internet. But that sum seems hard to reconcile with the difficulty in finding anything on those boards to counter this mass surge of irritation. We pay our little bit to the BBC and the money should pay for a vote in who handles such important sporting moments. And if none of us vote for the way Lawrenson and Castle do it, the BBC shouldn’t just ignore us.

The Olympics are almost here, let’s give it a soundtrack to be proud of.