Match of the Day
Match of the Day
Blog Article
And they’ve seen firsthand the pitfalls they need to avoid. Find a head coach who works, support them through the inevitable downtimes, and reap the benefits over the long run. Keonhacai football under both Hayden Fry and Kirk Ferentz is a great example of this approach paying off.
Cowen has been a Match of the Day commentator since 2018, but it was during last year’s women’s Euros that she really came to prominence. Game changers” pronouncement when England won the final instantly entered the annals of sports commentary. In April 2003, in the Premier League 10 Seasons Awards, Tyler was voted as the Premier League Commentator of The Decade by fans and a specially assembled panel of football experts. Names and title information are usually in black, player and match data in blue, goal statistics in red and miscellaneous material in green.
That's the beauty of having so much time together and so much experience together. Cowen is a shining exception, and to be in her hands is to have the viewing experience immeasurably enhanced. Noticing what you notice (and more), she is another example of how the women’s game has improved on the men’s, the latter still riven with a level of gamesmanship that the former comes nowhere near. It shouldn’t be too much to ask that a commentator concentrates on the game, reads the action, contextualises, anticipates moves, processes in an instant what is happening and finds the right words to describe it. Yet not many commentators are actually able, or inclined, to do this. This is what my safety net looks like when I step onto the high wire of live commentary to millions of viewers.
You need to be pretty sure of your ground before you start being damning or dismissive. These days, fans sing ‘you’re not fit to wear the shirt’ too readily. As Barry Davies, a retired BBC doyen of the microphone, once said to me, “one man’s commentator is another man’s pain the backside”. If commentaries are indeed exams, they are not maths papers where every answer is right or wrong, they are more akin to English Literature essays in which a style, an opinion or a turn of phrase will appeal more to one examiner than another. Being a television commentator is a fairly glamorous profession, and yet the stereotypical image of a commentator is of a bookworm in an anorak. Chelsea are a goal down and need to score in the next ten minutes.
But it also signified what radio commentary is to so many people. It is not just recalling the action, but an emotionally trusted medium that connects fans to their club. For me, I was stuffed into the backseat of a car—not the most creative-inducing environment and usually a setting for life’s most boring moments. Yet, Pearce’s commentary elevated me to Edgeley Park for a brief moment. Thanks to his voice, his dedication, and passion and understanding, even as a neutral, of what Freedman’s goal meant to Palace, I felt like I was in that away end, that I was bouncing with red and blue shirts, scarves and memorabilia, and connected to the heart of my club.
When he is not working for Sky, Tyler can be heard commentating for Premier League Productions, the Premier League's production arm which is responsible for producing, packaging and broadcasting the matches for the Premier League's international broadcast partners. Generally Tyler covers the Monday night matches for the international audience. Many of the originals have been donated to charity auctions and club museums.
The man that scored all those goals for Newcastle and Manchester United was Andy Cole. If his mum calls him ‘Andrew’, that’s fine, but he will always be Andy Cole to me. At ‘highlights’ matches, we do occasionally get the chance to record a correction to a piece of errant commentary but it never sounds quite right and regular viewers of football will invariably spot it.
With the NCAA Football franchise, he said he would be flown out to EA Sports’ Tiburon Studios in Orlando, Florida, where he would spend a week doing the voicework for the game. This time around, the duo made their own studios and recorded at home, with EA Sports representatives on video calls to be there to listen to all the work being done. Browse 183 football commentary box photos and images available, or start a new search to explore more photos and images. A glaring example occurred on the first Match of the Day of the new Premier League season last Saturday. As it kicked off, the commentator thought it worth telling us that the two teams had met twice before on the opening day of a top-flight season, in 1963 and 1966. And while all this was being regurgitated, Everton nearly scored.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the distance, a football match is taking place. I think it’s safe to say that tomorrow’s World Cup final will be the biggest moment in the professional lives of the 11 Englishwomen taking the field against Spain in Sydney. Yet, deep down behind the moody teenage persona, and listening to football via the radio was a leisure activity and a passion that I have never lost. I was also incredibly grateful that I could keep up with the action in an engaging way that allowed my mind to wander.
To make matters more interesting, the examiners are also mainly mad. Well, not clinically mad… but most viewers of a live match are ‘not all there’. ‘Football Commentary’ is purely for people interested in commentary. There are not many fairytales in the 21st century world of further education, work experience and career opportunities, but the ones that come true are written in a font of diligence, persistence and ambition… and an awful lot of luck. Martin Tyler[1] is one of the English commentators who appeared in FIFA.
After more than 115 hours of voice overs, Chris Fowler and Kirk Herbstreit are thrilled for people to see what they've been working on for the past two years. I chained this prompt with the data and after a couple of iterations, I received a JSON file with the generated commentary. As a result, I had a very long CSV file containing all the information I needed, mapped over a timeline.
I write the charts with standard biros and file them all away for future reference after each match. Where I think this can play a role is providing commentary - at scale - where none currently exists (e.g. where matches have no commentary, or where you want commentary in a different language, etc). It's inspired me to have a go at using, ahem, Bard (I believe other generative AI is available?) for some other entertainment use cases. But I don't think this is about replacing the top commentators, this is about scaling. Admittedly, we are still a long way from having AI generate football audio commentary.
Reading this article made me wonder if it was possible to have ChatGPT act as a football commentator. Neither was right because the Dutch make a guttural G/H sound that is simply not inside the British throat. ‘Gullet’, he reasoned, was at least logically wrong, ‘Hullet’ was just plain wrong. But ‘Hullet’ he had been to every British football fan for twenty years, so I remain stubbornly faithful to the original mistake. Many moons ago, a famous BBC television commentator happened to take lunch with a Swedish colleague who convinced him that Bjorn Borg’s surname should be correctly pronounced ‘Burry’. This was at a time when Borg was defending the Wimbledon singles title for the fifth successive year, and was just about the most famous sportsman on the planet.
Every commentator has their own style, and we won’t all like the same voices. But I think we can agree that there are a few basics to be adhered to. In 1976, Tyler moved to Yorkshire Television and began to make an impression on ITV Sport bosses, who included him in the team for the 1978 World Cup. Another change of region came in 1981 as Tyler moved to Granada in his native North West.
I must admit that I have left some of those sessions fearing I recognised less players at the end than I did at the beginning, but the occasional ‘ident error’ is an occupational hazard. I actually try to avoid all of these foibles and failings and many more besides, but it’s not easy to talk for an hour-and-a-half and not mess up somewhere. The most instructive critic of my own broadcasts was the late Reg Gutteridge, ITV’s famous boxing commentator. I remember him once lecturing me for saying ‘of course’ too often.