For Martin Tyler and myself, it was an honour to voice the game for so long. Smith said: “Gutted not to be involved with anymore. ![]() Jonathan Liew was named sports journalist of the year at the prestigious London Press Club awards.Yes, gutted not to be involved with anymore. A sparser broadcast, but one that feels all the more immersive as a result, as close to the live experience as it is possible to get.įootball sounds amazing. Just a viewer, a screen and the seductive ambient noise of the game. Somewhere in a splintered market, there may just be an audience out there for the very opposite: football without any commentary. Some of you will be devotees of the YouTube watchalong, where you log in to watch a man with two million followers swearing at a screen.īut for decades televised football has gone one way: more talking, more curation, more voices, more product. Some of you prefer shouting, some wit and whimsy. Some of you will take comfort in a familiar voice. Some of you clearly can’t get enough of the football men talking (and for all the progress made, this remains an unforgivably white and male profession). There is a high degree of subjectivity here. “A SAN SIRO DRAMA TO END ALL DRAMAS!” And you think: all right Peter, it’s a 1-0 win in Europa League Group K. “MILANESE! MAYHEM!” Peter Drury will shout after a dramatic late winner. Overwrought, emotion-soaked commentary specifically geared towards the viral clip market. Commentary as an extension of pub banter. Over time different styles of commentary have sprung up, all furiously jostling for a niche in the attention economy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. For more information see our Privacy Policy. Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. In the second-screen age the commentator serves a subtly different function. ![]() Most people these days watch the game while doing something else: travelling, cooking, entertaining friends, scrolling through social media. The problem is that this is not really how we interact with football any more. Any decent commentator will argue that their job is not simply to narrate but to contextualise: to tell the story and explain why it matters. There is a sincere and a cynical answer to this question. In which case, what purpose does the human serve? If you were starting football from scratch, would you still have these guys chattering away in the background? If not, what’s the point of them now? ![]() The technology exists to identify players with far greater accuracy and speed than a human commentator ever could. Does this still hold true in an age of 4K Ultra HD, names on shirts, augmented reality and overlay graphics? The original football commentators emerged in an era when television was still a close cousin of radio, when the pictures were fuzzy and everyone needed a little help recognising which player was which. But it strikes me there is a whole unexplored aspect to this debate. This is in no way to devalue the job of live broadcasting: a difficult and often thankless task that requires not just natural talent but – in the social media age – a depressingly thick skin. No wonder the narrators of this simulacrum sound increasingly drawn and forlorn, like prisoners in a dystopian police state trying to earn enough credits for their freedom. Largely this is down to the sheer crushing volume of live football: not so much an event of national communion as an endless scroll of dead content, much of it delivered from a dark metal box somewhere in southern England in front of two blinking screens and a Pumpkin Café cappuccino slowly going cold in its non-compostable cup. It’s hard to recreate that wonder these days. Photograph: David Cannon/Allsport/Getty Images ![]() Barry Davies (centre) commentates for the BBC at the 1990 World Cup in Italy.
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