Prologue
Dawn broke in Bosnia, and they were gone – the press corps, the Soccer Writers of Ireland – like snow off a ditch. I felt a bit like a war correspondent who’d chosen to ignore advice and stay on, watching as the last flight out took to the skies. My colleagues were in the air. I was alone in Sarajevo.
I was no hero. Sport had brought me to the Balkans and had served up a perfect opportunity. With all of its history, this would be the ideal venue for me to don my other hat, lay down the commentator’s microphone, settle into a radio studio and bring travel to life on RTÉ lyric fm, presenting the music on The Hamilton Scores.
There was no need to rush. With the hour time difference, I wouldn’t be on air until eleven, so I had time to linger. Over the fruit, coffee and cold cuts in the Marriott Residence beside the little play park in Skenderija Street, I perused the online editions of the Dublin papers. The taxi would be along soon enough. I’d checked. It was only a ten- or fifteen-minute ride to the radio station.
We’d come to the city for the first leg of a European Championship play-off, the last-chance saloon for a nearly team. The Republic of Ireland or Bosnia and Herzegovina would qualify
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for the finals in France the following year. We’d spent the previous evening peering through the gloom of a fog that enveloped the football stadium in Zenica, an hour away from the capital. It turned into one of those matches that looked as if it was destined to end scoreless, which would have been perfectly acceptable with the return in Dublin to come. You couldn’t really see a goal coming. When it did, with around ten minutes to go, you couldn’t really see it at all.
A Bosnian attack down to the right had just ended with the ball safely in the arms of the Irish goalkeeper, Darren Randolph. What happened next took place on the far side of the pitch from our seats in the press tribune. The bright LED displays of the advertising hoardings cut through the murk, but the ghostly shapes of the white-shirted Irish advance were less distinct. And as for the ball? Well, it had to be part of this moving tableau, didn’t it? At this point, faute de mieux, it was less of a commentary and more of a conversation between Jim Beglin and myself when he suddenly injected, ‘I think they’ve scored!’ And sure enough, the low-level close-up caught Robbie Brady wheeling away in celebration. It took a second replay from the opposite angle to decipher what had actually taken place. Not even a very late equaliser could dampen the spirits. Thanks to that away goal, 0–0 in the return leg in Dublin seventy-two hours later would be sufficient. The Republic of Ireland did better than that: a 2–0 win sent them on their way to Euro 2016.
The fog of the previous evening had lifted and it was a sunny November Saturday morning as I stepped into the taxi that would deliver me to the radio station. According to my colleague Nicola Byrne, who’d booked the studio for me back in Dublin, I was
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going where no RTÉ broadcaster had ever gone before. My linguistic box of tricks didn’t extend to Bosnian, so it was the hotel doorman who gave directions to the driver.
We moved off past the little play park and along Skenderija Street to join a dual carriageway heading west. Ten minutes later, about an hour before I was due on the air at ten o’clock Irish time, we pulled up outside an imposing glass-fronted palace that bore an unfamiliar logo, with huge white lettering on a red background advising that this was the headquarters of a local television station, TV1. Nothing unusual here, I thought, as I paid for the ride. TV stations can have radio studios too.
I bounded up the steps and through the sliding doors into the lobby. The reception desk was unmanned. From what I could make out, TV1 weren’t the only tenants in the building. The big red logo was visible on the balcony of one of the upper floors. I took the stairs. There was no reception here, just a vast open-plan office, whose sole inhabitant looked up from her keyboard, clearly puzzled at my intrusion. The language barrier was preventing meaningful communication, so she rose from her chair with an internationally recognisable hand gesture that indicated she would go and find someone who could help. She came back with Eddy, who had perfect English and absolutely no idea why I should have ended up there. TV1 was a commercial television station, pure and simple. When I showed him my confirmation of the studio booking, he laughed. This wasn’t where I should be at all.
Eddy wasn’t going to see me stuck. He rang for another cab, then came back down to the street with me to await its arrival and ensure that this one delivered me to the correct address, the
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vast brutalist block on Bulevar Meše Selimovića that was home to the national broadcaster BHRT – Radio Sarajevo – and from there, it was plain sailing all the way.
Not that it’s always been plain sailing. Not by a long chalk. Over fifty years on the commentary circuit there have been enough missed connections, misplaced baggage – I was on first-name terms at one point with the lady in lost luggage at the airport in Rome – and dodgy hotel rooms to confirm that, like the course of true love, life on the road doesn’t always run smooth.
That said, I wouldn’t have missed a minute. It sure beats working for a living.
xii Prologue
Lighting the Blue Touchpaper
My love affair with football had begun back in 1950s’ Belfast when my dutiful dad – once a free-scoring centre forward with Cliftonville – would take me to matches. The biggest thrill each year was that October Saturday when the Irish League closed down because it was international day. Year about, England or Scotland would be in town.
We’d go early to the Kop at Windsor Park, and he’d plonk me on top of a barrier. The Kop – a familiar moniker for the home end at football grounds (think of Liverpool’s Anfield, which, by the way, takes its name from an estate in County Wexford) – is a term that has come down from a battle in the Boer War in South Africa in 1900. The steep terracing was thought to resemble the slopes of the hill known as the Spion Kop near the city of Ladysmith where the military engagement in question took place. Spion is the Afrikaans word for spy, Kop in that language means head. So Spion Kop is the top of the hill where you keep a lookout.
In the 1950s there was precious little sport on television. In fact, there was precious little television. We got our football
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from the paper. So being at the ground – we never called it a stadium – was extra special. To see Harry Gregg, the Northern Ireland goalkeeper, right there in front of me. Bobby Charlton, his Manchester United teammate, scorching down the wing. Those heroes from the back pages. Up close and personal.
And then, who would believe it, Northern Ireland qualified for the World Cup. This was sensational. All we would know would come courtesy of Malcolm Brodie, the doyen of Northern sportswriters and sports editor of the Belfast Telegraph.
I couldn’t wait for the ‘Tele’ to come through the door each evening. Sweden in 1958 marked the birth of the legend of Brazil – Pelé, at seventeen, the star of the show. And Northern Ireland reached the quarter-finals. Is it any wonder that this lad from the Cregagh Road – George Best’s part of town – would get hooked?
Twenty years on RTÉ had made a call, and I was in the airport in Madrid, waiting to board a flight to Buenos Aires and my very own first World Cup, Argentina 1978. I would be sharing an aircraft with Günter Netzer, a German star of ’74, now, like me, working for TV.
This was the biggest shock of the new. With my shiny laminate, I’d be joining a club, and it wasn’t just a commentators’ collective. Everywhere you looked there were faces you recognised from big games gone by, now the purveyors of considered opinion.
What a World Cup baptism it was for me. I was to be based in Mendoza, in the foothills of the Andes. Back then, nobody at home had ever heard of Mendoza. Now, it’s a byword for the best of Argentine wine. It was impossibly romantic.
This was just the second time RTÉ had covered the World Cup. Eight of us set off for South America, which, incredible as
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it may seem in this era of vastly extended coverage, was twice as many as the station’s sports department deemed appropriate to send to the event in Qatar forty-four years later, which featured twice as many teams as the tournament in Argentina. There were four commentators and four ‘minders’, for want of a better description. Co-commentators weren’t standard in those days.
The team leader, sports editor Mike Horgan, was based in Buenos Aires with the lead commentator, Jimmy Magee. Philip Greene, who covered football on the radio, had producer Dermot Kelly alongside him for the games in Córdoba. Billy George, soccer correspondent of The Cork Examiner, as it was known at the time, and a regular contributor of Sunday afternoon match reports, was hired to fill the third commentary slot, famously registering his utter incredulity when the Welsh referee Clive Thomas denied Brazil a late winner against Sweden by blowing his whistle for full time when the ball was in mid-flight following a corner kick. Billy’s travelling companion was the Gaelic games reporter Jim Carney. For me, there would be six matches over four weeks in the company of Maurice Reidy, the man in charge of the Saturday afternoon show Sports Stadium.
Maurice and I left our colleagues in Buenos Aires and departed the city’s domestic airport, the Aeroparque as it’s known, aboard an Austral Airlines 1-11. I remember that flight so well, heading west as the music system played the Carpenters. ‘Yesterday once more,’ they sang. This, though, was about my World Cup tomorrows, my wildest dreams about to be fulfilled. Saturday, 3 June 1978. My World Cup debut. Netherlands against Iran. Argentina was the first of the twelve World Cups I’ve covered. By the time the next one rolled around, I’d moved to London. I
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lucked out again in the four years I spent there, without question the golden age of Radio Sport on the BBC. That sportsroom on the third floor of Broadcasting House, just up from Oxford Circus, was home to an amazing array of talent, with a camaraderie to match. It was more than just a workplace. Sadly, a lot of that was lost with their move to Salford in 2011.
I covered the 1982 World Cup for the BBC, following Scotland until their elimination, then picking up with Northern Ireland, who’d surprised everybody, perhaps even themselves, by beating the Spanish hosts and qualifying for the second round. The night they did that was quite something. Northern Ireland, in their first World Cup since 1958, had drawn against Yugoslavia and Honduras to give themselves a fighting chance of going through, but though the group was wide open, defeat by Spain would almost certainly have put them on an early flight home.
The Scots had already departed, and I had moved from their base on the Costa del Sol to the BBC hotel near Madrid airport to await my next assignment. With me was the former Arsenal captain Frank McLintock, who’d been my co-commentator for the Scotland games.
That Friday night, the hotel had laid on a big screen to show Spain against Northern Ireland. Frank had decided to watch it on his own in his room, no doubt fearful the potentially raucous home crowd could interfere not only with his enjoyment but also with his analysis. I decided to take my chances and took my seat in a packed conference room, which had effectively been turned into a cinema, lights down, all eyes on the screen. I can’t imagine there was anyone else in there cheering on the team in green and white. (I wasn’t actually cheering.)
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It was noisy, and it got noisier still when Gerry Armstrong put Northern Ireland ahead just after the interval. The Spanish were roaring at the screen, a very vocal mixture of encouragement tinged with exasperation. The longer it went on, the more rowdy it became. I was aware of the conference room door opening. Turning towards the shaft of light that pierced the darkness, I saw a familiar figure. It was Frank, scanning the crowd, clearly looking for me.
I raised my arm, and he made his way over to squeeze in beside me. ‘Amazing, isn’t it,’ he said as he sat down. ‘Your guys 1–0 up. I can’t believe it. I couldn’t leave you down here to face the masses on your own. You need some support!’
I was certainly glad of the company, even more so when Mal Donaghy was sent off and the ten men in white and green committed to a rearguard action as the decibel level around the TV soared. The match would enter footballing folklore as one of the greatest upsets in World Cup history.
Prior to moving to Valencia for that fateful encounter, the Spanish squad had been based at our hotel. Fresh from their victory, Northern Ireland moved in to take their place. Disembarking from the team bus it was smiles all round, despite the fact that two of their number sported black eyes. It appeared the celebrations had all been a little too much for Billy Hamilton and Sammy Nelson.
I was straight into an interview with the captain, Martin O’Neill. The unusual appearance of two of the squad was not up for discussion, but he was forthright when it came to analysing Northern Ireland’s remarkable performance. ‘We played to our potential and deserved what we achieved,’ was how he put it.
Lighting the Blue Touchpaper 5
They were punching above their weight and had earned themselves a place in the second group phase, a round robin that involved matches against Austria and France. Only one of the three would progress. First up, France earned two points with a 1–0 win over Austria. Next, it was Austria against Northern Ireland. The stuff of dreams. The little boy who’d read those match reports from Sweden and watched his heroes from his perch on the crush barrier on the Kop all those years ago would have a view of them from the commentary box, playing at the World Cup.
Austria’s defeat meant they had to beat Northern Ireland to have any chance of staying in the competition. For Northern Ireland, it was another blank page. Anything was possible. Billy Hamilton gave them the lead – the spirit of Valencia lived on. But Austria rallied and led 2–1 as the game moved into its closing stages. There was a twist in the tale, though. Hamilton scored again, and with that, Austria were out. The France game would be a shoot-out: winner takes all. But this was the great French team of Platini, Rocheteau and Giresse.
Back at the mic in the Vicente Calderón, the home of Atlético Madrid, it was time to dare to dream. But dreams don’t always come true, and this one died in the face of a relentless onslaught. I’d seen it happen earlier when Brazil had smashed Scotland in Seville. That night in Madrid, France did the same thing to Northern Ireland, by the same scoreline, 4–1.
And that was that as far as my World Cup was concerned. I took a few days on the coast to make the most of my Spanish summer and was back home in Wimbledon to watch as David Coleman called the final on BBC television and Italy claimed the title with a 3–1 win over West Germany.
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Four years on we should have been back in South America, but Colombia was considered a security risk, so the tournament was shifted to Mexico. They’d been hosts in 1970, but they weren’t quite up to speed in ’86. The coverage at the start was a shambles. I remember a meeting when the head of Eurovision (the European Broadcasting Union) announced that they were taking control from the locals. At the back of the hall, the Austrian commentator hoisted a huge pair of foam hands and applauded.
Mind you, that wasn’t the end of the problems. We headed off to a place called Puebla to cover an Italian game. We were booked into commentary position number 48. They were numbered down from the back of the stand, along the rows, and we figured we were fortunate, for we’d be in the front.
We counted along that line, right up to 47. Then there was a gangway. And across it, a punter’s seat. Commentary position 48 had disappeared in a puff of misplaced jack plugs.
The great Tim O’Connor (I say great because I’ve never come across anyone else for whom absolutely no problem was unsolvable), RTÉ’s head of sport at the time, was my minder. In the best traditions of the service, he said, ‘You sit down there and get ready to do your work. I’ll go and sort this out.’
Half an hour later he was back in the stand, shaking his head. ‘I’ve just been in the control room,’ he reported. ‘There are guys in there looking at wires coming out of the wall and wires going into the wall, and they’re pulling some out, and putting some in, and I don’t really think …’ He tailed off and cast around, scanning the commentary area, then delivered a masterpiece of understatement. ‘I think it’s fair to assume there will be no position 48.’
With that he was off, in search of a commentary seat that was
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not only unoccupied but equipped with a telephone. That was how we managed to broadcast that day. And later, in Tel Aviv (for it was Israeli Television’s position he had commandeered), there must have been an accountant wondering how on earth they’d ended up with a monumental phone bill for a commentary position at which they didn’t even have a commentator.
Mind you, we nearly drowned on that trip. We’d covered a Scotland game in a place called Nezahualcóyotl, then a shanty town on the edge of Mexico City. There was an unmerciful thunderstorm during the game.
We were travelling by car, one which we’d hired on arrival. There was a desk in the garage at the hotel. Driving back on a fine dual carriageway, with uncommonly high kerbs, we came upon a traffic jam, but with a discipline you wouldn’t find in Dublin, the two lines of traffic had left space up the middle, presumably for emergency access.
From the front seat, Tim instructed our driver and colleague Max Mulvihill to dodge down between the cars, which he did. We made splendid progress until we neared a junction, where crowds had gathered on the footpath to one side, and the central reservation on the other. As one, they raised their hands to their faces at the sight of our Volkswagen Passat approaching at speed through the stationary traffic. In an instant, we knew why, and also realised why the kerbs were so high.
Thunderstorms weren’t unusual in the area, and flash floods were the regular result. We launched straight into the middle of one, sweeping a huge wash around us, like a lifeboat off a slipway. The car slowed as it ploughed into the depths of this massive pool of rainwater.
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I watched as the water rose to lap the sill of my back-seat window. I thought we were floating, visions of having to wade through this rancid pond filling my brain. ‘What do I do now?’ said Max, grimly holding fast to the steering wheel. ‘Whatever you do,’ said Tim, as ever the calm voice in a crisis, ‘don’t stop!’
Mercifully our momentum carried us through. It would be our last journey in that particular vehicle. The following morning, after breakfast in the Mexico City Sheraton, Tim went to fetch the car from the garage. Max and I finished our coffee and made our way out to the front of the hotel where we’d arranged for him to pick us up. He was a long time gone.
We watched cars come and go as the morning sun gave way to a haze that we’d come to recognise. If you fancied a tanning session by the rooftop pool it had to be done by noon, for if there was one thing Mexico City had plenty of, it was smog. As the morning wore on it would grow denser, and by afternoon there would be precious little sign of the sun.
Finally, we caught sight of Tim behind the wheel. He was in a Passat, all right, but not the one Max had successfully navigated through the flood the previous evening. On boarding, an explanation was swiftly forthcoming. ‘Had to change the car,’ Tim announced. ‘The stench was unbelievable!’ Clearly the water had penetrated the door seals. The question was, how had he managed to talk his way into another charabanc?
‘Oh, that was easy,’ said Tim. ‘I went to the desk and told the guy they should never have rented us the car because there was a god-awful smell in it!’ With a smile on his face he went on, ‘When I brought him out to check it, he didn’t take much convincing.’ As I was saying, for Tim, absolutely no problem was unsolvable.
Lighting the Blue Touchpaper 9
Cars, and what goes on in them, are a large part of the World Cup experience. Often enough, it’s taxis. One night in Palermo, with Ireland in 1990, I was on navigator duty in the front seat, and in my pidgin Italian was attempting to make small talk. The subject: the World Cup, of course. Something about the way the taxi driver spoke when he mentioned a player told me I’d be better off trying a language I knew, so I reverted to German.
Well, he came back as colloquially as if he were from Cologne, which, in a sense, he was.
He’d gone there as a Gastarbeiter (a guest worker, the posh way of describing immigrant labour), without a single word of the local tongue. He’d toiled for seven years on building sites around that lovely city on the Rhine and made enough money to do what he wanted to do, which was to come back home to Sicily and be self-sufficient. And here he was, speaking German like a motorbike, raving about Klinsmann and Matthäus and the rest. It all seemed a long way from Belfast and the Cregagh Road!
USA ’94, like Italia ’90, featured the Republic of Ireland. This was a watershed trip for me, the time I got a better understanding of the Land of the Free. There were nine venues, and I went to every one except the most Irish of them, Boston.
Bill Bryson’s The Lost Continent – the one that begins ‘I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to’ – was my vade mecum. I learned the subtle differences between the big cities, the difference in emphasis between the various states, and learned that however much Americans may appear to be into sport, it’s really the show that matters. The hottest ticket in town was for the opening ceremony.
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Four years later, the tournament was back in Europe. The French were disdainful, to say the least, until their team started to do well. The night they won it, it was as if the storming of the Bastille had coincided with liberation at the end of the Second World War – the streets of Paris were full to overflowing. Heading for home at four in the morning, it was almost impossible to cross the wide avenue of the Champs-Élysées, so thronged was it with revellers. The Metro was still closed for the night, people were sleeping in station doorways. There wasn’t a taxi to be had for love nor money.
We were stranded, with a flight now just hours away, and our hotel – and all our luggage – too far a walk. We stopped at another hotel, down by the river, to see if maybe they could call us a cab. No chance, was the answer, but the exchange had been overheard by an American businessman, just about to leave in his car for the airport. ‘Hop in,’ he said, the price of the ride the full story of what had been an amazing event in French sport, and in French culture.
The Republic of Ireland missed that World Cup, of course, but they were back in 2002. After Italia ’90 and USA ’94, this had a feeling of normal service being resumed. That illusion was shattered when Roy Keane departed the training camp in Saipan, irked at what he perceived to be a lack of professionalism in the planning department. ‘Fail to prepare, prepare to fail,’ as he memorably put it himself.
With or without him, the show would go on. And what a show it would turn out to be.
I didn’t think the tournament should have been held in Japan and South Korea, particularly since it had been so long since it
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was in South America, which had hosted the very first World Cup and delivered eight of the sixteen champions since its inception. But it has become very clear that a football culture is of no advantage when it comes to bidding to host this global jamboree.
I’d covered the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo in 1991, and my third Olympic Games had been in Seoul in 1988, so it wasn’t entirely uncharted territory. But those were essentially single-city events. A World Cup is an entirely different experience.
We left for Tokyo on a Sunday, arriving Monday around four in the afternoon. Rain and a two-hour trek to town didn’t make for the best of starts. But the hotel more than made up for it, American in scale, with what seemed like half a mile of shops and over thirty restaurants on the way from reception to the lobby of the Towers where we had our rooms.
Picking up our credentials involved a trip to Yokohama where the final would be played, fifteen minutes on a bullet train there, forty-five on a regular service on the way back. A gentle breeze took the edge off the heat as we made our way to sign in.
What a place! A magnificent waterfront – shopping malls, convention centres in the same building, another edifice alongside rising huge in the air, designed like a schooner in full sail, an enormous Ferris wheel, all lit up, and a digital display of the time of day at its fulcrum. A skyline that was simply sensational. And there was a galleon moored at the quay.
Ireland had three games in Japan to begin with. As expected, the interest at home was huge. The national commercial radio station Today FM sent its top presenter, Ian Dempsey, to Tokyo to host his hugely popular breakfast show from the World Cup. A studio had been set up in his room. I was invited on as a
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guest, which was not something that RTÉ would normally have approved – they’re the opposition, after all – but wiser counsel prevailed. Having me on Today FM was, in effect, a plug for our coverage of the World Cup, and since it wasn’t going to be on anywhere else, why wouldn’t the lead commentator be talking on a radio show – even an opposition radio show – live from Tokyo?
Given the time difference, this was a breakfast show in the afternoon. Ian was ensconced in his kingdom of faders and microphones and he had Mario Rosenstock for company: Ireland’s leading impressionist. A regular feature bringing a whole cast of characters to life was majoring on those in and around the football team. The manager, Mick McCarthy, loomed large, his booming Barnsley accent filling the room.
There was much hilarity as the show progressed, Ian sprinkling a selection of listener reaction across the banter. He introduced me and we chatted about the prospects, and every now and then there’d be a text with a question for me. And then one arrived out of the blue. ‘That guy doing the George Hamilton voice is sensational. It’s so like the real thing!’ Mario cracked up. And Ian did too.
Ireland got out of their group having scored the only goal Germany conceded on their way to the final, moving to Korea where they succumbed to Spain in the Round of 16, drawing the game before failing in the penalty shoot-out.
Spain themselves would lose to South Korea on penalties. The co-hosts’ success in the competition – they reached the last four, only a late goal from Michael Ballack securing Germany’s place in the final at their expense – resulted in an enormous expression of national pride, a positive surge of feeling in a place where a
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demilitarised zone divides a peninsula and tension is never far from the surface.
I was in Gwangju, a city far south of the capital Seoul, when South Korea beat Spain to qualify for the semi-final. Every last one of their fans in the stadium was wearing the red of the football team’s shirts. Many neutrals were too.
After the victory, in scenes not so far removed from what we’d witnessed that night four years previously in Paris, the streets were a sea of people, all dressed in red.
The impact was enormous, the story ran around the world. The newsroom wanted to hear from someone on the spot. I took the call in a restaurant and found a quiet corner to file a report. I felt like a real foreign correspondent when I got the chance to sign off with: ‘George Hamilton, RTÉ News, Gwangju!’
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2
London Days
They do say absence makes the heart grow fonder. That certainly seemed to be the case with the BBC. No sooner had I left the comfort blanket of their regional headquarters in Belfast than I was back. Well, it was actually two years, and I wasn’t returning to Belfast. No, I was off to Head Office in London to join the team in Radio Sport.
When the deal was done in the autumn of 1980, Fred Cogley, the man in charge at RTÉ, very generously suggested I could move straight away. But I’d committed to a heavy enough schedule in the run-up to Christmas and didn’t want to leave colleagues in the lurch, so it was on my thirty-first birthday, the following January, that I made the move.
It was a big change from what I’d become used to. In Dublin, my desk was in what would once have been a reception room in Montrose House, whose sprawling grounds had become the RTÉ campus in genteel Dublin 4. The sportsroom at the BBC could not have been more different. It was a room with a view from the third floor of Broadcasting House, looking past the spire of
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All Souls Church next door straight down across Oxford Circus and into Regent Street, the throbbing heart of London’s West End in all its glory, bright red buses and all.
Not that there was much time to stop and stare. It may not have been the wall-to-wall coverage of the twenty-first century, but there was still plenty going on. On weekdays in Radio 2, there were five hourly sports desks to be compiled and broadcast through the afternoon, with a fifteen-minute round-up at a quarter to seven. Saturdays began on Radio 4 with the morning magazine Sport on Four, presented by Tony Lewis, the former England cricket captain, whose mellifluous Welsh lilt lent itself perfectly to the gentle ruminations that were the programme’s staple. And as Saturday was the biggest day of the sporting week back in the early 1980s, Radio Sport’s crowning glory was the centrepiece of that day’s output.
Sport on Two ran on the station’s medium-wave frequency from 1.30 p.m. until 6 p.m., incorporating for the final hour the iconic Sports Report, radio’s equivalent of a newspaper’s back pages, a real must-listen back then. It was first broadcast on 3 January 1948 with Raymond Glendenning in the chair and has gone on to become the longest-running sports programme on radio in the world.
For about a third of its history it’s had an Irish presenter. Eamonn Andrews was the first, through the fifties and into the sixties. Liam Nolan followed. He would undoubtedly have stayed on as its frontman for a lot longer than the four years he was at the helm had the desire to be back in Ireland not won out over a burgeoning career at BBC Radio that included an offer to present the Today programme. Desmond Lynam, born in Ennis,
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County Clare, but shorn of his Irish accent by his adolescence in Brighton on the south coast of England, to which his family had emigrated when he was just six, steered Sports Report – now part of the expanded Sport on Two – through the seventies. He’d go on to become the UK’s top television sports presenter, his relaxed bonhomie most in evidence as he introduced England’s opening match at the 1998 World Cup in France, which had a Monday lunchtime kick off. Lynam welcomed viewers to the coverage with the words, ‘Shouldn’t you be at work?’
I became the fourth Irish voice to front the show when I’d deputise for the then regular presenter, Mike Ingham. The Sports Report audience was summoned to the speakers by the iconic signature tune ‘Out of the Blue’, the familiar ta-tum, ta-tum, ta-tumpety tum music originally written by Hubert Bath to be performed by the marching band of Britain’s Royal Air Force at a display at Hendon Aerodrome in north-west London. Threeand-a-half hours earlier another melody had become instantly recognisable.
I’d wager not too many involved in Sport on Two knew the title of its signature tune. The bold brass of ‘Number One’, a recording by a group led by a German saxophonist known as the Delle Haensch Band, could have been written just for the programme. It was known to everyone on the show as the ‘Five and Twenty’. A double fanfare announced the piece, then drew breath for five seconds, enough time to say, ‘Good afternoon, and welcome to Sport on Two,’ before the music launched into its main theme. A bridge, some twenty seconds long, was the presenter’s cue to rattle through the day’s menu before the horns took over again.
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It’d be a pretty varied bill of fare – Peter Bromley at the main race meeting of the day, the rugby covered by Ian Robertson and Chris Rea, both of them former Scottish internationals, Tony Adamson (another Irishman, born in Donegal) covering the tennis or golf – all building up to the main event, or at least the main event for nine months of the year, second-half commentary on a top First Division football match.
Those were the days when the BBC wasn’t allowed to announce which match it would be covering until kick-off time. This was to assuage the fears of the football authorities that prior knowledge of which match would provide fortyfive minutes of radio entertainment might affect attendances elsewhere. As if!
Still, those were the rules, so the anticipation would be cranked up in the studio to the moment at precisely 3 p.m. when we’d go live to Peter Jones who would announce, ‘Today, we’ve come to Old Trafford (or Maine Road, or Anfield, or The Dell) …’ and would then offer up a little teaser, putting the game in context.
And at five to four (only ten-minute half-times back then), Radio 2 would be live. On winter afternoons this generally coincided with ‘the floodlights are on’, which became something of a catchphrase, a key component in painting the word picture.
Forty-five minutes of live action, and then it was a swift trip around the grounds for a brief summary of what had gone on elsewhere as the hands ticked up to the top of the hour. ‘And now the time is five o’clock, time for Sports Report’ would be accompanied by the unmistakable sound of the programme’s musical punctuation mark.
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I had joined as a commentator, but that wasn’t my sole deployment. I did sports desks through the week as well, and there were those Saturdays too when I was in the chair for Sport on Two. Apart from the ‘Five and Twenty’ at the top of the show, it was real live radio with very little scripted. But all that changed at five o’clock.
Bryan Tremble was the producer of the programme. Each Friday, he’d present his running order, all subject to change of course, depending on how events played out. But once we got to Sports Report, there was a distinct structure. Bryan liked his match reporters to know how they were going to be introduced, so that they could frame their opening remarks accordingly. What this meant in practice was that you composed three separate introductions, or links, for each game – home win, away win and draw. When the moment arrived, you read the appropriate words. Sometimes, though, the script simply had to be torn up. On one particular Saturday, Friday’s wildest imaginings could never have predicted the action at the Merseyside derby at Goodison Park in 1982. It ended Everton 0, Liverpool 5 – their biggest win at the home of their rivals.
I was on commentary duty that day. There was nothing to suggest this was likely to happen. For sure, Everton’s recent record in the derby was dreadful: four wins in their last twenty-four meetings, one of those in the FA Cup. They hadn’t had bragging rights after a League game for over four years. But they hadn’t lost at home that season, and they were on a decent run, a narrow defeat at Southampton the previous Saturday ending a sequence of three straight wins. After twelve games, they were only four points behind Liverpool, who were top of the table.
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The feeling in the blue half of the city was that this was their best chance in years, even though Liverpool were the defending champions, and the European Cup holders to boot. Howard Kendall had his team primed to bring them down. That was how it felt looking on from our commentary seats beside the directors’ box as the atmosphere crackled, and the Everton captain Billy Wright, football in hand, burst from the tunnel leading out the players in their vivid blue shirts. No sedate procession behind the match officials, as is now the case. The roar went up. Wright responded by thumping the ball he was carrying high into the air. Everton were ready for this.
But so were Liverpool. They hit the woodwork twice in the opening minutes, then had a goal by Kenny Dalglish disallowed. Everton were rattled, riding their luck.
There was a debutant in their line-up. An injury to Everton’s regular centre half, Mark Higgins, had prompted Kendall to bring in a replacement on loan. Glenn Keeley, whom he’d managed at Blackburn Rovers, was his choice, but there was a problem. Keeley was in dispute with his club and had been training on his own. Worse, he hadn’t played for six months. Kendall didn’t see that as an issue.
He gave Keeley a run-out in the reserves the weekend before the derby, then told him on the Tuesday that he’d be in the starting eleven to face the top team in the country. ‘You’re a big-game player,’ he’d said, but the player himself knew he would struggle. When he told his wife, her no-nonsense response was, ‘You can’t play, Glenn, you need a few more games.’
This was going to be a long afternoon for the Everton defence. Eleven minutes on the clock, Alan Hansen put Rush in for the
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first of his goals. By half-time it had got immeasurably worse for the home side. Keeley, tormented throughout by Dalglish in particular, pulled him back by the shirt to prevent a second goal. Not having played that season, the defender was unaware that a new regulation meant the punishment for denying a clear goalscoring opportunity was no longer a booking but a red card.
By the time we took up live second-half commentary Everton, though only 1–0 down, had been reduced to ten men. The floodgates duly opened. Rush got his second, released by Dalglish, who then set up Mark Lawrenson for the third. Rush hit the post going for his third but buried the rebound to make history by achieving the first ever hat-trick by a Liverpool player at Goodison Park, and the first in the Merseyside derby in the forty-seven years since a certain centre forward called Fred Howe. Sammy Lee put Rush in for his fourth and Liverpool’s fifth. History had repeated itself. Howe had also finished with four goals on that September afternoon at Anfield back in 1935. That day Liverpool won 6–0. As for Glenn Keeley, his Everton career lasted just those thirtyseven minutes he was on the pitch before the referee, Derek Civil, sent him off. He never played for the club again.
While football was my main preoccupation as a commentator, the broad canvas of sport on offer meant I’d be deployed from time to time in other areas. So it was the previous November, on the day our first daughter was born, that I found myself on board a British Airways flight to Belfast where the touring Australian rugby team would be in action the following day. Alongside me was my old schoolmate Alan Green, who’d followed me into the presenter’s chair on Good Morning Ulster, and was now aiming to repeat the trick by joining Radio Sport. He’d had his
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job interview in London that day and was more interested in sharing the ins and outs of that than in looking at the Polaroid pictures of my offspring. He got the job and was soon relocating to Manchester as Radio Sport’s north of England reporter, a post that evolved into the role of principal commentator, a forthright voice who pulled no punches, which made him the scourge of Alex Ferguson alongside many others. Their feud would become the stuff of legend.
I stayed that night with my parents, who were understandably overjoyed at the images of their first grandchild. We were joined for lunch the following day by Ian Robertson, who’d be sharing commentary duties on Ulster against the Wallabies at Ravenhill just a mile away, down the Cregagh Road.
It’s not the rugby I remember so much about that day, though I did have a personal interest in the opposition. Playing at centre for Australia was Andrew Slack, whom I’d got to know really well during the time he spent in Dublin with Wanderers. He helped the tourists to a 12–6 win. The abiding memory, though, was hearing on the lunchtime news that the Ulster Unionist MP for South Belfast, the Rev. Robert Bradford, had been assassinated by the Provisional IRA as he held a clinic in Finaghy community centre in his constituency. The twenty-nine-year-old caretaker of the facility, Ken Campbell, was also shot dead. Bobby Bradford, as he was known, had been a talented footballer and was an enthusiastic supporter of the soccer club in his student days at Queen’s University, remembered for his colourful language as much as anything else. It was a stark reminder that nobody was many degrees of separation away from what was euphemistically termed ‘the Troubles’.
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