John Motson was all about the sound of football

“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