David Coleman was the BBCâs Number 1 until the end of the 1970âs really. Think the 1977 Man U v Liverpool Cup Final as a stand-in was Mottyâs first. Coleman was at loggerheads with the BBC and on strike at the time. Motty took over as Number 1 shortly after that.
My uncles were at that fa cup final if it was between man United and Liverpool I think
Iâm not sure when Mottyâs last FA Cup final was, but letâs try and work it out.
I make it Motty would have done 18 successive finals from 1977 to 1994.
There were replays in 1981, 1982, 1983, 1990 and 1993, so add five replays to bring it up to 23.
Barrry Davies did 1995 and 1996. Canât remember who did 1997. Have a feeling it might have been Motty.
ITV had the live FA Cup rights from 1998 to 2001 inclusive. BBC have had it since.
Motty would surely have taken over the live commentaries from 2002 again and definitely did the 2006 final.
1997 plus the five finals from 2002 to 2006 would make it 29 live finals.
Motty definitely commentated on BBCâs highlights package of 2001 because I recorded it live on VHS tape that night.
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David Coleman did the 1978 Cup Final. It was possibly his last. Great childhood memories of that Cup Final. Roger Osbourne scoring the winning goal as Ipswich shocked Woolwich.
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Thought heâd have been a lot older than 77.
Always came across as an old man when I first started watching soccer properly in the very early 00âs.
Continuing the discussion from 2022 FIFA World Cup (Part 1):
I left out there what is probably Mottyâs finest moment among so many, which is Michel Platiniâs winning goal in the 1984 European Nations Cup semi-final for France against Portugal.
Itâs difficult to put into words the full context of the moment, but I will give it a try.
Michel Platini, at this moment, was not yet considered a cynical, corrupt cunt, but the epitome of a beautiful man who represented the innocent beauty of football. He was the epitome of the heart throb matinee idol. Those eyes, that smile. He was beautiful and played beautiful football. Him and his French team were the representation of tragic first love in football form and the essential representation of Frenchness and La Belle France. They were passion, beauty and rebelliousness. Tragedy would always befall them. They were from the time when national stereotypes were real. Rummenigge and his hooded eyes and shifty demeanour were straight out of the Nazi team in Escape To Victory. Harald Schumacher putting his boots through the head of Patrick Battiston was considered the football equivalent of Germany invading Poland.
France were the good guys, West Germany the baddies.
The 1982 World Cup is remembered for the two twin tragedies of France and Brazil, who everybody wanted to meet in the final. These two teams represented innocent, glorious football. My oulâ fella raged for years about the injustice of the defeats suffered by France against West Germany and Brazil against Italy. He especially adored âthat big black centre halfâ Tresor and that âgreat black midfield playerâ (Tigana). When France later played Brazil in 1986, the world raved about this game because they were imagining it was the 1982 World Cup final.
In 1984 France were in a European Nations Cup semi-final at home. The other three teams left were Portugal, Spain and Denmark. France had to win.
Like all tragic heroes, France were about to somehow fail again, against a team considerably their inferior. They had a Stade Velodrome in Marseille full to heaving behind them, on a Saturday night where the magical, coastal Mediterranean, urban open air of the Velodrome, set amidst the hills of Marseille, was set alight by fireworks and klaxons. Franceâs kit was beautiful, and so were the Metaxa and Bata Bata and Canon advertising hoardings.
The game was, to the best of my knowledge, not broadcast live on BBC Television. You donât need this sort of thing. And anyway, arenât you supposed to channel your ire at those awful striking miners?
Amidst all this cacophony John Motson effectively found himself alone in a box in Marseille, paying homage to a muse in silence. He was free to weave words as he liked, because nobody would hear them.
John Motson didnât have to prepare for this game. There were no pre-prepared lines, no pre-prepared statistics. There was no need. He was free, as a football man and a football fan, to go deep into his inner romantic and call it as a fan, in the best possible sense of that phrase. School holidays stuff. Motty never told us he wanted France to win but it didnât need to be said. His commentary is the words of a man lost in a dream. A tragic dream, as France were going to lose.
And then France did not lose. Tee-gannaâŚTeegannaâŚTeegannaâŚ
The anticipation. The pause.
Platin-eeeâŚ
The deliverance.
GGGGGGGGGOOOOOOOAAAAAALLLLLLLL!!!
There was nothing else to do except shout that word. At the end of 120 minutes of sheer glorious hell, the deliverance. The glorious climax. The ecstasy.
âI havenât seen a game like this in yeaaars!â
No Brazilian ever shouted the word âgoooooalllllâ better, because they shout it all the time. Motty didnât shout âGoooaalllllâ all the time. But here he was shouting it, because nothing else was needed or could do justice to the moment. Scarcity is truth.
And the commentary nobody would hear became one of the most enduring representations of the sort of innocent moment of pure joy that football can light up our humdrum lives with.
Thank you John Motson.
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Thatâs a smashing post Cheasty. Fair play.
Thatâs a belter of a piece
Brilliantly put.
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Post of the year
Send it to football 365 and the irish jtimes and joe.ie and any other site now. Theyl take out the black references but theyâll be searching to find a piece like that. Its brilliant.
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My favourite Motty FA Cup Final.
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Thatâs unreal writing.
I used to think he was a doddery old goat and that he got too many plaudits compared to Barry Davis but that post has softened my take on him.
Met Motson in an OâNeills in Bournemouth the day of the Gerrard slip. He was watching the game with some friends, wearing a Liverpool polo shirt underneath his jacket. When Gerrard slipped, he gave a knowing shake of the head.
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Thatâs up there with @thedancingbaby spotting Marcel Desailly in a strip club in Vienna, but much more wholesome.
The black references are the essential heart of that post because thatâs how a lot of open minded people actually talked then. The two black players in the French team, Tresor and Tigana, were part of the attraction, part of why people loved that team, because they were different. Tresor was a braveheart. Tigana was silk. Brawn and brain. People saw them and liked them. They werenât used to seeing live association football, and they werenât used to seeing black players in a European football team. They gravitated towards them.
My oulâ fella would watch random matches on the telly and say things which are by todayâs standards considered toe-curlingly out of order, like he might be watching some European match, I have the 1987 European Cup final between Bayern Munich and Porto in my head here, he might say something like ânowâŚcome on blackie me boy, go on, good on ya!â. He wouldnât have known the name of the player because he didnât know the times of most of the players.
Paul McGrath was called âThe Black Pearlâ. When Nelson Mandela got the Freedom of Dublin on July 1st, 1990, crowds chanted âOoh Aah, Paul McGrathâs Daâ at him.
Iâm not sure what my point is here except to say that times were different.
Incidentally John Motson had one well known one minor run in regarding black players, ie. where he said something to the effect that it can sometimes be difficult to differentiate their identities when commentating, and at least two other less well known ones I can find, one of these more serious than the other, ie. where he didnât mention that Englandâs black players were being booed in a match in Slovakia.
Youâre definitely more likely to get away with saying things - or not saying things - if you were born in 1944.
Overall, people should be judged by the roundness of their character.
Motson came from a time when people werenât expecting every little thing they ever said to be on the record, on tap, and to be taken down and used as evidence against them.
And maybe that was why sporting commentators of yesteryear were better. They were freer.
Sports commentators now are commentating for a YouTube (or its future equivalent) clip 35 years from now. That doesnât work.
Thatâs actually why Iâm increasingly growing to like Darren Frehill. Every gaffe the man makes is noted down within seconds and reprinted here. But he has got something. An infectious enthusiasm. That commentary he did with Pat Spillane on the New York v Sligo match last year was bizarrely brilliant. It was like himself and Spillane were only commentating for themselves. They were free. It was like they were of the belief that nobody could hear them.
To sum up this rambling, all over the place post: give Darren Frehill a GAA commentary gig.
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I remember reading some piece with MicheĂĄl Donoghue in the months after Galway won the All Ireland & the Dazzler got a mention. It referenced how he was very supportive & keen to help in any way he could. If I recall correctly, heâd used his RTE archive access and media/production skills to package up some clips set to music of Galway players throughout hurling history doing Braveheart type deeds. Management played these to the squad at opportune times during the season. I was flabbergasted. Iâd have expected Donoghue to throw on a Dazzler DVD during the bus journey from team hotel to Croker only for a 1994 episode of Fair City to appear.
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