He is the man who told us, during Euro 96, that ‘the Velvet Revolution between the Czechs and Slovaks doesn’t affect the fact that most of the Czech Republic’s players come from the old Czechoslovakia’.
And bewilderingly opaque though that piece of historical analysis might have been, it seemed to sum up the wonder of John Motson — whom the BBC will on Wednesday announce is to step down from the commentary box at the end of this season after a career spanning 50 years, 10 World Cups, 29 FA Cup finals and more than 200 England games.
There have been times when Motson’s delight in knowledge and information has bordered on the comical, but this simply reflected his unpremeditated, unadulterated love of a sport for which no fact seemed irrelevant. The obscurities were sprinkled among the innumerable trademark Motson exclamations — ‘My goodness!’, ‘Oh I say!’ — and they brought colour and life to the game in a way that monochrome statistics will never do.
John Motson will retire at the end of the season after a 50-year career as a commentator
Motson belongs to a time when football was less po-faced and cool and when there was room for eccentricity, as one of his thoughts tumbled into another.
‘And I suppose Spurs are nearer to being out of the FA Cup now than at any other time since the first half of this season, when they weren’t ever in it anyway,’ he told us on another occasion.
The less acknowledged aspect of Motty the fact machine is just how many hard yards he covered to unearth the sense of a club and their players before taking up his microphone. He fretted if he had not visited the home club the day before a Saturday TV commentary.
His breakthrough game was the legendary 1972 FA Cup third- round replay in which Hereford’s Ronnie Radford and Ricky George finished off Newcastle. His commentary is legendary. Less appreciated is the fact that Motson travelled to and from the game with match-winner George, in the back of a Vauxhall VX40 driven by Hereford striker Bill Meadows, and spent the evening in Meadows’s house watching the highlights.
Motson was awarded with an OBE at Buckingham Palace in 2001 for his services to football
Motson commentates at the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City during the 1986 World Cup
Motson’s description of the iconic George goal was prosaic and not really poetry. ‘I would dearly love to have punctuated my commentary with better language, nicely round phrases, wider vocabulary and better lines,’ he reflected years later. But his connections and gregariousness allowed him to live and breathe that giantkilling club, like countless others.
Motson, whose curiosity and quest for detail was honed during a formative newspaper career on the Barnet Free Press and Sheffield Morning Telegraph, needed to put in the hard yards because the man with whom he forged an absorbing 30-year rivalry, Barry Davies, was the more erudite of the two.
For 17 years, Motson had the edge. He took the FA Cup finals and World Cup finals, leaving a discontented Davies with the European Cup consolation prize. But the phone call he got at a Manhattan bar in 1994, telling him that Davies would be ‘calling’ the impending World Cup final, devastated him. ‘That’s your lot son’ stated one brutal headline back home.
Motson commentated on 29 FA Cup finals and more than 200 England games in his career
(L-R) Alan Hansen, Trevor Brooking, Motson and Des Lynam at Arsenal vs Tottenham in 1993
Motson poses with the Premiership trophy
‘They preferred Barry’s more restrained style to my own,’ Motson later reflected. Motson took a sabbatical and left for a solitary cruise up the Nile, but returned to find ‘somehow or other my absence had made a few people’s hearts grow fonder’. He didn’t look back.
There were challenges for both men beyond the comprehension of today’s commentators. The BBC had only one ‘video-disc’ action replay machine, which was allocated to horse-racing for Saturday’s Grandstand show. So they had to re-tell a goal sequence as they saw it and hoped they would be right when the images were put into the slow-motion machine later for Match of the Day.
Motson’s own trials included Brian Clough’s attempt to eviscerate him, during one televised interview. ‘I am far more qualified than you or any of your colleagues. I suggest you shut up and show more football,’ Clough told him. That was rich coming from a man who had made a tidy sum out of TV punditry. The implacable young Motson politely told Clough so on camera, refusing to yield.
In recent years there has been sneering from some recesses of social media about his exhaustive research and endless enthusiasm. But what do these keyboard warriors know? Not every commentator would have thought to phone the Wimbledon goalkeeper Dave Beasant on the Tuesday before the 1988 FA Cup final to ask what he would do in the event of Liverpool getting a penalty, and how he might deal with John Aldridge’s unusual method of pausing during his run-up.
The 72-year-old’s quest for detail was honed during his formative newspaper career
Motson braves a blizzard to give his report from Wycombe’s Adams Park back in 1990
Motson did. ‘Beasant thought the kick might go to his left, or the right as we look,’ he declared in commentary. It played out just as he predicted, with Beasant making a famous save.
He claimed towards the end of his career that being dropped in 1994 led to a ‘more restrained style of commentary’ from him. But he has remained the commentary box everyman, so often delivering that euphoric response that could be yours or mine. ‘In a sense it’s a one-man show . . . ’ he declared on another occasion. ‘Except there are two men involved, Hartson and Berkovic. And a third, the goalkeeper . . . ’
‘I’ve absolutely loved it. I’ve really been very lucky,’ Motson said of his career last night.
The pleasure has been ours. The football landscape will be far poorer without him.
The football landscape will be much poorer without Motson when he retires this summer