Football on the radio in England

[My Name Is Ian]

There's huge amounts of 1960s Italian league football on YouTube. It's rabbit hole I haven't yet gone down for fear that I may never return.

[Satchmo Distel]

Going to other grounds for score flashes and penalties seems like a no-brainer so there must have been a specific reason why they couldn't or didn't do this before. Maybe they were worried they would miss a goal in the main game or piss off the fans of whichever big clubs were featured? Or maybe the technology wasn't up to it in those pre-Taylor Report grounds?

I haven't listened to the 1988 game but was wondering whether Green toned it down when sharing with senior colleague of Jones' class? I also wonder how Jones felt when he heard Green.

[Duncan Gardner]

As the thread has quickly and predictably turned to a Greeny pile on

After leaving our school (RTE's George Hamilton was a fellow pupil in the 60s) the great man worked at the Belfast Telegraph. His brother in law Winker Watson (a student PE teacher in my day) was adamant that even then Greeny was a knobend

[My Name Is Ian]

One thing I've really noticed has always been how *weird* former radio commentators sound when they're first on the TV. I remember this quite distinctly from when Jon Champion and Peter Drury first made that jump and again when Alan Green did a few years later. Because I was watching MOTD much less by the time Green got involved, his voice on a televised match still irks me.

[Uncle Ethan]

Back in the day I was on a radio show where we used to bring the BBC Radio 2 commentary into Western Australia. Time differences meant it was on between about 10.30pm to 2am, depending on the the time of year. We used to have a pretty big audience for community radio at that time of night. Pre-internet there very few ways to get the football scores and certainly no live TV.

In the NSL days the old system of two commentators was common here, but you'd share the action quite randomly rather than in two equal segments.

Nowadays it is one caller, one special comments and someone on the sidelines.

[Jobi1]

It seems kind of extraordinary to think that the BBC used to use two commentators for the same game. Sure, it's nice to do it, if you have the resources, but... it seems an extraordinary luxury.

On the subject of those resources, it amazes me that pretty much every match down to the Conference (and even a few in Conf North/South) get two sets of full BBC radio commentary – from both the 'home' and 'away' BBC regional stations. And I guess Premier League games get that local commentary too as well as the 5 Live coverage? I get that listeners want their local perspective, but that seems an astonishing and unnecessary use of resources to me.

That leads me to wonder whether the decision to stop having two commentators on the big games on 5 Live really was just a cost-cutting measure. Was it not perhaps more because with the number of games that kick off at different times now, they have way more games to broadcast full commentary of, so need to spread the commentators around more than they used to?

Combining both those points, I heard the half-and-half tradition revived in 2017/18 when York and Harrogate spent a season in the same division, and the guys who usually do the respective clubs' commentaries did half of each half each. Wonder if any of the other local stations in regions with multiple teams still do that if and when their teams play each other?

[Satchmo Distel]

This is Mike Ingham's account:

On radio, the voice is pre-eminent and over ninety minutes – plus, often, extra time and penalties – one voice, no matter how mellifluous, can be a hard listen. Test Match Special would never dream of having just one cricket commentator for the whole of a two-hour session. These changes were made in line with the BBC’s ‘delivering quality first’ manifesto, which in this instance had nothing to do with quality but all about financial cutbacks and amounted, in my view, to false economy. A more practical method of putting the licence fee to better use would have been to prevent duplication of resources and to make one BBC Radio commentary available to all outlets, instead of having two or three local radio stations turning up to broadcast the same game. Whatever money was allegedly saved by scrapping the second commentator was then ploughed straight back into having a presenter at virtually every game. Axing a second commentator was the justification for the pruning of staff and the price paid for making these changes would be a heavy one. Invitations were sent out to all staff football commentators to consider voluntary redundancy, and if there were no takers, then management would make the final cull. In order to be able to back up their decision, reports were compiled on us all and marks awarded in various categories.

One particular priority was the cross-trailing of other programmes and identifying 5 Live as much as possible during commentary; Peter Jones would not have passed this test! I was briefly shown my report, and the only thing that I can now remember from it was that apparently, I had a tendency ‘to growl’. Feedback is always welcome but should have been part of everyday communication. At the end of this frankly obscene procedure, two valued colleagues lost their jobs. Nigel Adderley had been a pleasure to work with at Euro 2004 and thankfully was able to become more appreciated at talkSPORT. David Oates had worked for the corporation for over a quarter of a century and was now deemed to be surplus to requirement, even though as a talented all-rounder there were many other roles he could have performed. Broadcasting ability is often best judged when you find yourself having to react to an unexpected event like Jon Champion had to when Eric Cantona jumped into the crowd at Selhurst Park. For David Oates, his defining moment as an eyewitness was at White Hart Lane when Fabrice Muamba suffered a cardiac arrest on the pitch. David handled it all so sensitively and professionally.

Less than a year later, and just sixteen weeks after finally severing his links with the BBC, David died aged only fifty, after being struck down by a virus that attacked his heart. It was a devastating loss to us but more importantly to his wife, my football producer of ten years, Charlotte Nicol and their young girls, Imogen and Kate. At his funeral, there was a message of sympathy from Sir Alex Ferguson recalling his association with David when he had been at Radio Manchester. In later years, when he was in dispute with the BBC, Fergie had to apologise to David for not being able to grant him an interview. “Sorry, David, it’s nothing personal. I just don’t like some of the people you work with.” “Don’t worry,” said David, “there’s one or two I’m not keen on either.” Not only did Charlotte have to rebuild her life without her husband but without the BBC career she had worked so hard and against so many obstacles to secure. When the BBC decided to uproot the sports department to Salford just in time for an Olympic Games in London, it informed all staff that they had to make the permanent move to the north or resign. An easy decision for someone who is young and unattached, but there were a host of skilled producers like Charlotte who had a life with their families in London that was difficult to leave. Forcing such valuable members of staff like her and head of radio sport, Gordon Turnbull, to choose between keeping their jobs or moving over 200 miles away and making it clear there would be no half measures, meant that BBC Radio Sport lost a generation of experience and knowledge that would be so difficult to replace.

Ingham, Mike. After Extra Time and Penalties (Kindle Locations 3729-3758). The Book Guild. Kindle Edition.