Football on the Radio

It has never been more expensive to watch football. Ticket prices continue to hyperinflate quicker than the currency in a war-torn banana republic. Television packages, even the ones which bring the sub-Patridgeian character of Michael Owen (‘I don’t watch films…I just can’t get into them’) into your home, are incredibly expensive too.

Football on the radio, however, has remained impervious to the creeping taxation on fandom. It is as free now as it was when I first fell in love with the medium in the mid-1990s, aged about ten; free in the way that the sun is really hot, or the sea is really wet. So it is, so it was, so it always will be.

My first Walkman was, in the lingo of the era, rad. It was shiny and black, with a mess of little buttons on the front which made it look like Darth Vader’s chest panel, if Darth’s chest panel could pick up medium wave. 

My initial interest in radio football was as a means of parental defiance: at the age of ten or so, my bedtime was a positively agrarian seven o’clock. Intent on staying awake long enough to see what the moon was actually like, I stumbled upon live football on Five Live. I was hooked, instantly.

I liked the sound of a commentator talking close into a lip mic. I liked the noises a crowd made: the small pockets of singing during a quiet passage of play; the full-throated roar that accompanied a goal; the howling fury that followed a late challenge or flag.

I liked that it was the supporters who led the action, as much as the players: without the context provided by TV’s wide-angle pitch view, cheers and jeers were exciting events in themselves. The crowd created the drama, propelled the action along, and the commentators provided the detail a split-second later.

I liked listening to those night games best in winter. It was strangely enjoyable to hear of whipping winds elsewhere while I lay toasty in bed. I felt the cold in the stadium, and was glad to be at home. It heightened my sense of excitement that the commentary was so busy and urgent, while I was horizontal; that while the match was all noise and light and colour, my bedroom (to a passing parent at least) was quiet and dark and still.

Most of all, I liked the fact that listening to a match on the radio it was possible to feel intimately involved and incredibly close to the action despite being in my pyjamas, in the dark, hundreds of miles away.

It was the moment I realised radio sport, at its best, is teleportation. As the cliche goes — and the title of the book I just wrote and published states — the pictures are better on the radio.

But radio football does more than just capture atmosphere; it is also the most immediate and arresting way to follow a football match, particularly one in which you are the smallest bit invested.

Take, for example, the 2002 World Cup quarter-final between England and Brazil. I was in an A-Level exam at school. I wanted to know what was happening: not the detail, not the narrative unfolding, but the score, plain and simple, as quickly as possible, in a remote location where watching on television was impossible.

I did not have a radio in my pocket, with headphones snaking up my blazer sleeves into my arms. The exam invigilator did though.

He was a PE teacher, obviously, and as he walked circuits of the room, his facial expressions alone were enough to know what was happening. He stopped periodically on my desk. He held up fingers two fingers on one hand, and one on the other, then shook his head.

In an old gymnasium in Portsmouth, I was able to feel the tension, the futility, the frustration of England’s defeat to Brazil in Japan, thanks to a radio plugged into the ears of another man.

Could that have been achieved, so surreptitiously, so illegally, without radio? Almost definitely not. Radio is such a good way to follow football that it even second-hand listening was exciting.

Of course, that is just my opinion. In the same way some people wrongly dislike The Simpsons or Pavement or Macaroni cheese, a certain (and probably quite high) percentage of people will prefer to watch football on television than listen on the radio.

That’s their choice, and this is mine. But perhaps now more than ever, I think radio football is relevant. It is, I think, important that it continues to be a part of the way we follow the sport.

Everywhere else in society, money talks. It promises the opportunity of a better education, a better quality of life, better access to art and culture, even political influence. Radio is above all that.

There is no tiered membership structure, no optional premium service with more bells and louder whistles. The service available to the poorest in society is exactly the same as that available to the richest.

In fact, the FM and MW reception in the city is usually vastly superior to the reception out in the sticks. The further you get from densely-populated urban centres, the fuzzier the sound gets. Radio is a positive discriminator like that.

And as long as there are traffic jams to be stuck in, parts of the country with decent medium-wave reception but no 3G, and enough people who appreciate radio’s ability to translate twenty-two people running about for a bit into a thrilling audio experience that costs less than, well, everything, it will continue to survive and thrive.

But I can’t condone Robbie Savage.

You can follow Adam Carroll-Smith on Twitter (@ACarrollSmith)

Adam’s new book ‘The Pictures Are Better On The Radio’ is available now on Amazon

Football on the Radio
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