Martin Tyler’s voice and love for the game are a constant between football eras

A t Sky Sports, they still called him “the Voice”. Richard Keys, the long-serving anchorman to Martin Tyler in the commentary box, claimed this weekend this was because Tyler “definitely didn’t have a face for TV” – throwing us back to a now distant, coarser era of broadcasting.

At 77, Tyler is the perennial who floated above the eras. Viewers of 40-plus will recall his career extending far further back than before football began in 1992. At both the 1982 and 1986 World Cups, Tyler acted as ITV’s main commentator while Brian Moore stayed in a London studio before flying out for the latter tournament’s final. Back in the days of regional highlights making up ITV’s Big Match programme, Tyler was the voice of Yorkshire TV football and then Granada in the north-west. The more clipped Tyler of the pre-Sky years is prime commentary from an era of less meaning more.

Those overseas from the UK will recognise his vocal range of tenor to soprano from broadcasts of the World Cup and Euros in Australia and the United States. Tyler was everywhere he could be while top-level football was being played. He intends to remain so; accompanying the news he would no longer be with Sky was the message he did not yet consider himself retired.

Among his contemporaries, John Motson, two months older, who died earlier this year, had retired from live work in 2008 while Moore, the previous doyen of English football commentary, hung up his mic at 66 after the 1998 World Cup and died three years later. Barry Davies, now 85, stepped away from the BBC’s Match of the Day in 2004 at 66. Clive Tyldesley, the voice of ITV’s Champions League coverage during Sky’s early glory years and now 68, joins Tyler as last men standing, two vintage guns for hire.

A