With the world currently in such a god-awful mess, it's hard not to look back on better times. As a nation, we seem perpetually stuck in the past at the moment, each of us harking back to our childhoods despite the fact that, in descending order of generation, they probably featured one of rickets, everyday poverty, the threat of impending nuclear annihilation, or Tony Blair. Whether we have become infantilised as a society or whether, in our anxiety and apprehension, we have rejected the contemporary status quo in favour of our comforting memories of the past, nostalgia reigns supreme in Britain today. That applies not only to our artistic output, our politics and our collective psychological makeup, but also to our football. Where there is nostalgia for old-school football, there is nostalgia for old-school football pundits, and where there is nostalgia for old-school football pundits, there is a return for Mark Lawrenson on Match Of The Day.Lawro hasn't quite made it back onto the Saturday programme as of yet, but he did make an appearance on MOTD2 this weekend alongside Mark 'Chappers' Chapman, as Lawro insisted on calling him throughout, and the boringly sensible Kevin Kilbane. Seeing Lawro there on the sofa instilled us with a hollow longing for the nineties and early to mid noughties, when Match of The Day pundits were exclusively drawn from former Liverpool centre-backs and when Lawrenson and Alan Hansen made the punditry sofa their sole and dictatorial domain. There were far fewer pundits back in those days and, as such, Lawro and Hansen broached no little dissent to their overbearing opinions; they were tyrants as much as they were pundits, Saturday evening despots in brown suits and absurdly long ties. This was before Match of The Day got all soft and informal, bowing to political correctness with its open-button shirts and unscripted banter. This was when Match of The Day was good and proper, in that it was uptight, upstanding and had a strict but unspoken uniform, namely 'car salesman done good seeking election to Guildford Borough council'.When we first saw Lawrenson in the studio, then, we were transported back to the halcyon days of the businesslike Lawro-Hansen axis. Sure, his adherence to the dress code had slipped a little bit, and his bristly goatee made him look like a postgraduate university supervisor, but Lawro still seemed to represent uprightness, and order, and a time before the BBC studio was full of left-leaning luvvies virtue signalling their love of poor people and refugees. We were ready for the return of Lawrenson, ready to listen to his views once more. We were ready to forget his commentary from the 2010 World Cup onwards, which has been so unrelentingly miserable that it has caused us on several occasions to turn off the television, sit in the dark and, gripped by the quietude of loneliness, heave a heavy sigh.Unfortunately, while our memories of the Lawro-Hansen axis are rose-tinted, today's Mark Lawrenson is a different man. While the misery of his dotage is still a major feature of his punditry – we want an authoritative voice on the football, for God's sake, not bloody Morrissey – he has also bowed to societal pressure, and so sought to strike up an atrocious to-and-fro with 'Chappers', a nickname which he couldn't help but hiss through gritted teeth. This patter made us grimace on more than one occasion and, in its latent prickliness and passive aggression, reminded us that Lawrenson was always the chippiest man in the studio, even back when he and Hansen ruled supreme. With that realisation, our fondness for Lawro's punditry rather evaporated. Christ, maybe the past wasn't so great after all.
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