John Motson: 'I was incredibly lucky - but I never saw England in a major final'

John Motson can’t put a precise figure on the hundreds of matches on which he has commentated during his 47 years as a television staple. But one thing he is sure about: he can immediately identify the best game he ever worked on.

“Oh, England 5 Germany 1 in Munich, 2001,” he says. “I can live every moment again. Funnily enough, Greg Dyke, who was the director general of the BBC back then, and I were at the airport the next morning when he heard that the viewing figures were over 20 million. He almost did a lap of honour round the departure lounge. I said to him: ‘it’s all very well Greg but what about the 30-odd million people who didn’t see it? Why don’t you show it again?’ He said: ‘yeah let’s put it on tonight’. And he did. It was the only time in my life I was a television scheduler.”

As he speaks the crackle of excitement is audible in his voice, his sentences punctuated by the characteristic little chuckle that has become part of our national soundscape. This Sunday, however, will mark the last time we will hear it on Match of the Day. At the age of 72 the voice of a generation is hanging up his sheepskin coat. And he leaves, he says, a happy man.

“I’m not going to forget the thrill I got sitting behind the microphone. I’m going to miss it but I’m not going to have to go too far to watch a match. I’m not going to cut myself off from a lifetime’s experience.”

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Mind, it has not been the most sudden of announcements, his departure. Frank Sinatra would have been pushed to match the scale and ceremony of his season-long goodbye, in which he has commentated on a game involving every club in the Premier League. The final hurrah will come on May 19 when an entire evening of programmes will be dedicated to him, as BBC2 hosts Motty Night.

“Oh gosh, it was the BBC’s idea, this farewell tour,” he sighs. “Sadly I haven’t completed it, I didn’t get to all 20 league grounds, I only managed 16. But it has been so rewarding. One or two clubs have been kind enough to recognise my departure with a small gift, for which I’m very grateful.”

On the day we meet, he is sitting in Wembley Stadium, which has become over the years of reporting on FA Cup finals and England internationals, almost his second home. It is the ideal spot to reflect back on his magnificent career, from the most precarious commentating position he ever occupied (“at Leeds the ladder up to it was so sheer if you’d fallen back you wouldn’t have done another commentary”) to the modern fashion for extravagant squad numbers (“I saw somebody the other day with 90-something on his shirt; that hasn’t made my life any easier.”) And he recalls, as if it had happened yesterday, the moment when, as a cub reporter fresh from the radio, he realised he might actually make it on television.

“I feel I’m boring people with this story, but the turning point for me was February 1972 and that Cup replay at Hereford against Newcastle. I really was very much the junior commentator, filling in with lower table matches.

"When they sent me to Hereford I think my bosses thought it would be very straightforward, three or four minutes which would make up the end of Match of the Day. Then came Ronnie Radford scoring the goal which probably changed my career. It was the first match on that night. I remember going back to Billy Meadows, the centre forward’s house, eating fish and chips and listening to a record his wife had just bought which was American Pie, the Don McClean song that was leading the charts at the time. It remains probably the most pivotal day in my career because I think people thought: oh well Motson maybe can do a big occasion.”

And over four decades he has proved exactly that, his voice forever associated with football’s landmark moments. Though he admits he has not been everybody’s cup of broadcasting tea.

“When it comes to commentators, one man’s preference is another man’s nadir, if you want to use that word,” he says. “I’m not going to deny I had my critics, there were people who probably couldn’t stand the sound of my voice, others were very kind and said I really spoke their language.”

But even if you preferred Barry Davies, Martin Tyler or Clive Tyldesley, nobody could deny Motson knew his stuff. His research was extraordinary. I recall once doing an article following his preparations for the 1992 FA Cup final. He had sat in the stands as Sunderland played their last league game before the final, away at Brighton, then positioned himself in reception at the hotel where they were staying, watching each of the players at close quarters as they checked out, committing to memory their faces, their hairstyles, anything about them that would make identification easier.

“I loved doing it,” he says of his meticulous preparations. “It wasn’t a chore. But it was a challenge. In my early days I couldn’t sit at home watching live matches on the television: there weren’t any. I had to go to training grounds, I researched on the hoof, in corridors, face to face.”

The commentator’s life is very different now. He recalls when he first started standing with half a dozen others outside the dressing room at Anfield waiting for Bill Shankly to emerge for his post-match interviews. Now there are reporters from all over the world at big matches, flooding purpose-built media theatres, each hoping for their moment.

“We used to get time for proper interviews, now you get 30 seconds if you’re lucky. And I have to say some of the questions have become so predictable. “So that was a great performance Jose”: it doesn’t really bring the best out of them.”

But, whatever changes, he reckons the basic requirements of his trade are the same as they ever were.

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“Be clear and simple, identify the players, those rules are at the heart of commentary,” he says. “What’s changed is technology. When I started the BBC only had one replay machine and it was used for the racing. And when I first reported a penalty shootout, I had to mark up my own piece of paper.” That, he reckons, was his most neve-racking moment in the commentary box.

“I never felt more scared than that shootout in the 1990 World Cup semi-final. I thought if I lose track of the sequence and say England are through to the World Cup final – or more likely Germany are – and there was still a penalty to go I’d be finished. Fortunately I didn’t.”

And that moment in Turin represents another thing: the closest he came to what he reckons would have been the crowning privilege of his magnificent career.

“I’ve tried ever so hard to be a neutral. But the one time I could allow myself the luxury of commentating from one team’s perspective was with England. Though I had to be careful not to say us and we, because of the licence fee payers in Wales and Scotland, not to forget Northern Ireland. And I have to say one of my only regrets is I never saw England in a major final. I wish my successors every luck in that particular department.”

One thing is certain: should England ever make it to a final, John Motson will be watching. Because while he may well be a great broadcaster, a magnificent voice, a national institution, above all Motty is a football fan.

“People often say to me what a lucky man I was to have been paid for doing something I love,” he says. “They’re right, of course I was incredibly lucky. Though I would add the rider that there was maybe a little bit of work involved.”