The Beautiful Poetry Of Football Commentary By Charlie Eccleshare

And that’s why you will have to be ‘interested’ in commentary to survive this section of the site. I love a great movie, but I am not that interested in how it is made – I just want to enjoy it, or rubbish it, or both sometimes. 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.

Sheffield United

The match between title rivals, Liverpool and Arsenal, had to be rearranged because of the Hillsborough in 1999, and as such was eventually played on a Friday night at the end of the campaign. Quite possibly the greatest finish to a season in the English league, and it was called superbly by Brian Moore. Whenever a team scored the opening goal in a match, Coleman would announce the news with the crisp declaration, "One-nil!" and a catchphrase was born.

Race

International research has shown that live sports commentary exhibits racial bias. Specifically, non-White players are more likely to be praised in terms of their physicality, while White players are more likely to be praised in terms of their intellect and character. The current study, which utilised a quantitative content analysis design, examined whether the speech of AFL commentators exhibited racial bias. The study randomly selected 50 men's AFL game quarters from the 2019 AFL season and analysed 1368 applicable statements directed at 382 unique players. Based on prior research, a coding instrument was developed that incorporated three main categories , and six subcategories .

If you have two conferences comprising teams each – a six-team playoff in each conference leading to a national-championship showdown could captivate the country in a way we haven’t seen in college football. And super conferences would eliminate what often feel like formality games between perennial conference giants and perennial conference cellar-dwellers. The research literature clearly outlines the overt racism still experienced daily by Indigenous Australians , and the structural disadvantages faced across multiple domains, including health , employment, education, and socioeconomic status . The disadvantage and marginalisation faced by Indigenous Australians are also apparent within the institution of the AFL .

”, results indicated that there were no significant between-race differences in the overall proportion of positive and negative AFL commentator statements. Regarding the second research question, “does the frequency of AFL commentator statements that relate to physical, cognitive, or character attributes differ by race? ”, no significant between-race differences were found in the proportion of statements received for each main attribute category. Regarding the third research question, “does the frequency of positive and negative AFL commentator statements that relate to physical, cognitive, and character attributes differ by race? ”, there were no significant between-race differences found in the proportion of positive and negative statements received for each main attribute category or within each main attribute category. Finally, there were insufficient data to statistically analyse the fourth research question.

At the levels at which the players that we follow play, winning—as Gary Neville says—is everything. Integrity, self-respect, even honesty—it all goes out the window when the players get onto the field. This is the reason that you’ll rarely hear a player apologising for diving; it’s the reason Luis Suarez and Diego Maradona never said sorry for the blatant handballs that dishonestly knocked Ghana and England out of World Cups. We might want to believe players have a conscience and elevate football to similar idealistic planes that we do, but to them the game is a job; a job in which they are judged by results, and anything that will help them attain those results is fair. It's blatant cheating, far too many players do it, and it's a cancer that comes uncomfortably close to ruining the game. According to a recent BBC article, as many as 97 per cent of football "injuries" may be classed as "dives," if you think of diving as "exaggerating the extent of an injury."

In British sports broadcasting, the presenter of a sports broadcast is usually distinct from the commentator, and often based in a remote broadcast television studio away from the sports venue. In North America, the on-air personality based in the studio is called the studio host. During their shows, the presenter/studio host may be joined by additional analysts or pundits, especially when showing highlights of various other matches. Radio and television play-by-play techniques involve slightly different approaches; radio broadcasts typically require the play-by-play host to say more to verbally convey the on-field activity that cannot be seen by the radio audience.

Did you know that two of the most popular languages for commentating on soccer are English and Spanish? And did you know that the difference between Spanish and English commentary lies in more than just the language? “Spanish commentary” or “Latino style commentary” has a few features that make it completely distinct from soccer commentary in any other language – especially English. Read on to see why Spanish and English commentary are so vastly incomparable. Television commentator John Motson during the Division One football match between Ipswich Town and Middlesbrough held at Portman Road, Ipswich on 1st...

As previously discussed, ten players were removed from the sample, which included the removal of 32 statements, due to coder disagreement on the race of the player. The majority of research carried out in Australia examining racial bias in sports has focused on qualitative analysis from a critical perspective. This literature has described the lived experience of Indigenous athletes and the effects of overt yeubongda.site racism on Indigenous Australian team sport players . Furthermore, it has highlighted pervasive essentialist narratives that focus on the Indigenous athlete’s speed or innate talent . Given the pervasive nature of such discourse, one might expect it to be also evident in the speech of AFL match commentary. However, the systematic analysis of live AFL commentary has yet to be carried out within Australia.

I get the balance wrong occasionally (some of you may say a lot more than occasionally!), and it is a matter of opinion and taste. He was John Madden’s ‘straight man’ on network American Football coverage in the USA. He used words economically, succinctly, effectively to set the stage for each play.