A female commentary for a woman's match?...

... that's not the way I heard it.

Would you rather have a female tv commentator calling a major women’s international match or do you just want a good one?

There, I’ve asked it! Oh, and by the way, Robyn Cowen is both.

If I had a pound for every time I’ve been awkwardly, furtively asked ‘what do you think about these women commentators and pundits?’… I could buy a tv network for them all to appear on. Which is where most of the men that ask me would probably like them to be.

Why are we taking so long to embrace female voices in football?

When Robyn’s voice steadied to describe the deranged scenes at the end of England’s shoot-out victory as ‘beautiful chaos’, her words were as choice and fitting as any a Mowbray or Matterface or even Motson could have found to crown the occasion. Spot on.

Robyn is a woman, a mother, a wife. I don’t think that any of her maternal instincts or feminine intuition contributed to her finding the right words at the right moment. She is just good at what she does and always wanted to do. She thinks before she speaks. Not all commentators do.

All commentators are a matter of opinion, and fairly juicy opinion in the social media age. It’s my opinion that there are good, bad and indifferent female commentators just as there are male and black and Irish and 70-year old commentators like me. I can be good, bad and indifferent on one night.

The nights when an England national team tease and torment us at a major tournament are the stiffest examination papers that any commentator can be set. Somehow, the good results from indifferent performances are the trickiest of all to navigate.

Striking a fair balance between the full range of contradictory emotions that your mass audience of millions is being tested by is just the impossible job. How do you tell a wildly-celebrating nation that they’re a lucky lot? Can you sound unbiased without sounding unpatriotic? Where do you tread the line between ‘we’ and ‘they’? I’ve been up on that tightrope too many times.

Too many times to be silly enough to be discussing the sensitive issue of gender and football in a public blog! But I think it’s a conversation we need to have.

The cow elephant in the room is probably the natural soprano pitch of most female voices. Big moments in sport call for big bellowing tonsils. I can (er privately) think of a number of commentators that get away with bland and empty content because the timbre of their booming tones lend an arresting authority to the rubbish they ramble.

Robyn Cowen is blessed with a voice that can hit some of the lower parts of the stave when an ‘Agyemang!!’ moment comes along. She is not as shrill and piercing as others of either sex when she’s yelling ‘can you believe it?’ at and with us. Her trick and her skill are to stay out of top gear unless it’s time to go racing. Robyn’s strength, for me Clive, is the controlled rhythm and pace of her commentaries. She doesn’t fake the orgasmic crescendos.

Considering your next utterance before it leaves your lips is not always easy in running sports commentary. I’ve watched a lot of cricket, tennis and golf in recent days and the astute, studied manner in which Ian Ward, Andrew Castle and Ewen Murray lead and control the tone, pace and direction of a live broadcast is talent that I both admire and envy.

Envy because you can’t always control the runaway nature of a football or rugby match. When England score twice in 103 seconds to save their skins, you’ve got to hang on and go with the ride. That doesn’t mean you can stop concentrating and trying to make sense of the madness. The other lead commentator at this tournament has a tendency to speak off the top of his head and continually get behind the action. Robyn is far more thoughtful and economical.

Her game reading is sound and observational… short punctuating phrases that update the story of the game… ‘Sweden are more cohesive, they know where the next pass is’. She uses stats only to editorially augment what we are watching… ‘Sweden conceded just one goal in the group stage and were the only team to keep two clean-sheets’ (soon after they took the lead). When you put it like that… shit!

The partnership with Rachel Brown-Finnis is clearly both professional and personal. They radiate that comforting camaraderie that I can’t help but elicit if I’m sitting alongside McCoist or Townsend. You know these guys like and respect each other. The sense of humour and rapport is natural and easy on our ears and Robyn clears the stage for Rachel to add the inside knowledge that only former players can bring… Graeme McDowell and Stuart Broad have emerged as excellent additions to their Sky teams in that respect.

The danger zones during England games are those ‘we/they’ dilemmas. When Sarina Wiegman (belatedly) mixed the right cocktail from the bench, the temptation to wave the flag and strike up the anthem is inevitable because good commentary needs to serve its audience and try to capture what the moments mean to them. We can go from 0 to 100 in 103 seconds, can’t we?

‘Still our Queen’ and ‘In Sarina we trust’ rang a little tabloid and jingoistic when Robyn took the brakes off and caught the national wave but I think they were said with just enough irony to hit the spot. I’ve engaged in long and labyrinthic conversations about introducing the occasional ‘we’ into an England commentary. Being partisan doesn’t mean you can’t remain objective. Go for it.

The recurring point about this review of the minutiae of an unscripted, unpredictable two hours of live broadcasting is that the analysis of Robyn’s performance is along the same lines and fault lines as it would be if I’d been holding the microphone in Zurich last night… or Darren Fletcher or Peter Drury or whoever your personal favourites and demons are.

Gabby Logan’s commanding presentation style is not compared to Lineker or Pougatch because we have moved way past questioning her work on gender grounds. She is sports broadcast royalty.

Listening to Robyn Cowen last night, I didn’t hear a female football commentator, I just heard a good one.