This feature on Sky was very underrated.
Commentary has changed. There used to be pauses and gaps in the commentary, or certainly lulls. Now it seems to be an endless wall of noise, from start to finish, and they're all just talking shit. It is often just endless words, rearranged into some form that roughly resembles a sentence, with the same phrases repeated over and over again.
Commentators used to be journalists, often well educated, and by the time they got on TV they tended to have a few years experience, and tended to be older. Now they're all former football players. The likes of Micheal Owen, Steve McManaman, and even the half-decent ones like Jamie Carragher are really poor replacements for the the likes of John Motson, Barry Davies, Brian Moore, etc.
The role of the football commentator has changed from being one of them describing what is happening on the pitch to one of former players recanting stories of their playing days, and how what is happening now is somehow like something from their playing career (.. insert name of the player's former team/a match they played in/former teammate/how "their" manager would have done things differently, etc). It gets incredibly tedious incredibly quickly.
Sorry to turn this into a "things were better in ye olde days" type thread, but I genuinely believe commentary was more interesting prior to the turn of the millenium. The commentators used to turn up prepared, having done their homework, you'd hear crazy anecdotes about players, managers, grounds, competitions (not just cheap statistics pulled from Wikipedia/transfermarket). There also didn't seem to be the constant need for injecting over-excitement into the game via the commentary (F1 style), that really shouldn't be required in football.
/rant