Dessert trolleys may be the buffet cars of obesity, but to voice of football John Murray they will always be a reminder of his favourite soundbite from the archives.
Forty years ago, when his predecessor as BBC Radio football correspondent Bryon Butler was surveying the teamsheet at the 1984 European Cup final, he came up with a one-liner for the ages.
Noting that Roma’s line-up against Liverpool was sprinkled with exotic Brazilian imports, Butler purred: “Graziani, Di Bartolomei, Tancredi - the names of a warm Roman sunset… but with Falcao and Cerezo, this truly is an international sweet trolley of a side.”
If Butler was the pavlova or tiramisu of his trade back in the day, Murray is the Grand Marnier crepe or panna cotta of the airwaves now. Millions of us listen to his gentle Northumberland lilt on the retreat from long-distance away games, and amid the shrieking hysteria berating England's jarring performances at Euro 2024, Murray’s patter has been a soothing antidote.
As the son of a sheep farmer whose land was so close to the border with Scotland you could almost mistake the keen winds for wheezing bagpipes, Murray’s was often a lone beat. But he is a man of the people on Radio 5 Live now. One of the great broadcasters of his time.
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“I think when you grow up somewhere like a remote farm, you have lots of time to think,” he said. “I would entertain myself by listening to lots of sports on the radio. It’s a long way from clipping sheep to sitting in some of the most famous football grounds in the world and conveying what I see with the spoken word.
“We had something like 1,000 sheep and my job, as the youngest of four sons, was to help with clipping the lambs, wrapping the fleeces into bundles and putting them in big sacks ready for the wool traders to collect. They were long days on big hill farms on the crags of Northumberland right next to Hadrian’s Wall, and neighbouring farms would help each other out on a reciprocal basis.
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“When the job was done, we would get together for a big communal tea to celebrate. But out in the fields, often I would have my radio with me and the soundtrack to my summer would be Wimbledon, Test matches and football commentaries.
“Bryon’s sweet trolley is one of great lines, and by way of tribute I used an adaptation of it the other night during my Austria v France commentary. I’ve always been very grateful that I had the upbringing I did - farming is a hard life with early mornings, late nights, all weathers and it’s bloody hard work - but it’s also a very singular job.
“One is physical endeavour and the other is often about long hours on the road or spending time on your own doing prep for the next match. There are definite parallels between farming and the radio commentator’s beat, and the spoken word has been as good to me as my agricultural background.”
Like all the best commentators - notably Peter Drury, the sultan of Super Sundays on Sky Sports - Murray’s silken prose is easily transferable from radio to TV. But his debut on Match of the Day was, literally, a non-event.
Assigned an FA Cup tie at non-League Telford, Murray watched the convoy of outside broadcast trucks roll into town and felt energised by the sense of occasion.
“The night before the game, I remember being quite nervous,” he said. “It felt like a big deal because the full force of the BBC machinery was invested in the game, which was quite unusual for me because on the radio, give or take a producer, you are a one-man band. But it fell flat when the game was called off because of bad weather. So in essence, my TV debut didn’t happen.”
John Murray can also be found on the golf course (Getty Images)That self-deprecation is a snapshot of a long-serving stalwart of BBC Radio Sport, where colleagues have long marvelled at an unassuming character with a keen eye for spotting the idiosyncrasies of life and football. Just as he was faintly humbled at being designated as a key worker during lockdown, as if his commentary was a vaccine against the ravages of Covid, he revisited that singular existence of the Northumberland shepherd.
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“I was driving home from an FA Cup third-round tie, somewhere in the hinterlands of Nottinghamshire, with no phone signal and listening to the dire warnings about no mixing on the news bulletins, and I was the only soul out on the road. I remember thinking that if I skidded and ended up in a ditch, nobody would ever find me. None of those people who had been listening to me an hour or two earlier would have known.”
There was no slalom between the tables for sweet trolleys in those dark days. And if Murray counted the miles on those long, singular drives of lockdown, they would have outnumbered the sheep from his youth when fleece was the word. Pass the cheesecake, old chum.
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