Gavin Cooney

AAAAAND BREATHE. 

The longest English football season has finally ended, elongated as it was to create space into which a World Cup could be crowbarred. 

Everyone deserves a break…even those for whom it hardly feels like work. 

Limerick-born commentator Conor McNamara lives in Dublin nowadays, and he commutes across the Irish Sea every week to do games for Match of the Day and 5Live along with television commentary for the Premier League’s own in-house broadcaster. 

The latter gig means McNamara called some of the league’s biggest games last season, replacing Peter Drury, who was headhunted to lead NBC’s coverage. Given Sky Sports, BT Sport, and NBC have their own commentators sitting in the gantry, McNamara’s commentary serves broadcasters around the world. 

Conor McNamara, pictured at the 2007 Rugby World Cup. Morgan Treacy / INPHO Morgan Treacy / INPHO / INPHO

“These are the best games, frankly, the ones I wouldn’t be doing for BBC”, McNamara told me when we sat down earlier this month, taking time before he MCed a LiveScore event to promote their Champions League coverage. 

“Nobody hears it here but it’s heard around the world, places like Hong Kong, Australia, Canada, and across Africa.” 

McNamara is used to being heard in far-flung places. When he was doing live commentaries for the  BBC World Service, he went on holidays in Tanzania and a taxi driver insisted on stopping the car to shake his hand when he recognised the voice. 

But not all feedback is as personable or positive. “At the start, there’s no denying it”, he says, “when a game ended I would go on Twitter to see what people were saying about me. Maybe it’s a maturity thing, but very little good comes from it. People praising you and telling you you’re the best thing ever, I don’t think that has a great effect on people’s performance; it can send you into a comfort zone where you don’t work as hard. Or people telling you you’re shite, that can lead to doubting yourself.

“Take all of that into account and you don’t take it personally. It’s still nice to feel people are hearing it, you’re not just in your basement talking to yourself. Particularly during the lockdown time, that was a factor as you’re in empty stadiums.” 

The problem with the lockdown games, McNamara explains, was not that he felt nobody was listening but that he knew too much about who was listening. 

“The first game I did after the restart was at Norwich. I was in the normal position, the subs were warming up, and they were turning around and looking at me, listening to the commentary. Now I don’t mind millions of people listening to me, but I don’t want you in real life here listening to me! I was once doing a game at Villa when John Terry was the assistant [manager], he came up to a position in the stand near us to get a better view. I was being really critical of the Villa defence, and then I could see him looking over thinking, ‘Oh God.’” 

During the pandemic games, crowd noise was the only sound missing from Match of the Day, but last season circumstances aligned to the point that one edition was soundtracked to nothing but crowd noise. 

The BBC’s decision to take Gary Lineker off the air in March for a tweet criticising government policy caused an astonishing fallout, with fellow pundits Ian Wright and then Alan Shearer announcing they would not be going on air in solidarity. Many of Lineker’s colleagues followed suit, including presenters, commentators, reporters and crew. It led to a day of chaos as Football Focus and Final Score were yanked from the TV schedule at short notice and ultimately a short highlights package went to air without any post-game interviews, studio presentation, or commentary. The controversy was swirling when McNamara stepped onto a Friday-evening flight out of Dublin, as he was due to do a commentary for Match of the Day. 

The title screen of the infamous highlights programme shown instead of Match of the Day in the wake of Gary Lineker's suspension.

“It was very chaotic”, reflects McNamara. “We were learning things off social media like anyone else.  The producer rang me up – it wasn’t his fault – and he said that this was going on, ‘what’s your view?’

“We started a WhatsApp group between the commentators who were due to go on, and it came to a quick consensus that this wasn’t right. So we told the bosses that night and we put out something on social media. I turned my phone off and when I turned it back on: ‘Hi, this is Sky News, the Telegraph, Radio 4…will you come on?’ 

“‘It was the right thing to do. It was really weird, but it was the right thing to do. Some people said we were just doing it for notice. And there’s also a feeling of letting football fans down: people want to see their team and this programme will be messed up.

“I felt they might have done the show with just the commentators, with no studio, but the trouble of that is we would then become the voice and the face of it. It wasn’t fair to put someone in that [position]. Most people that day were freelance, so there was no way it wasn’t a difficult decision, but it was consensus. Everyone was on the same page, which made it easy.” 

From there we segue into a peek behind the Match of the Day curtain. BBC commentator Guy Mowbray almost quit Twitter earlier this year, growing exasperated with the fans telling him that commentary is recorded after the game. Not so. Commentators go to games and do them live as, McNamara explains, “you don’t know what game will be the best, and the commentator interviews the managers after the game, so you’re sending them to do that anyway.” 

McNamara peels back another couple of layers of mystery about his job. The host broadcaster’s commentator – Martin Tyler at Sky, for instance – has special privileges in that he/she can communicate with the match director, and so they can cue up cutaway shots over which they can deliver their lines. Every other commentator in the gantry can hear the conversation, so they at least know what’s coming up next. McNamara explains this in the context of the differences between working on TV and radio. 

“If the director goes to a shot of Sean Dyche, you can’t be talking about Evan Ferguson on the bench”, says McNamara. “You have to be talking about what’s on the screen. With radio, you can decide. In general play you can go off on a tangent or bring it back to something you were talking about earlier. There is a freedom and a flow to it.”  

Our conversation flows elsewhere, to his biggest influences in commentary. 

“Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh was incredible. His onomatopoeia was so good, you would know the ferocity of the game by the bite in his voice. Bill McLaren had an amazing gravitas, and for a kid from Limerick in the BBC -  things have changed now – but when I first went over, it’s not that everyone was English, everyone was from southern England. There was a certain sound, as if, ‘this is what the BBC sounds like.’ But McLaren embraced his Scottishness, and that really helped me a lot in feeling confident and not feeling like I stood out.” 

Not that it’s always easy to avoid assimilation. 

“My wife is from Dublin, and when I am chatting to friends in Limerick over Christmas, she can’t understand me”, he says. “We speak really quickly and we leave out half the syllables. It’s not that you are putting on an accent. Think of the American accent. In America, everyone comes from a different place, and they know they can’t just rattle off their own vernacular. To be understood, they have to pronounce every syllable. They need a common ground, which is that little bit of elongation. 

“In a smaller sense that is what happens in England. When you’re in a restaurant and ordering something, you just try to say the last syllable of every word a little bit more. That’s the starting point of it.

“When I lived in Manchester there was a big Mayo community, and when you went for a pint with them you heard the Irishness come out way more. What’s the line we learned for the Leaving Cert…prepare the face to meet the faces you meet. There’s a bit of that when you’re living there all the time, it’s going to creep in.

“There’s also an issue with expressions you hear in football you don’t hear elsewhere. Like ‘campaign’, for season. When would you use ‘campaign’ in Ireland? 

“One of my first games in England, I used the phrase that the players were ‘giving out’ to the referee. My boss said afterwards, ‘Just one thing Conor. What were the players giving to the referee?’

“English people wouldn’t say giving out, they’d say moan. We never say moan here. Little things like that. You find yourself using football words you only ever hear in an English accent, and so you use them in a slightly more English way.” 

McNamara also touches on the fact that there is a certain English football way of pronouncing foreign names. It’s a difficult trap to avoid, even for a guy who grew up bridling at descriptions of Paul Mcgrathhh, Kevin Mur-ann, and Mark Kinn-sell-a. 

“This is the bane of my life. You try to say Kevin de Brun-ah, but everyone says you are saying it wrong, that it’s De Broin-a. You can be wrong and right.  Sometimes then an English version of a foreign name comes, you start using it, and people say ‘Oh you sound a bit English.’” 

But ultimately nothing sounds more unnatural than the scripting of lines. 

“People wonder if you rehearse the lines”, says McNamara. “You can’t. You’re starting sentence is one where you don’t know where the full stop is. The style of a commentator is a little ee-longg-gaatedd as you’re not sure what you have to say next.”