Clive Tyldesley: 90 minutes with ITV's footballing voice of reason

He may only describing a game of football but there is an implicit ethics in his commentary. Andy Martin on the man who’ll be guiding ITV viewers through a month of World Cup hyperbole

Tyldesley: 'Sometimes, a game of two halves is exactly what it is. You can’t improve on it' (PA)

Everybody is a commentator these days. @Chasepacheco1, for example, who tweeted after last month’s Uefa Champions League final: “My Liverpool team fought hard and I’m proud of them. Except for Karius, he can die in a hole.” Loris Karius, Liverpool’s German goalkeeeper, let in three goals (one of them, to be fair, a moment of sheer brilliance by Gareth Bale). Which means that online he finds himself denounced as a “Nazi”. And, according to one theory, paid handsomely for his “howlers” by Real Madrid. We can assume that the World Cup in Russia this month will be the occasion of a deluge of similar wildly overheated rhetoric, hyperbole and death threats.

But you won’t be hearing any of it from ITV’s chief football commentator Clive Tyldesley. Winner many times over of the Royal Television Society Sports Commentator of the Year award, he is the voice of moderation, the calm centre at the eye of the storm. Occasionally the target of Twitter rage himself, he expects to encounter not just a lot of verbals but also racism, hooliganism, and misogyny on top. Football, he says, is “warts and all. It reflects life. It corrupts. That is part of its fascination.” But, from the heights of the commentary box, he tries to provide something like a counterpoint to all the frenzy, the agony and the ecstasy.

He is a fit-looking 63 and described himself as “a respecter of vocabulary” when I went to see him shortly before the Champions League final. “I would never say it’s a ‘disaster’ or a ‘tragedy’ if the ball goes through the goalkeeper’s legs,” he said. “You only use words like that if somebody dies.” He thought he might stretch to “calamity”.

His words were strangely prophetic. As it turned out that is exactly the word he selected to describe Liverpool’s “goalkeeping calamity” when Karius bowled the ball right onto the toe of Benzema. But it struck me that there was also a kind of poetry, of a restrained, austere kind, in his summary of Real Madrid’s first goal, perhaps something like an instant haiku:

Karius was careless,

And Benzema was alert.

And Real Madrid are in front.

His “an evening that had started so promisingly for Liverpool” sounded a poignantly elegiac note. I also had to admire the comment, after Karius lets a tame one by Bale slip through his hands and into the net: “His reputation would do well to survive that moment.” Note the use of the conditional tense. Tyldesley appreciates that the keeper’s reputation is already in tatters, but that – perhaps in an ideal world – it could still recover.

Tyldesley had more sympathy for Liverpool goalkeeper Loris Karius than most Twitter users (Getty)

David Hume said that you cannot get an “ought” from an “is”. Somehow Clive Tyldesley manages to pull that off. He is only describing a game of football but there is an implicit ethics in his commentary. Tyldesley agrees with Bill Shankly that football is not a matter of life and death, but omits the punchline, “it’s more important than that.” Still, it is “a huge emotional investment by all the people who turn on. They choose to watch.” Therefore, as a commentator, “You have to be careful with your use of words.”

The Playstation Schools Cup U15 final, between Thomas Telford School and Carshalton Boys Sports College, held at Reading’s Madejski stadium, was as fraught and intense as any Champions League final. Some of the players even had agents already. “Maybe overdid it a bit, Hodnett,” commented Tyldesley, in his simultaneous schools broadcast, as he skyed the ball over the bar. He prepared for this game as scrupulously as he is now preparing for the opening game of the World Cup between Russia and Saudi Arabia, and had a foolscap file in front of him containing assorted facts about the players.

There was a goalmouth melee, which saw both the Carshalton goalkeeper and the Telford player red-carded. And a penalty shootout after the much fancied Telford came back from 2-0 down only to blow it on the last kick of the game. “Now that is absolutely out of order,” said Tyldesley, as the hulking No 10 wrapped a menacing paw around the referee. “He’d have done well to keep his opinions to himself.” It’s advice he has tried to follow.

But in a sense all of his commentary implies an opinion. Presumably he would have disapproved of Zinedine Zidane’s farewell headbutt on Marco Materazzi in 2006 and David Beckham’s retaliation on Diego Simeone that got him sent off in 1998. Tyldesley himself doesn’t get flustered. He is unflappable. He has – and admires – grace under pressure. “His control wasn’t the best,” as he said in one of his critical remarks about the U15 final. The ability to take and keep control is all important, whether you’re on the pitch or off it.

Zinedine Zidane head-butting Marco Materazzi during the 2006 World Cup 2006 final between Italy and France (AFP/Getty)

This might have something to do with having been subjected to the furious “hairdryer” treatment from Sir Alex Ferguson when still manager of Manchester United, not just once but twice. “You really can feel your hair blowing backwards.” He thought that the boot that hit David Beckham in the face in the dressing room was “probably an accident”.

Whether it’s broadcasting to schools or to 10 million people on ITV, Tyldesley always feels a sense of “responsibility”. “Balance” is a key word. He points out that the dying words of Pheidippedes, the messenger who ran all the way from Marathon to Athens to report on the outcome of the battle back in 490BC, “We won!”, only caused confusion, because people were bound to ask, “Who is ‘we’?” “He wasn’t a good journalist,” says Tyldesley. “What he should have said is ‘Athens won’.” Greece 1, Persia 0.

He was once commentating on an England-Scotland game with Ron Atkinson when Atkinson insisted on saying “we”. Tyldesley said to him, “You should say ‘England’ not ‘we’.” Although he accepts that there perhaps he was being “correct beyond reason”. He allows that the occasional we “might slip out” at the World Cup. “I’m English but I’m still objective. You don’t choose to support England. It would be odd to switch to supporting Chile.”

Tyldesley disapproves of those who get too fancy. “A straightforward pass would have done,” is a classic line of his, which happened to be addressed to schools. So too when it comes to commentary. He argues that cricket and golf have passages of inaction which permit – or even demand – “colour”, the kind of lyrical and expansive discourse, infinitely digressive, forever associated with John Arlott and Brian Johnston in cricket or Peter Alliss in golf. Steve Bunce likewise in boxing, and I can get similarly carried away when it comes to describing surfing, perhaps because there are often long lulls between the epic and the awesome.

Tyldesley is more a fan of plain speaking. He says the best ad slogan of all time is Ronseal’s “Does exactly what it says on the tin”. That’s how he thinks commentary should be. You observe, you analyse, you try not to hype it up. You keep it “succinct”. “There’s no point trying to be Wordsworth or Browning. As Barry Davis once said, “One man’s commentator is another man’s pain in the arse.”

Sergio Ramos was described by Tyldesley as ‘not everyone’s idea of a model professional – maybe nobody’s’ (Getty) (Getty Images)

Everything is mediated and mediatised. There are no exceptions. The old Zen koan, “If a tree fell over in the forest and no one was there to witness it would you still hear it?” now has a clear answer. Yes, because it would be captured by a passing drone or on satellite TV, blazed all over Instagram, tweeted about furiously, the tree’s friends on Facebook would start a crowdfunding campaign, and it would shortly thereafter be the subject of a controversial Channel 4 documentary. Nothing happens any more without commentary. But this is and always has been especially true of football. “They think it’s all over… it is now”, Kenneth Wolstenholme’s line, is as memorable as the 1966 World Cup final itself. Whether or not the ball crossed the line is less significant now than the fact that there was so much debate about whether or not it had. And new technology is not making the debate go away, rather the opposite.

I can’t play football without also hearing something like this in my head: “Martin comes on, scores with his first touch, and the crowd goes wild.” As Simon Critchley, philosopher and (currently distraught) Liverpool fan comments in his book, What We Think About When We Think About Football, “We usually know football through commentary, through largely, and hugely, inane commentary.”

Tyldesley doesn’t think of it as inane. “Sometimes,” he says, “‘a game of two halves’ is exactly what it is. You can’t improve on it.” If he were to write a book about it, it would be something like the opposite of Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch. Hornby is all about irrational fandom, ritual, intensity of feeling. Tyldesley is more of a phlegmatic “keep calm and carry on” sort of guy. “We don’t need to see that!” he exclaimed at the sight of an overflow of emotions on the sidelines with even teachers getting hot under the collar.

Albert Camus said, “I learned everything I know about morality from football.” Which is to say, when it comes to the “beautiful game”, the good, the bad, and the ugly are all on display. There are undoubtedly heroes and villains in Tyldesley’s narrative. But he does it subtly. “You try not to sound too much like a Methodist preacher,” as he puts it. When it comes to making criticism of the play – you could call it a judo throw – by Sergio Ramos, the Real Madrid captain, that resulted in Mo Salah going off in agony with a dislocated shoulder, Tyldesley is judicious but still uncompromising in his remarks. There is “a coming together with Ramos that only he can fully explain”. As he goes up to collect the cup, Ramos is described as “not everyone’s idea of a model professional – maybe nobody’s”.

There is even an implicit politics in his commentary. Tyldesley has no objection to big money in football. “It’s labour intensive, they’re entitled to be paid. You can’t do without individual players.” But still “the collective should be stronger than the individual”. And this is where we went so badly wrong in the Brexit campaign, and the adjacent media coverage, he argues. “We turned it into a personality competition. Instead of providing the relevant information, we focused on the impact it would have on the lives of politicians.”

He says that “the most popular team in this country is not Manchester United or Liverpool, it’s England. It’s a great democracy.” And he has to be “inclusive”. He would never use the word “esoteric” for example, he says, because he doesn’t “want anyone to have to get up and look for a dictionary”.

The England team line up before their friendly match against Nigeria at Wembley Stadium (Getty)

When I saw him, Tyldesley was prepping Arabic and Russian names. He says, “I will try to get it correct, but I will not make sounds we don’t make in the English language.” When identifying James Rodriguez of Chile in the past, he wanted to say “James”. Eventually he bowed to pressure from Twitter to say “Ham-es”, in the Spanish manner. “But later I learned that his father, a 007 fan, had named him after James Bond.” He felt vindicated, because in Spanish-speaking countries it’s always James, never Ham-es, Bond. He is not, he reckons, “responsible for the teaching of Spanish” or Arabic or Russian.

In an extremist, Dionysian world, Tyldesley is an Apollonian voice of reason. He holds the mirror up to football with minimum distortion, minimum fuss. Sound without the fury. A degree zero of poetry. Let’s hope he doesn’t have to repeat a line he first used of England versus Iceland in 2016, “This is the most abject failure that I can recall.”

Andy Martin is the author of ‘Reacher Said Nothing: Lee Child and the Making of Make Me’. He teaches at the University of Cambridge. This article is the result of the ‘Independent Thinking’ collaboration between the University of Cambridge and The Independent