5 Live - 12.5.13

With Ian Payne in the studio and then at Old Trafford

Everton v West Ham - Conor McNamara
Fulham v Liverpool - John Southall
Man Utd v Swansea - Mike Ingham + Steve McLaren (2nd half commentary)
Norwich v WBA - Mike Sewell
QPR v Newcastle - Alistair Bruce-Ball
Stoke v Tottenham - Pat Murphy
Sunderland v Southampton - John Murray + Pat Nevin (commentary)

Watford v Leicester - Jonathan Legard (Ian Brown and Danny Higginbotham for Sports Extra)

BBC London
Stoke v Tottenham Andy Rowley and Steve Froggett (commentary)
Everton v West Ham Nick Godwin (also host) and James Scowcroft (commentary following the above match)
Fulham v Liverpool Emma Jones
QPR v Newcastle Phil Parry
Watford v Leicester Jamie Hill
Jamie Hill went berserk when Watford 'did a Doncaster' and scored from a dubious Leicester penalty. Jon Marks on BBC 3CR was similar - I wonder how Ian Sreinger sounded on BBC Radio Leicester.

BBC Three Counties Radio
Watford v Leicester Jon Marks, Derek Payne, Nick Wright and Paul Robinson (commentary) with Luke Ashmead.
In addition, Jason Harris did his last commentary of a Saracens match for BBC 3CR. For whatever reason (move of ground?), BBC 3CR will no longer cover Saracens. Good luck Jason in the future.

BBC Three counties radio commentary:- Clicky

Anyone got the BBC Radio Leicester commentary of the ending of the game?
Or any Leicester reaction would be an interesting listen and a bit of a contrast, i bet.

Monday 13th May - talkSPORT

Mark Saggers presenting Kick Off alongside Ray Houghton

Championship Play-Off Semi-Final Second Leg
Brighton & Hove Albion v Crystal Palace - Elliot Cook

To clear something up from the weekend, Dom McGuinness did indeed commentate on the Premier League trophy presentation at Old Trafford on Sunday during The Press Pass on talkSPORT. From flicking around stations, Absolute Radio carried audio from Old Trafford with Ian Wright and Ian Stone commentating on it off-screen, while both stations plus talkSPORT Live carried audio of the whole of Sir Alex Ferguson's post-match speech, although the latter was doing its Premier League highlights show during the presentation. Newstalk Sport Sunday had gone off-air by the time the trophy was lifted.

Anyone have details of Wish FM's FA Cup Final coverage? I know some audio from their commentaries and coverage of previous matches was carried as part of one of the features about Wigan Athletic during ITV's pre-match build-up to the final.

Radio Manchester was on air with Rugby League and then the rugby league phone-in after 4.45pm, crossing regularly to Old Trafford for reports from Bill Rice. They did the whole of the Ferguson speech at around 6pm and then stayed on air until 6.20pm after coverage of the presentation, handing over to Indus (an Asian magazine show) that was already in progress on Radio Lancashire. Rather than join it mid-conversation though, the presenter stopped to welcome Radio Manchester before carrying on with the ongoing debate.

However I was also listening to the start of the United game on Radio Manchester when the players and AF were coming out to the guard of honour. It was half time in the RL game so they were previewing the United game, then for some reason seemed to hand back to the RL just at the critical moment of the guard of honour as AF was coming out, Jack Dearden (or whoever was at the RL), briefly mentioned the RL coverage coming up and then silence for about 3 seconds and then Bill Rice started describing the scenes again. It was as if they had told Bill Rice to hand back and then realised that was a bad idea so went back again.

Anybody fed up with Sam Matterface and his boring commentry?
I like the bloke as a person but he says the same old things over and over.
2 phrases he always says is

"Across the face of goal"

"Salaloms down the wing"

5Live 13.05.2013.
Championship Play-off Semi Final second leg: Brighton and Hove Albion v Crystal Palace: Conor McNamara and Steve Claridge (commentary)

5 Live - 14.5.13

With Mark Pougatch at The Emirates

Arsenal v Wigan - Alistair Bruce-Ball + John Hartson (commentary)
Reading v Man City - Jonathan Legard (Ian Brown + Clive Allen for Sports Extra)

Mark Pougatch will present from Amsterdam tomorrow with John Murray and Nigel Spackman part of the commentary team for the Europa League final.

Tuesday 14th May - talkSPORT

Mark Saggers presenting Kick Off alongside Ray Parlour

Premier League
Arsenal v Wigan Athletic - Mike Bovill
Reading v Manchester City - Ian Danter

Mark Saggers, Sam Matterface and Stan Collymore will be talkSPORT's team for tomorrow's Europa League Final.


talkSPORT Live

Premier League
Arsenal v Wigan Athletic - Adam Bridge and Alan McLoughlin (featured 7.45pm commentary on international radio stations)
Reading v Manchester City - Kevin Hatchard

"RATTING AROUND" !!!

Seems John Hartson will be heard more often on the BBC, per a comment from ABB before the start of the Arsenal match. Not sure if this was knowledge beforehand.

BBC Radio Manchester

Arsenal v Wigan - Jack Dearden and Paul Rowley - commentary on 95.1 FM

Reading v Man City - Ian Cheeseman and Fred Eyre - commentary on DAB only

A rare occasion when Man City aren't on FM, due to the importance of the Wigan match tonight. Can anyone remember the last time City weren't the live commentary match on FM ?

Sports Producer/Presenter Chris Milow was Live from inside Wembley from 4pm last Saturday (as he was for the semi final) with commentary from the usual commentary team of Paul Chialton & Neill Rimmer (who to my knowledge have done every Wigan commentary for Wish FM/Latics Player this season).

All the cup final stuff is here - http://www.wishfm.net/on-air/wigan-a...ve/facupfinal/

Obviously a bitter sweet contrast tonight BUT going forward relegation will actually be good for Wish FM, like it was with Bolton on Tower FM. The illegal streaming goes out the window in the championship, meaning radio commentary is boosted and they get tons of extra midweek games to cover. Be interesting to see if the station covers Europa League matches next year with six of them (at least) to play. I suspect the nature of the deal with "Latics Player" will see them do so, but that is my pure speculation.

Many thanks for posting the Wish FM FA Cup Final details that I requested Andy, it is much appreciated.

I believe this is the second FA Cup Final UTV Radio has broadcast on a local radio basis since returning to local radio sports commentaries across most of the British stations in their group, the first being the Manchester City v Stoke City final on Signal two years ago; it will have also been their third cup final locally including the Capital One Cup Final between Bradford City and Swansea City which went out live on both Pulse and Swansea Sound earlier this year.


This is certainly true. That the option to watch Wigan Athletic's 3pm games via the internet or at certain pubs is largely out of the window now, Wish FM should see a boost in their listening figures. I remember reading a Twitter conversation involving a commentator from Free Radio 80s in the Midlands a while back that discussed the respective listening figures The Goalzone's coverage of Premier League and Championship games was receiving, where he stated that actually their listening figures for their Championship clubs' commentaries were significantly higher for precisely this reason.

As for whether Wish FM (and indeed Swansea Sound) will cover Wigan (and Swansea) in the Europa League - I think Signal's coverage of Stoke City in that competition last season should act as a fair guide given that all three stations are owned by UTV Radio. Signal provided commentary on Stoke's three home games in the Europa League group phase and the home leg of their play-off against Thun (although not the home leg of their pre-qualifier against Hajduk Split), plus both legs of their Round of 32 tie against Valencia with commentator Simon Humphreys being on-site for the away leg of that.

Hopefully both Wish FM and Swansea Sound will be afforded the same treatment, although for Swansea Sound it might be tricky as most of their commentators also work on UEFA.com's Champions League and Europa League coverage during European weeks. Perhaps they could call on talkSPORT's Roger Hughes for these games?


I listened to the second half of last night's game on Radio 5 Live (a rare listen to that station's football coverage for me) and I thoroughly enjoyed both Alistair Bruce-Ball's commentary and the fair-minded analysis provided by John Hartson. John is one of the better recently-retired former professionals for my money and it would be a good move on the BBC's part to get him involved more often, particularly seeing as he now has built up a fair bit of punditry experience since retiring on S4C's Sgorio.

Speaking of S4C, Ian Cleverly posted in the Football Commentators thread in the Broadcasting section recently that last weekend's FAW Welsh Cup Final was to be John Hartson's last appearance on Sgorio. Given the confusion surrounding 606, I'm wondering if Radio 5 Live might have lined up Hartson to be (one of) the new voice(s) on that next season? He has co-hosted the phone-in in the past with Robbie Savage and at points during last night's commentary he was encouraging people to ring in to their post-10pm half hour and setting up call subjects as Stan Collymore would in the latter stages of a talkSPORT commentary match preceding an edition of Call Collymore.

Wednesday 15th May - talkSPORT

Mark Saggers presenting Kick Off: Europa League Special

UEFA Europa League Final
Benfica v Chelsea - Sam Matterface and Stan Collymore (7.45pm commentary), with Ian Abrahams at pitchside

BBC London
Host Nick Godwin (studio)
Europa League Final: Benfica v Chelsea (Amsterdam Arena) John Murray, Alan Green and Nigel Spackman (BBC Five Live commentary) with Ian Ramsdale

The Diff listened to 5Live

And in other shocking news, I listened to TS twice this last weekend.

Firstly in The FA Cup final build up and first twenty minutes of the game. I thought the build up was good, Danny Murphy sends me to sleep though but I know he's a popular figure in the media. He didn't convey any excitement. The commentary was good from what I heard.

Then I listened to some of the Stoke vs Spurs game, it was fine listening to it.

I think it's the presenters on TS I'm not always into, I think I could cope with the commentary of games. Sadly, my main experiences of TS is Drivetime which I simply cannot stand. I'm also not a huge Matterface fan.

BBC Radio Scotland, 15/5/13

Richard Gordon presenting Sportsound on 810MW from Rugby Park.

Kilmarnock v Hibernian - John Barnes, Billy Dodds and Steven Thompson (commentary) with Chick Young pitchside
Alloa v Dunfermline - Kenny McIntyre
East Fife v Peterhead - Jim Spence

The audience figures have been released for the first quarter of 2013 so how are our sports stations doing?

Indeed Wish FM's first Wigan Athletic commentary was on the 1999 Auto Windscreens Final against Millwall that Wigan also won 1-0 with an injury time winner. Matt McCann was the commentator that day. He is now head of press at Liverpool.

Not a surprise but 5Live have gone for Newcastle vs Arsenal on Sunday

Out of interest, are you talking about the standard of presenting on talkSPORT in general terms or specifically about that of their live football/sports coverage? If it's the latter, I actually think this is one of the areas in which they really excel in.

I too cannot stand Drive Time, which I think is by far the poorest programme on the station, and Adrian Durham's role as on that - but on Matchday Live on Saturdays it is like listening to a different presenter. Adrian has a superb knowledge of the Football League and is an extremely slick anchorman, perfectly capable of throwing between games and updating scores during the Around the Grounds section from 2pm. I think most people who have listened to a fair amount of both Adrian's weekday and weekend work would agree with my assessment here, I know that certainly seems to be the case on this thread.

Elsewhere, Georgie Bingham for me has been a big success on Sunday Exclusive since taking over from Alan Brazil at the beginning of last year, she has a nice style for the 90 minutes of discussion prior to the 1.30pm commentaries and tends to gel well with the different studio pundits. Danny Kelly is probably talkSPORT's form presenter of the last few years and his Thursday and Friday Kick Off programmes are of a consistently high standard, Ian Danter is a versatile deputy on just about every show, particularly on Matchday Live when Adrian was ill for a few months at the start of the year (and he is a very good commentator and reporter too), and while Mark Saggers has his faults (he tends to get irate easily) on his day he is a strong live anchorman who asks the pertinent questions of his guests. That Saggers is probably the weakest link of their presenting line-up for live sport these days says a lot, as when he was on Radio 5 Live he was for me their strongest live sports presenter.

In my opinion, talkSPORT has a much stronger roster of live sports presenters than Radio 5 Live does these days. I thought 5 Live had a really good line-up about 6-7 years ago when it included the likes of Saggers, Russell Fuller, Arlo White and Bob Ballard, but all of these hosts have subsequently moved on and I don't think they have been replaced at all well. I've warmed to Mark Pougatch over the years - to me he is now by far their strongest suit in sports presenting terms - but I struggle to take Mark Chapman and Colin Murray seriously as straight sports hosts and have never really warmed to either Ian Payne or Eleanor Oldroyd. I like Nat Coombs, who presents 5 Live Baseball on Sports Extra as well as ESPN's Bundesliga coverage, and would like to see him used on the main station, but rather than getting heard on 5 Live he's started appearing as a presenter on talkSPORT.

As for 606, the less said about that the better - it has to be at its lowest ebb right now and is in desperate need of a rethink in the summer. It's easy to see why 5 Live bosses have made at least two attempts to re-sign Stan Collymore, his Call Collymore phone-in blows 606 out of the water in my opinion.

Please. TS - hang on to SC at all costs.