Adam Summerton on signatures, seasickness & statistics

Our man at BT Sport asks what makes for good football commentary?

I’ll start with a shameless name drop. I sat with James Richardson – the excellent host of Golazzo Live – ahead of going on-air last week and we got talking about what we both thought makes for good football commentary. It’s something many people will have quite strident opinions on. I’d really love to hear yours in the comments section. 

I think about that quite a lot. I believe, as a commentator, I should always be self-assessing, looking for better ways of doing things, and – perhaps most pertinently here – being prepared to look for ways of incorporating new sources of information into a broadcast. 

In my opinion, fundamental to good commentary is something that also applies to journalism. Try to tell people something they didn’t already know. I started out in broadcasting as a journalist, and those principles have always stayed with me. 

I guess I really like to think someone watching would smile, raise an eye-brow, or say words to the effect of “that’s interesting, I didn’t know that.” It could perhaps be something you’ve found out about a player’s past – for example, ahead of my recent Udinese v Lazio commentary on BT Sport, I translated an Italian newspaper article on Beto, which told the story of how he grew up admiring Samuel Eto’o so much that he used to write his own name as Beto’o in his school study books, and even used Beto’o as his signature.