We forget sometimes that television is such an artificial medium. We get lost in the mists and swirls of it, suckered in like tourists at a three-card monte table. This happens despite the fact that somewhere away back in the subconscious, we know that it’s all a pose. We know that every shot, every camera angle, every line is pre-cooked. Scripted, sculpted, moulded just so.
At a very basic level, that’s why sport is such a gift to television. At a certain point, all the artifice falls away. All the build-up, all the nonsense, all the analysis and interviews against sponsors’ backdrops and touchscreen tactical breakdowns and fluff and guff and all the rest of it stops. A referee blows a whistle and everything is suddenly real.
There was nothing artificial about John Motson. You listened to him commentate on a football match and you knew, instantly and without having to think about it, that he was being himself. His enthusiasm for the game was uncomplicated and unabashed. He was on television and he was serving the people who were tuning in so a level of performance was unavoidable. But you never got the sense that he was offering anything other than pure distilled Motson.
That’s why he connected, ultimately. It’s why his death at the age of 77 strikes a chord with so many people. He wasn’t everyone’s favourite commentator by any means – plenty of us were far more taken with Barry Davies when it came to plumping for one BBC voice over the other back in the day. But John Motson was a fixture, an indelible link to those first years when the game was entering your bloodstream forever. His commentaries from three, four, five decades ago live on now, every bit as vital as the games they soundtracked.
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Very few commentators get to be that person. Longevity doesn’t, by itself, guarantee it. Plenty of commentators in plenty of sports have done whole careers behind the microphone and have slid from public view as respected, valued servants to the game. But you won’t go far past the fingers of one hand counting the figures who defined an era.
John Motson sits comfortably among them though – and for a few reasons. He was a one-sport man, for a start. The BBC would occasionally get him to try his hand at other sports, Olympics and such. But it always felt like a bit of a gimmick. Motson was dutiful and diligent and typically prepared but even so, it never landed. You’d hear him commentating on a Team GB hockey match or something and it just wouldn’t feel right.
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No, he was a football man. Of the countless clips that did the rounds online after his death, there was one where he was asked to talk about football in society at some stage in the past few years. He talks with his whole body, arms going, shoulders hunching, eyebrow furrowed as he picks through his words, trying to make sure he has the right ones. All of it sincere, all of it a statement of his fealty to and belief in the relentless power of soccer.
“Majorly important,” he says. “It represents an outlet for people, a brotherly affection between people who support the same team. It streamlines an interest that people can take, whatever their age, whether it’s in the stadium, on the television, on their mobile phones.
“Go into a pub and try and listen to a conversation without football. Impossible. I’ve tried it. Not just because it’s me! It captivates the nation. It outreaches every other sport. I’m a fan of cricket and horse racing and boxing – nothing gets near football. And honestly, it’s not just in this country, it’s worldwide.”
And as he talks, you close your eyes and though that voice is 50 years older than the one that screamed home Ronnie Radford’s goal for Hereford in the 1972 FA Cup, the inflections and intonations are unmistakably him. His sport took over the planet across the span of his career and yet he never gave the slightest hint that he’d wearied of it. He retained that capacity for wonder and was never embarrassed or self-conscious about it.
Everything in football is so knowing now, as though nobody can ever admit to being surprised by what is happening. Motson was a devotee of statistics long before xG was a twinkle in a data analyst’s eye but he was never a know-all. His instinct was always to use them as a guide rather than a weapon. He treated every small piece of arcane trivia as though he’d discovered a new element for the periodic table. None of it was for show.
In the end, it was that zest for the game, that untamed love for its nooks and its crannies that defined John Motson. Football has lost its least-secret admirer.
