Dave “Harry” Bassett, the former Premiership football manager, may not have seen much meaningful frontline action lately but he remains one of the game’s leading thinkers, and a first port of call on matters ethical and political affecting his sport.

Hence one’s keenness to take a sounding from him on the topic of the first woman commentator on Match of the Day. “I am totally against it, and everybody I know in football is totally against it,” Bassett said. “The problem is that everybody is too scared to admit it.”

He must mean Lawrie Sanchez, the caretaker manager of Fulham, on whose ground the BBC’s Jacqui Oatley makes her television debut this afternoon. Sanchez has described Oatley as “a commentator of great quality whose knowledge of the game and its personnel is every bit as good as anyone else I have heard”. But presumably that’s just because he’s a scaredy-cat, running in fear of the PC legions, like so many in today’s game.

It takes a certain kind of man to stand up and speak for football’s silent and cowed majority, and, in the area of sexual politics, Bassett is probably the first to do so since Joe Royle, the manager of Everton at the time, expressed surprise that Eleanor Oldroyd, of Radio 5 Live, wasn’t at home cooking the tea. A woman commentating on football? They’ll be letting them drive cars next. And, before you know it, they’ll have the vote, and then where will football be?

Bassett, we should note directly, is not an unreasonable man: he’s not dismissing women altogether from football broadcasting. “I’m completely relaxed about women presenting football shows,” he said, generously. “Women like Clare Tomlinson are very good.”

Tomlinson will be proud, we can be sure, to receive the Bassett seal of approval — something to put on her CV. “April 2007: highly recommended by Harry Bassett — as long as I stay in my place.” But, as Bassett emphatically points out, smiling nicely at the start and end of the show and offering an informed and accurate commentary on a match are tasks of a quite different calibre requiring a totally different skill-set and, indeed, sex. If you’re going to commentate, Bassett notes, “you must have an understanding of the game and the tactics,” which, he suggests, means men only.

Fair enough. Imagine that Fulham, at some point this afternoon, switch from 4-3-3 to 4-4-2. How is Oatley, as a woman, not to be mentally overwhelmed by the sheer brain-confounding complexity of this change? Or say Blackburn Rovers, Fulham’s opponents today, leading 1-0, suddenly, in the game’s closing phases, take off a forward and bring on a central defender. How is Oatley’s by definition female mind to cope with the dauntingly chess-like implications of that shift in the game’s tactical set-up? Indeed, will she even see it? Or will she have popped out to redo her make-up?

Not for nothing, then, does Bassett insist that, in order to work as a commentator, “you need to have played the game”. Quite so. Which is why, when one thinks of the chief representatives of unquestionable authority in the commentary box, one thinks first and foremost of John Motson’s 22 goals in 47 appearances for England, and of Guy Mowbray’s four championship medals and two FA Cup victories at Liverpool, not to mention Simon Brotherton’s legendary role in the great Brazil team of the Seventies.

(Note to editing team: bit rushed for time. Could you check these facts? Ta.) Another disappointed football analyst raises a further germane point when he accuses Oatley of sounding, at moments of excitement, “like a fire siren”. You wouldn’t get that kind of undignified performance from, say, Alan Green, the analyst observes, and quite rightly. As a man, Green is naturally in a position to exercise a greater degree of control over his emotions, and thereby ends up merely sounding like a car alarm or a cat under the wheel of a slowly reversing car. And you wouldn’t hear it on the television from Jonathan Pearce, either, whose superior male discipline under pressure ensures that he only ever comes across like someone who has accidentally closed a sensitive part of his anatomy in a biscuit tin.

We can all agree, I think, that a football commentator is, above all, someone who knows the value of the single, well-chosen word. That’s why the commentary box is the realm of reserved, non-attention-seeking men such as Clive Tyldesley. You can’t put someone in there who is just going to twitter on. People simply won’t wear it.

And while we’re on the subject of not wearing things, Blackburn have already sent Oatley a replica Rovers shirt, signed by the squad, as a token of their congratulations and support on this era-changing occasion. Furthermore, the club’s marketing director has gone on record to welcome what he called, in a phrase that just possibly backfired on him slightly, “a ladies’ perspective”. Again, though, you have to ask: a shirt? Couldn’t they have got her something pretty? A signed box of chocolates, even. Or some signed flowers. It’s political correctness gone mad. Harry Bassett will be shaking his baffled, grey head.

Cowering in fear of the big boys

Last week we heard Adrian Boothroyd, the manager of Watford, comparing his team’s chance of a victory over Manchester United to a manned mission to the moon. This week Neil Warnock got his flag of surrender out early, playing down Sheffield United’s prospects at Old Trafford by saying, “never mind result of the season, it would be the result of the decade”.

What is wrong with these people? How did they come to buy into the myth of the “United juggernaut” so completely that they sound defeated before they start? Warnock even rested players for Tuesday’s match, an act of cowardice for which he ought to be dragged before the game’s disciplinary panel and fined to within an inch of his mortgage.

When was the last time a small club travelled to Manchester talking of “reputations going out the window”? What happened to the “best league in the world”, in which any team can beat any other “on its day”? To listen to Boothroyd and Warnock, you would conclude that the best league in the world is United and Chelsea, followed by a bunch of anonymous others in various stages of low-shouldered resignation. That can’t be right, can it?

Got all the answers? José has . . .

Competition results time. A short while ago, we asked you to spot the common factor linking the 14 managers who have been connected so far this season with José Mourinho’s job at Chelsea. This list includes Guus Hiddink, Frank Rijkaard, Fabio Capello, Sven-Göran Eriksson (remember him?), Gianluca Vialli, Mark Hughes (no, really), Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and, most recently, California surf dude Jörgen Klinsmann.

The answer, of course, is that not one of them is as good at managing a football team as Mourinho is. The response was massive — indeed, overwhelming. Unfortunately, so many of you got the answer right that the first prize (a day of running after Roman Abramovich shouting, “Are you completely out of your head?” plus tickets to a Premiership match of your choice) has had to be held over until another time. Thanks to all who entered, though.

This week’s challenge: using your skill and judgment, identify Peter Moores, the new England cricket head coach.