THE VOICE (AND VIBES) OF A GENERATION
“This is George, the substitute, turning well. Mallender. Meadows heading it on. Tremendous spirit in this Hereford side, they’re not giving it up by any means. Radford. Now Tudor’s gone down for Newcastle. Radford again. Oh what a go-oa-l! Wh-aa-at a goal! Radford the scorer! Ronnie Radford! And the crowd, the crowd are invading the pitch, and now it will take some time to clear the field. What a tremendous shot by Radford. He got this ball back, and hit it from well outside the penalty area, and no goalkeeper in the world would have stopped that. It fairly flew into the top corner of McFaul’s net!”
The signature work of John Motson, his voice-cracking commentary of non-league Hereford United’s shock defenestration of Newcastle from the 1972 FA Cup, doesn’t have the quotable soundbite quality of Kenneth Wolstenholme’s magisterial “They think it’s all over, it is now”, Barry Davies’s gleeful “Look at his face! Just look at his face!” or David Coleman’s iconic “One-nil!”. But then pithy catchphrases weren’t really the point of Motson, who has died aged 77. Instead, the legendary BBC commentator was all about the sound of football. His voice laid on top of it like a comfort blanket as he delivered a constant mundane throb of surnames, sequences and stats, occasionally punctured by excitable yelps of childlike glee, perfectly capturing the ebb, flow and ludicrous beauty of football. Consider them a series of 90-minute tone poems, avant-garde Radiophonic Workshop experiments surreptitiously crowbarred into mainstream BBC programming, a bit like the Doctor Who theme. Delia Derbyshire in sheepskin.
The Hereford game was Motty’s big break, and there’s an argument that, as in the cases of Catch-22, Citizen Kane and Three Feet High and Rising, its creator never produced anything else as good. But then, as Joseph Heller was often minded to retort: “Who has?” One of the great things about the Hereford commentary was Motson’s almost immediate shift from pitch-bending wonder at witnessing a goal for the ages, to sober concern over how long it would take to restart the match. From ecstasy to admin in 13 seconds, and you wouldn’t have had him any other way. We all used to gently poke fun at him for this sort of buttoned-up, none-more-British carry-on, of course, but let’s face facts, folks, football fans are a strange bunch, and he was every single one of us.
Some of Motson’s best work soundtracked legendary FA Cup moments. His “What drama here!” as Manchester United equalised late on in the 1979 Five-Minute Final, only for Arsenal to hit back with a sucker punch through “Sunderland!”, a meta BBC callback to that old Colemanesque brevity. The increasing throes of Ricky Villa-based rapture in 1981. His gender-fluid take on Wimbledon’s 1988 FA Cup victory: “The Crazy Gang have beaten the Culture Club!” Football Daily, however, prefers his work at the Euros, where his berserk response to Michel Platini’s winner for France in the 1984 semi-final thriller against Portugal – “I’ve not seen a match like this in years!!!!!” – was perhaps only bettered, certainly in terms of the amount of exclamation marks required to give any sort of sense to the occasion, by “Alfonsoooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” when Spain completed an absurd comeback against Yugoslavia in 2000. An all-time classic, that, and the feelgood hit of that summer. Motsooooooooooooon!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Later on, there was also the character Motty, seemingly created as a foil for Des Lynam and Gary Lineker to bounce gentle pint-and-a-pie-style zingers off. A stats-obsessed chuckler in constant danger of being smothered by his own increasingly out-of-control car coat, Motty was beloved to many, and rightly so. But each to their own, and we preferred the earlier recordings by John Motson (vibes). Either way, it’s time to bid farewell to a true broadcasting giant and national treasure. We just hope that when he’s finally laid to rest, the vicar spends an appropriate portion of the eulogy pointing out that Motson is only – heh heh – the 17th person to be buried in this cemetery on a wet Wednesday morning in February, since post-war records began in 1946 anyway. It’s surely what he would have wanted.
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QUOTE OF THE DAY
“It’s a terrible idea. The government are terrible at running everything. Look at the mess the country’s in. We pay the highest taxes for the worst service from the worst government I’ve seen in my life. The regulator will have a huge staff that football will have to pay for. It will be a total waste of money” – West Ham co-owner and bongo baron David Sullivan delivers a furious review of new plans for an independent regulator of the English game; perhaps he should have a word with his vice-chair. Reform group Fair Game welcomed the initial outline, with Niall Couper saying: “Football is in crisis and the white paper could change football for the better forever.”
FOOTBALL DAILY LETTERS
“I am sure you will be deluged by comments about John Motson. I met him when I was on director duties for Stockport County at Barnet. He was a lovely man, wearing that coat, and was genuinely interested in our lower-division football. Barnet ended our run of nine victories without conceding a goal. Much to my disappointment, he didn’t offer a running commentary on the game” – Dan Levy.
“Non-sightings of non-footballers (yesterday’s Football Daily letters)? Easy. As a St Johnstone fan, I’ve been paying for these for years” – Rose Hanley-Nickolls.
“OK, forum exchanges are well and good, but I once delivered post to Gordon Strachan when he was Saints manager and he lived next door to Pompey keeper Shaka Hislop. Imagine the conversations that took place over the fence. Anyone else delivered post to footballers?” – Tim Wild.
Send your letters to the.boss@theguardian.com. Today’s winner of our prizeless letter o’ the day is … Rose Hanley-Nickolls.
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