Richardson got his start in the early 1990s, when he lucked into a job as the host of “Football Italia,” the first show to air Italian domestic soccer in Britain, after Paul Gascoigne, the mercurial English midfielder who had agreed to be the presenter, stopped turning up for work. (Like a natural-born striker, he has a gift for being in the right place at the right time.) The show’s linking sequences, which featured Richardson eating elaborate desserts and reading the newspaper in sun-dazzled piazzas, gave it an unbuttoned, off-duty feel. Instead of treating soccer like a blood sport, he assumed the attitude of an aesthete, savoring ironies, tracking subplots on and off the field and in general doing his best to show the viewer a good time. You can still hear the warmth and languor of Italy in Richardson’s voice.
Given all these deviations from the norm, it might be tempting to call Richardson an anti-pundit, but that sounds altogether too effortful for a man who embodies the ideal of sprezzatura. “Pundit-satirist” might be nearer the mark, for Richardson’s distinct charm lies in his recognition of the inherent absurdity of what he does for a living. Most people who get paid to talk about soccer in public — to trot out the old chestnuts about players taking their chances and giving 110 percent — deliver their opinions in a tone pitched somewhere between that of an irascible headmaster and a time-strapped auctioneer. Richardson, by contrast, speaks with the breezy spontaneity of someone who knows that nothing, or nothing more serious than entertainment, is really at stake. It is not that he lacks passion — his speech crackles with exclamations of delight: “Woof!” “Wow!” “Mmmm!” “Tasty!” Rather, to adapt a phrase of Geoff Dyer’s, he has mastered the trick of sounding 100 percent ironic and 100 percent sincere at the same time.
In all likelihood, this year’s World Cup final will turn out to be another low-scoring foul-fest, like Italy ’90 or U.S.A. ’94 or South Africa 2010 — or come to think of it, just about every final I have been alive to witness — but, as of this writing, I can still dream of a 4-3 victory for England over Portugal, in which Harry Kane scores the winning goal, a bicycle kick from the edge of the penalty area, in the last minute of extra time and Cristiano Ronaldo is sent off for repeated diving, starts to cry and then trips over his feet as he walks from the field. Whatever happens, it is comforting to know that Richardson will be there at the final whistle with his quips and puns to put the whole harrying joy of soccer fandom into perspective and ease the arrival of the footballing winter to come.