The happy hispid face of Association Football commentary hides a long and arduous history. Today’s top commentators owe a lot to previous generations of pundits who fought to legitimise, intellectualise, harmonise, and visualize their unique trade on radio and TV. Indeed, the art of commentary has surpassed football itself, prompting the question “which came first, football or the football commentator”? Of course, the answer is obvious to all but the most demented of historians (it was football).

“Football commentary has come a long way to reach its current state of perfection” according to Barry, a banger on Templeogue College’s under-14 schools’ cup winning team. “It’s great at the moment, but I fear the constant improvement in commentating standards will make it sterile, unloving, ambiguated, even porcelain”, he said. “Ambiguated” is not a word, but Barry still seems to have a point. Forrester Research claims that errors in football commentaries - specifically in the areas of pronunciation, identification, conduction, convection, and radiation - have been reduced to an amazing 0.05 percent. Indeed, in one of his commentaries, George Hamilton achieved an almost unheard of 0.001 percent error rate. This compares very favourably to the 70 percent error rate of the early 70s.

Commentary larva

Who is responsible for these vast strides? The answer is complex and requires an examination of commentary’s development over many hundreds of years. Theory on the origin of football commentaries would seem to be split into two, no three schools. Jimmy Hill is an advocate of the “something-to-do-with-evolution” school of thought, while others say it was accidentally discovered by Faraday while theorising conductivity or capacitance or something like that. But the theory with most credence is that touted by Barry Fry et al. Historians maintain that a 9th century Chinese stained-glass window depicts a sage commentating on what looks like a game of Richatchi, an early form of football. Or was that golf?

Anyway, the pre-Barry Davis art of commentary developed many of its subtleties in the period between its inception and the 1960s, reaching its peak in 1966 when Kenneth Wolstenholm uttered the immortal line “some people have got on the pitch - they think the match is over - the game has ended now and England have snatched it at the death!”

Most surprisingly, it went through both beatnik and funk phases - antitheses of the modern fact-driven, business-like commentaries that provide the cornerstone even the most inspirational modern broadcasts of today. Indeed, elements of these styles can still be seen in the work of Atkinson and Beglin. While filling the audience in on inside angles, they also seem to scream, “I don’t care” or “papa’s got a brand new bag”. Many believe the liberal and relaxed beatnik era bore the spoiled child commentating style of the early 80s, epitomised by hell-raisers like Moore.

In anthesis from caterpillar to butterfly, the world of commentary had also experienced bitter infighting and a kind of commentating prohibition. A case study of such upheaval appeared in Ireland in the 60s. A young George Hamilton was forced to share dressing rooms with the Billy Barry kids, while GAA and horse racing commentators like Michael O’Hare enjoyed the splendour of large rooms with stir-about and dipping crackers. A defiant Hamilton convened a meeting in the Macushla ballroom on Amien’s St., unifying soccer commentators around Ireland and amplifying their voice for political change. In a dramatic showdown with RTE, George became a champion of commentators’ rights. This was to be the beginning of a new age - George’s voice was now in the shop window.

Going metric

The money a commentator can earn today is staggering. Jimmy McGee how has a market capitalization of over $1 billion on the Nasdaq, a far cry for the days when broadcasters were paid with snippets of trivia. They also have the luxury of using technological technology on the cutting edge of technology in their commentaries. Out the window have gone tools such as the protractor, the abacus and the spud gun, only to be replaced with lasers, supercomputers, NMR and sophisticated forensic techniques. Today, a quick swab behind the ears of a player in the dressing room will tell you if he was offside or not during the game.

Developments do not stop there, however. Scientists in Purdue University have isolated the gene responsible for Ronglish. When they injected a group of test sheep with a buffer solution, they found they grew an extra sheepskin coat. Also, Japanese scientists now claim to have produced a prototype robotic commentator that can move its 60 lb arm just like the real thing. It is said to be much more energy efficient than a real commentator, although it does tend to explode more.

The age of the technically perfect broadcast commentator is not far away, but will this be an end to its rich texture? Ultimately, there will always be a place for the traditional, less scientific commentator - the statistics bare this out. We can only pray they continue to enrich our lives.