Spot the ball

The purest form of radio is probably sports commentating, creating pictures in the mind purely through language so that by some magic the listener believes that they were there, too, when Geoff Hurst scored that final goal, Shergar ran out the field at Epsom, Mo Farah sped ahead on Super Saturday. As Mike Costello said last Thursday on Radio Five Live’s celebration of 90 years since the first outside broadcast from a rugby match on 15 January 1927, ‘We’re all blind when we listen now, just as we were back in the 1930s.’

The technology has changed radically but radio still relies on the skill of an inspired individual to communicate the atmosphere, the tension, the thrill of seeing something extraordinary happening in a sports arena. Peter Bromley on Shergar at the Epsom Derby: ‘There’s only one horse in this race. You’ll need a telescope to see the rest.’ Or Bryon Butler commentating on England versus Argentina in the 1986 World Cup, ‘Maradona turns like a little eel…’ Somehow the commentator has to find the right words to describe as precisely and evocatively as he or she can what they’re seeing, and also feeling, so that the listener, too, can not just see in the mind what’s going on but also feel it. The recurring nightmare of most exponents of the art is to hear a chorus of listeners wailing, ‘You’ve lost me. You’ve lost me. You’re not telling me where the ball is.’

Back in the days of those early outside broadcasts, the commentator was joined by a colleague who sat with a sketch of the pitch in front of him, divided up into a grid of numbered squares. Listeners could sit at home with a similar grid. Every few minutes the commentator was interrupted by his colleague calling out the number of the square where the ball then was.