Farewell from Sky Sports Martin Tyler; you couldn’t please everybody and neither will Peter Drury

There is no commentator that does not grind somebody’s gears and Martin Tyler certainly did that. As will his replacement at Sky Sports.

And then suddenly it’s not “live!!!” anymore for Martin Tyler, who hangs up the Sky Sports mic this summer. Although he’s 77, there’s no suggestion that he’s giving up his trade; there are plenty of broadcasters who need quality people to commentate on games but his days at the forefront of UK football seem to be over.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Martin, apart from having Parmar as a middle name, is that in over five decades, he hasn’t changed much at all. Incredibly consistent, he’s a man I first heard in the mid-70s on Yorkshire TV, commentating on Leeds United, Hull City, yer Sheffields Wednesday and United, maybe Barnsley or Bradford.

He was good enough to find me at an FSA awards dinner to give me some words of praise and encouragement. I’ll never forget that – it was very kind and greatly appreciated.

Having constants in our lives gets more important as we get older. People who take us from a child to an adult, to an older person, are threads of consistency woven through our timeline. Martin is one of those. As familiar and comfortable as old pyjamas, sometimes we take such people completely for granted until the moment they are no longer in situ.

We probably did that with Martin, but that in itself is a kind of compliment. When you are not just part of the furniture in the house, but the actual land on which the house is built, that is perhaps inevitable. But Martin set standards a long, long time ago. Standards that still apply today. While hyperbole has gone hand in hand with the existence of the Premier League, I always felt that Martin resisted the worst, most unhinged aspects.

He was widely enjoyed, but there has never been any commentator who everyone loves. It’s a divisive role. One person’s primo poet is another’s preening prick and worse yet, everyone thinks their own view is definitive. Social media has probably just massively amplified what everyone has been saying in their front rooms since 1964, but it’s a tiresome trend.

I hold to the view that there are no high-profile commentators who are ‘awful’, ‘the worst’, ‘terrible’, ‘shockingly bad’ – all comments that one routinely sees on social media no matter who is working on a game. If any were that poor they would mispronounce names, make factual errors, mistake one player for another or simply keep freezing. No-one does that. You have to have a high standard to be employed at this level.

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What these critics mean, I think, is that they don’t enjoy a commentator’s style, voice, accent and approach to the use of language. And that’s fine. We all have our preferences. Some annoy the hell out of me and I just can’t listen to them, others I simply ignore the way I ignore the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button on Google (Who uses that? Why is it there?) But that doesn’t make them bad at the job per se, even though the nuance-free social media algorithms want us to believe it does.

Commentator is such a tough role as you’re charged with having deep knowledge of the game, its players and officials, being on top of the action, but must also be engaging for the viewer or listener. And that rather nebulous concept of engagement is the toughest thing to achieve and is where most criticism usually falls. It’s what makes us listen or makes us hit mute.

Some dislike the mateyness between commentator and pundit that has become normalised these days, preferring the more schoolteacher-ish mode that Barry Davies epitomised and that was once more common. Martin Tyler has had to straddle two, possibly three distinct stylistic eras from a less showy era in the 70s, to Sky’s Gray and Keys Brut 33 banter bus, and now in what some call the woke era, though I have no idea what that really means. That is a real feat of professionalism and one that deserves much praise, especially when you consider you’re broadcasting live for a couple of hours every week. You’re only one injudicious remark, one wee swear away from the sack at any time.

Many would have loved Clive Tyldesley to take over from him – he’s certainly always been a favourite of mine and is a master of the artform – but Martin will be replaced by Peter Drury, himself a long-serving mic man, with over 30 years under his belt, most recently for NBC in America. He has been voted Football Supporters’ Association commentator of the year for three of the past four seasons. If you enjoy someone who loves to construct elaborate metaphors, creates cultural references and poetic phrases and inserts them whenever possible, he will please your ears. If you don’t enjoy that style and find it over elaborate or plain silly, you will find him irritating. That’s just how it goes. Good luck to him. As night follows day, it won’t be long before all the idiot fans are accusing him of bias against their club, unable to see it is they who are biased .

It really is the end of an era as this comes at a time when Sky are cutting costs because broadcasting football is a thankless task for any company not wanting to lose a BT Sport-style couple of billion pounds. They’ve cut adrift six of 13 football reporters – Guy Havord, Dickie Davis, Bianca Westwood, Greg Whelan, Lynsey Hooper and Jaydee Dyer – with Geoff Shreeves being told he has to take a large pay cut if he wants to stay on.

It is very noticeable that they lack women when it comes to football reporting with only Emma Saunders surviving the cull. The commentary team is unforgivably entirely male – Rob Hawthorne, Bill Leslie, Seb Hutchinson, Dan Mann, Gary Weaver and Ian Crocker. This at a time when we have some excellent women who could easily do the job. Even though they have increased the number of female pundits in recent years, that is a very bad look for the broadcaster and one which doesn’t feel sustainable.

So farewell Martin, as the final whistle blows, after all these years together, let it be au revoir and not goodbye.