It was the way Emma Hayes dropped an expected assists metric into the early stages of Spain v Croatia that told you this was no ordinary co-commentary.
Jose Luis Gaya had been selected ahead of Jordi Alba by Luis Enrique once again and, though this was something Hayes quite clearly took issue with, she was not prepared to foist her subjective interpretation on us after 10 minutes of a football match.
'It's been a surprise to see Jordi Alba left out of the Spain side. He registered the third most expected assists in La Liga last season,' she casually observed.
Emma Hayes has provided incisive insight while working as a TV pundit at the Euros
Karen Carney provided some fascinating insight on Instagram recently into the work Hayes puts into her analysis
Given that expected assists — 'xA' to the initiated — have not exactly been core vernacular for any of the British Euro 2020 commentary teams — and Graeme Souness was watching back in the studio for ITV — this observation carried risks.
When Alex Scott endeavoured to talk about the 'low block' on Sky Sports a few years back, Souness took her to task. 'What is a low block? This modern terminology…' he interrupted, fixing Scott with a stare.
But the Chelsea Women's manager did not break her stride. By the time she ventured into this Gaya-Alba dialectic, Hayes had already painted a more detailed picture of the game's initial tactical patterns than the Parken Stadium's battery of TV cameras could provide.
From Cesar Azpilicueta's higher starting position than in Spain's previous game, to the demands on Bruno Petkovic to link play in the absence of Ivan Perisic's superior pace, she told you how the mechanics of this game were working.
It is fair to say the TV offering has moved on slightly from those days when pundits masked their ignorance of the foreigners by having a good laugh at their own calamitous efforts to pronounce the names.
