Expertise and the work of football match analysts in TV sport broadcast

In this paper we describe expertise as a particular way of looking. We use match analysis “punditry” as a “perspicuous setting” to show how professional vision is interactionally achieved in TV sport broadcasts through environmentally coupled gestures enhanced by camera actions and a new technology of vision and visual display called telestrator. The paper is based on data from video sequences of (English) football TV broadcasts where the analyst shows to the TV host in the studio and to the non-expert audience at home what happened during a particular game. We argue that the transparency of seeing what is there to be seen is the product of artful instructed vision where the expert shows what should be seen, how it should be made accountable and what the audience should expect in order to fully appreciate what they see. We show how broadcasted football analysis expertise interactionally achieves this through the time-critical linking of talk, gesture and the technological environment.