Some believe Eddie McGuire showed a callous disregard for journalist Cynthia Banham — and all those with disabilities — when he mocked the way a woman who lost both legs in a plane crash tossed the coin before the Sydney-Adelaide match on Friday night.

Others will tell you McGuire was merely ignorant and ill-informed because he didn't know Banham was doing the honours when he made his supposedly agenda-setting observations on the shambolic state of contemporary coin-tossing.

But whether McGuire was contemptible or merely stupid, there was an issue at play beyond the inevitable culture war clash that erupts when a public utterance is subjected to the now routinely intense scrutiny.

Something outside the extreme views expressed by those so outraged they demanded McGuire be sacked immediately as Collingwood president and Fox Sports broadcaster and those who considered the public outcry just another case of "political correctness gone mad".

For consumers of broadcast sport, McGuire's bone-headed criticism of coin-tossers was just another example of the rapid degeneration of sports commentary and analysis.

Cynthia Banham tossed the coin ahead of a Sydney Swans verses Adelaide Crows match. ( Supplied: Fox Sports )

The pertinent question about McGuire's comments, quite rightly posed by the ABC's national sport editor, David Mark, was not about the remarks themselves.

It was why McGuire would make them during a sports broadcast.

"Eddie McGuire's disdainful comments about Cynthia Banham are so typical of the usual blokey and boring commentary bullshit in which put-downs and mocking in-jokes are the only schtick," tweeted Mark.

Nail. On. Head.

At least for those of us who have endured the decline of broadcast commentary from mostly straightforward observation and analysis into the murky self-indulgent realms of contemporary "blokecasting".

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In this sense, McGuire fell into a trap he had helped create by engaging in — and even pioneering in his role on the AFL Footy Show — the false bravado, bluster and matey in-jokes that now masquerade for serious sports commentary on some platforms.

If your brand of commentary is the kind of juvenile banter routinely exchanged by bored dunderheads in the back row desks of a trigonometry class, then you are bound to get yourself into trouble sooner or later — or in McGuire's case, both.

But, in some places, this is what sports commentary has become.

The mindless recitation of "big calls" and "great old yarns", disrupted only by the banshee screams of a caller who believes decibels are an adequate replacement for wit, wisdom and a vocabulary broader than what you might find in the average Mr Men book.

There was a time when McGuire would only dare utter his groundbreaking coin-tossing critique during an ad break.

Thus, had it been heard outside the studio, his mistake would have been to ignore the oldest of broadcast maxims — "the microphone is always live!"

This was how, to use just one famous example, Ian Chappell got into strife when he swore profusely during a Wide World of Sports broadcast in the early 1980s.

The kind of "gotcha moment" that, way back then, simultaneously scandalised viewers and helped inspire the hilarious parodies of Billy Birmingham.

But while swearing is still not keenly encouraged, nowadays the asinine takes and in-jokes that would have had any decent sports producer (not to mention the most influential couch critic, Kerry Packer) pulling a caller off-air are not merely tolerated.

They are a lucrative post-career option for the confident and relatively verbose ex-jock.

It is difficult to nominate exactly the moment when Warney's favourite pizza topping or analysts speaking to each other instead of their audience became the preferred form of sports broadcasting.

Perhaps this was the inevitable consequence of the reality TV era in which viewers became more accustomed to people talking amongst themselves than to them.

Survivor beget The Bachelor beget Gogglebox, where watching people watching TV somehow became a TV show itself.

Bill Lawry and Tony Greig sometimes spoke to each other through the game.

But now the game can seem merely the venue where ex-star athletes meet to resume dressing room conversations in which their Alpha Male persona is more significant than their insight.

In this regard, I suspect the change has also come about because of the unerring rise in Australia of what American broadcaster Howard Cosell called the "jockocracy" — the athletes-turned-media-performers who accepted the exposure and out-sized pay cheque of broadcast media without the journalistic responsibility, and most certainly without the training.

Eddie McGuire "fell into a trap he helped create". ( AAP: David Mariuz )

A noticeable pushback to the current trend toward blokecasting came last summer when Seven used traditional ball-by-ball commentators Tim Lane and Alison Mitchell as mainstays of their cricket coverage alongside past players.

Lane and Mitchell focussed the commentary on the game itself and ensured the banter, at least with most of Seven's combinations, was relevant to the on-field action and directed largely at the audience.

This was in contrast to those productions during which ex-champions diminish the contest — and even their own reputations — by using elite sport as a vehicle for quasi-comedic ramblings, deliberately provocative opinions or even "hilarious" mispronunciations.

All of which might seem a long route to take in reaching the cause of McGuire's latest faux pas.

But you must consider the environment in which the comments were made.

An age when increasingly professional and sophisticated athletes continually raise their game, yet the soundtrack too often comes from the idiots at the back of that trigonometry class.

