Super Sunday drowning in Peter Drury’s scripted whimsy and maelstrom of awfulness

We need to talk about Peter Drury. Frankly, something must be done.

A lot of people were very happy when he was announced as Martin Tyler’s successor as Sky’s main Super Sunday commentator, but we always had our reservations. It turns out we weren’t anywhere near worried enough.

Our concern was that people’s fond views of Drury were based on getting him only in small doses. A world-feed clip here, a Champions League game there. Maybe a bit of World Cup every four years.

The problem is that the hyperbolic (and often clearly and teeth-grindingly scripted) way he commentates on those occasional clips you’d see is the way he commentates on ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING and when you’re subjected to it every week for a whole season it’s just far too much.

It’s like having Christmas Dinner every single day of the year. Except also you think Christmas Dinner is a bit sh*t to start with.

Drury is the commentary equivalent of that player your team gets linked with who looks absolutely amazing in a few YouTube highlight videos but turns out to be almost entirely useless over an extended period of time.

We have two main gripes with Drury’s style. The first is the scripted or at the very least planned nature of so much of his commentary. Now one thing we’re not criticising here is his meticulous research. He is known in the industry for being an absolute master of this and it’s a brilliant thing. Whatever else he may be, he is certainly not lazy or a man who could ever be accused of giving less than 100% effort.

But those prepared lines have to go. The most famous one, and one that has clearly now become a burden as he chases forlornly and hopelessly to try and repeat the trick, is the “Goal for all Africa” monologue from the opening game of the 2010 World Cup. We never really liked it. We never liked the obvious scripted nature of it. But we concede there was some poetry to it, that it did capture the wider importance and significance of that goal in that game and at that moment.

It’s vanishingly rare, though, for something so obviously prepared in advance to join the pantheon of great commentary moments. Some of the very best and most iconic bits of commentary barely qualify as language. Think “AGUERRROOOOOOOOOO” or the Gary Neville goalgasm in Barcelona.

We mentioned highlight reels earlier, and that’s a big part of the problem. Rightly or wrongly, it’s hard to shake the idea that Drury is constantly commentating with subsequent highlight packages in mind. To us, this explains why, for instance, any time Mohamed Salah gets the ball anywhere on the pitch Drury will bellow “IT’S MO SALAH!“ even if he’s just collected the ball on the halfway line or won a throw-in.

But it wouldn’t even be so bad if he only used his prepared bits when the match delivers the requisite moment. You don’t have to like the South Africa monologue – and we don’t – but it was at least written for the exact moment that transpired as Bafana Bafana took the lead in the first ever World Cup game on African soil.

He now just uses them even if the game doesn’t behave as intended. The clearest example of that this season came during the Tottenham-Chelsea silliness. Now, we all remember that game, and the reason we remember it is because it was batsh*t mental. An at the time unbeaten, table-topping Spurs went calamitously down to nine men, invented the 0-7-1 formation and eventually went down 4-1 to what is almost certainly the worst Chelsea team of the last 20 years. Nicolas Jackson scored a hat-trick ffs.

The point of all this is to say this was not a match that in any way lends itself to pre-prepared bits of fluff. Rarely has a match veered quite so wildly off-piste as this one did. There was no way anyone had scripted bits about 0-7-1s or Nicolas Jackson hat-tricks.

What Drury did have was a painful golf metaphor about Chelsea’s results and upcoming fixtures.

“They’d just started playing to par with those wins. Dropped a couple of shots against Brentford. This was really the start of their Amen Corner.”

Now that is among his weaker content anyway. Even in a drab game there would be a very good argument for binning it. But it absolutely should have been quietly discarded once the game unfolding in front of him was quite clearly insane. But no. Out it came, shoehorned guilelessly in amid the chaos.

Commentators aren’t quite in the referee category of being at their best when unnoticed. Good commentary absolutely can and does elevate great moments of action to even greater heights. But commentators are almost never going to be the most important bit of the action, and most importantly should absolutely never try to be. Drury constantly seeks to place himself at the forefront of what’s happening. Just because he’s a bit better at doing that than, say, Sam Matterface doesn’t make it okay.

And when the action does produce unexpected moments, Drury still strives for the sixth-form poetry of his prepared material and ends up with unspeakable bollocks instead, like Sunday’s ‘maelstrom of awfulness’ to describe Liverpool’s equaliser. It’s unintentionally apt for his own contributions.

Which also highlights the second problem with Drury’s style. When everything that happens in every single game is treated like Shakespearean tragedy, where do you go for the truly massive moments in the truly massive games? You’ve left yourself absolutely nowhere to go other than maelstrom of awfulness.

The aftermath of Arsenal’s seismic win over Liverpool on Sunday saw predictable deployment of several high-ranking officers from the Celebration Police but really it was the Commentary Police required in north London.

Mikel Arteta and Martin Odegaard may have got slightly carried away, but did either of them declare “Liverpool will not vanish from this race” about a team that is still two points clear at the top of the table having lost for just the second time all season? They did not.