Why haven't we followed Des?

No matter which team wins on Friday morning, we can already predict the result of the World Cup ratings championship. On current form, the BBC team captained by Gary Lineker will win hands down, having captured the lion's share of the TV audience and condemned ITV's Des Lynam and his panel to the status of also-rans.

So, what's new? Ever since the World Cup has been televised, the BBC has scored higher than ITV in the audience ratings. But this time the commercial boys made a hugely determined effort to catch up. And in the early days of the present competition, they seemed to be making headway. ITV's solo coverage of England v Sweden on 2 June (a Sunday, admittedly), for example, attracted an average of

11.2 million viewers compared with the 10.2 million who watched BBC1's coverage of England's victory over Argentina.

Then came the crunch - the England-Denmark game, which both channels screened live. Nearly four in five viewers chose to see England win on BBC1 rather than ITV1. The fixture was the most watched match of the tournament so far, with the total of home viewers peaking at 16.8 million. The figures are the BBC's best for a head-to-head confrontation with ITV since records began. Given that both channels share the same video feed, and were therefore obliged to display the same images of the game, why would an overwhelming majority of the viewing public prefer Auntie's pictures to ITV's?

Is it because viewers detest ads? Or because the BBC commentary is better? Is it something to do with the expert panels employed by each channel to discuss the action? Or is it down to factors which have nothing to do with football?

Viewer aversion to ads is probably a factor. Internet chat rooms and football bulletin boards are full of unprintable comments about "those bloody awful sponsor's clips". Commentary is unlikely to be a distinguishing factor because relatively few viewers of the current games actually hear the commentary. Many watch the matches in social settings where ambient noise relegates the commentator to a secondary role.

What, then, about the expert panels with which both channels fill the dead airtime before, during and after the action?

The BBC team, led by Gary Lineker and including Alan Hansen, Ian Wright, Peter Reid and Peter Schmeichel, are all sharp, smooth-looking, thirty-something (to be generous) types. Significantly, the ITV squad is radically different. It is captained by Lynam (who famously defected from the BBC to ITV in 1999) and has Sir Bobby Robson and Terry Venables as regulars, with players such as Paul Gascoigne playing walk-on parts.

The central trio of Lynam, Robson and Venables reminds one of a group of ageing uncles gathered to watch the wedding video of a favourite niece.

It's now clear that the strategy that brought them together, the grand ol' man of televised sport plus two former England managers, was to give the commercial channel the kind of gravitas once associated with the BBC.

But this strategy for closing the gap hasn't worked. Indeed, it may actually have backfired. To the untutored ear, both panels appear to spout the same melange of cliché, tautology, self-evident truth and euphemism. But impression-istic research among young fans suggests that, for anyone under 20, Uncle Des and his mates are seriously deficient in street credibility.

They may go down a treat with viewers who remember when the marmalade was thicker and Bobby Charlton had hair. But for younger viewers, the grey-bearded insights of Robson and Venables count for naught against the smooth-talking analytical skills of Lineker and Co. Bluntly, the ITV panellists look as if they're past it.

In that sense, Lynam and co might be seen as a metaphor for ITV generally. Young viewers see the channel as a failing, dumbing-down operation that regards Who Wants to Be A Millionaire? as the high point of innovation and creativity. Few of them watch ITV1, yet they are avid viewers of BBC1 and Channel 4.

In addition, ITV seems to have been tainted by the ignominious collapse of ITV Digital and the calculating legalism of Granada and Carlton in relation to dozens of indigent football clubs, which has stained ITV's image in the minds of many of the sport's supporters.

In these circumstances, the remarkable thing about Des Lynam's audience share is not that it is so small, but that it is as large as 20 per cent.

Even if the ITV panel were as slick as the BBC's, however, the odds are that they'd still be playing second fiddle. For England's progression in the competition means that the game has temporarily moved on to a different plane.

George Bernard Shaw once observed that the English were not a very spiritual nation and so had invented cricket to give them an idea of eternity.

Were he alive today, Shaw would have had to concede that, for the time being, football has become the national religion. And in moments of sacred drama or crisis, whether it be the death of the Queen Mum or taking on the might of Brazil, the nation turns automatically to its national broadcaster.

After all, the BBC is "British" but ITV is only "independent".

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