RIP, John Motson (1945-2023)

I wrote this piece about him, as part of my Wrong Place, Right Time series, for the County programme when we hosted Barnet last term...

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Hatter in Macc ‘takes five’ to discover those from the football world who have links to the home towns and cities of our opponents… without ever having played for them!

JOHN MOTSON, OBE (Barnet Press reporter, 1963-67)

1. Motty the Player!

Yes, the famed BBC commentator and all-round national treasure did actually get his boots on back in the day. Which was a tad surprising in itself, given that the young, Salford-born ‘Motty’ had spent his formative years being educated at Culford public school in Suffolk, where cricket, hockey and rugger dominated the sports fields, and football - the one-time gentleman’s game played by ruffians - was generally frowned upon. But a couple of years after starting work in the newspaper business as a journalist in Barnet, Motty, in 1965, was a co-founder, with two other local scribes, of Roving Reporters FC. Our ‘man on the mic’ played in the early seasons for RR, who became inaugural members - and are today the sole surviving ones (with Motty as a Life Vice-President) - of the Barnet Sunday League in 1966.

2. Motty the Hack-turned-Broadcaster

After four years with the Barnet Press, Motty relocated to Sheffield, where he first covered football while working for that city’s Morning Telegraph in 1967 and 1968. But before he knew it, his career was to move into broadcasting, and eventually in a big way, when the BBC hired him as a sports presenter on Radio 2. A year after joining the Beeb, towards the end of 1969 at Everton, he was commenting on a match over the airwaves for the first time, and in early October 1971 he was once again in Liverpool - albeit in the red part, at Anfield - to chalk up another landmark as he covered his inaugural fixture on Match Of The Day. The elite league game between Liverpool and Chelsea, which finished goalless, offered little else to commend it to the memory - but four months later, at non-league Hereford, the 26-year-old Motty’s star truly, if unexpectedly, shot into the ascendancy. It was at a packed Edgar Street, and on a muddy quagmire of the Southern League club’s pitch, where the ‘Bulls’ dumped top-flight Newcastle out of the FA Cup by the odd goal in three in a Third Round replay best remembered for Ronnie Radford’s 30-yard screamer of an equaliser and a subsequent pitch invasion by joyous home fans clad in Parkas. And Motty was on the gantry to commentate on it all, as the BBC bosses decided to bump up the giant-killing to the top of that night’s MOTD billing. A three-year contract followed, and his broadcasting career, for the remainder of his 50 years with the Corporation, never looked back.

3. Motty the Legend

Motty’s first FA Cup Final commentary was in 1977, when one of the many carefully-crafted lines for which he is remembered was uttered. As victorious Manchester United captain Martin Buchan went up to the ‘old’ Wembley’s Royal Box to collect the trophy, Motty, in a reference to John Buchan’s novel ‘The Thirty-Nine Steps’, exclaimed: “How fitting that a man called Buchan should be the first to climb the 39 steps.” From the late 1970s to 2008, he presided over all but two FA Cup Finals, as well as at a host of World Cups and European Championships, and was the dominant football commentary figure at the BBC. He was honoured with an OBE in 2001, and, despite retiring from live television commentary seven years later, continued to broadcast on the radio, cover tv match highlights and provide BBC website reports until retiring in 2018 - having worked on more than 2,000 matches in one medium or other. He received a Special BAFTA Award the same year in recognition of his outstanding contribution to sports broadcasting. And he will forever be lovingly associated with the sheepskin coat, after appearing in one, looking a tad forlorn, as the snow fell down on him at Wycombe in 1990. He recalls having got through ‘nine or 10’ made-to-measure ones over the years.

4. Motty in Retirement

Retirement is a relative term in the world of Motty, who joined the talkSPORT team after leaving the BBC, as well as becoming the advertising voice of gambling platform Football Index and commentator for the free-to-play mobile game Head Ball 2. He has also provided, since 2015, the commentary and narration to the CBeebies football programme, Footy Pups.

5. Motty the Fan… ‘to Bee a Pilgrim’?

A Salford lad by birth he might be, but Motty grew up rather further East - and has been known to express affection for the ‘Pilgrims’ of Boston, recalling their famous FA Cup victory over Derby as a nine-year-old in 1955. But, when pressed, he remains ‘Bees’-otted about tonight’s visitors, more than half a century after working as a junior reporter for the Barnet Press. “I’ve always lived around Hertfordshire”, he once explained (and still resides there today), “and have looked for their results ever since… I go and watch them whenever I can.”

The present crew of commentators can't hold a candle to JM.

He was a legend and very knowledgeable, without ramming endless statistics down your throat, or insisting that the coverage was LIVE.

RIP Motty

I hope the two are not linked !!!!