The half-time panel has nothing to tell you

Fifteen minutes, four pundits, and a format that structurally prevents anybody from saying something they have had time to think about.

Half-time analysis is the most protected dead space in sports broadcasting. It survives not because it informs anyone but because there is a gap in the schedule and somebody has to be sitting in the chairs.

Consider the constraints. The producer has roughly eight usable minutes after the adverts and the trail for the evening's other fixture. In that time the panel must react to a half that finished ninety seconds earlier, using clips a gallery has been cutting while the half was still going on, and reach a conclusion that will be watched by people who just saw the same forty-five minutes. Nobody can watch a half and understand it in ninety seconds. Coaches cannot. They go into a dressing room with an analyst who has already prepared three clips and they still mostly say two things and change one instruction.

What comes out instead is a genre. Somebody says the home side need to be braver. Somebody says the away side will be happy with that. A former striker is asked whether he would have scored the chance in the twenty-second minute and says he would have hit it first time. Then a graphic appears showing possession percentages, which is the single least useful number available, and everyone nods at it.

The version that works exists, and it is the tactical breakdown that goes out on Monday, or the ten-minute segment where an analyst has a telestrator and one specific idea. The difference is preparation time. Give a good analyst two days and a match to study and they will show you the exact reason a full-back kept getting isolated. Give them ninety seconds and they will tell you the home side need to be braver.

So use half-time for what it is good for. Show the two or three incidents properly, at full speed and then at half speed, with the referee's audio if it exists. Show the actual chances rather than a possession pie chart. Then be brave enough to stop talking, because thirty seconds of dead air is not a crisis and the pitch is right there.

Radio, for what it is worth, solved this decades ago. They read the other scores.