Twenty minutes from the end of their opening game in the group stage of the World Cup, Belgium—Team U.S.A.’s upcoming round-of-sixteen opponent—was trailing the underdog Algeria, 1-0. But then the Belgian substitute midfielder Marouane Fellaini, hitherto remarkable only for his spectacular Afro, outjumped a defender and headed home the equalizer.
“Big man … big stage … big hair … big goal … Belgium back in business.” What would the World Cup be without these over-the-top grace notes from English commentators like Adrian Healey, who called the game for ESPN?
English is the lingua franca of televised football. Even in India, where only ten per cent of the population speaks English, Hindi commentary was abandoned recently after protests from viewers. But it’s not just the language. It’s the style—the rhetorical cadences, the theatrical beats and pauses and alliterations, the overwrought metaphors and wordplays—that American commentators simply can’t match.
English doesn’t have an absolute monopoly on TV commentary, of course. Most famously, there’s Univisión’s Argentine-born Andrés Cantor, virtuoso of the “Go-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-l-l-l-l-l!,” who has a cult following, even among English-speaking audiences. Native Spanish speakers on the English-language shows, meanwhile, like ESPN’s Fernando Palomo and Alejandro Moreno, do a pallid imitation of the Cantor bellow but otherwise pretty much stick to the classic American two-man play-by-play-plus-analysis formula that was perfected for baseball, despite the radically different rhythms between that sport and soccer.
Only the English have truly risen to the challenge posed by Ana Thome Williams, a Brazilian-born senior lecturer in linguistics at Northwestern University and the author of the recent book “O Jogo Narrado” (“The Game Narrated”): “Commentators have to transform soccer into art—not everyone can do that.” Well, the English can. Even if it’s sometimes bad art.
The person we have mainly to thank for this is David Coleman, who died six months ago, at the age of eighty-seven. Coleman was the voice of BBC Sport for four decades, hosting his own show and anchoring “Grandstand,” the Saturday afternoon multi-sport spectacular. He covered every World Cup from 1958 to 1998. Alternately affable and irascible, with his flat Northern vowels and prodigious knowledge of the game, Coleman’s “garrulous gurgle,” as the Daily Telegraph once called it, swept away the decorous BBC English that marked the first generation of bow-tied, pencil-mustached TV commentators. (“Oh, my goodness, that’s a jolly good goal by Jimmy Greaves. Well played.”)
The most delicious legacy of the man was his gaffes, to which the satirical magazine Private Eyeused to devote a regular column. The constant risk of Coleman’s overripe rhetorical style was the foot in the mouth, the half-cooked sentence that came tumbling out before the gears of the brain were fully engaged. Private Eye dubbed them Colemanballs.
“Here they come, every color of the rainbow: black, white, brown.”
“And he missed the goal by literally a million miles.”
“If that had gone in, it would have been a goal.”
“With alphabetical irony, Nigeria follows New Zealand.” (Huh?)
Coleman’s spirit still gurgles away in the current crop of English commentators, men like Adrian Healey, Ian Darke, and Jon Champion, who are charged with the bulk of ESPN’s World Cup coverage. It’s the second time we’ve been treated to the inimitable art of English commentary (ESPN switched from Americans after the 2006 World Cup), and sadly it may be the last. Fox has the rights to the 2018 competition, in Russia, and we can look forward to the dubious privilege of listening to Gus Johnson, whose calls tend in the direction of “Bam!,” “Bang!,” and “Hot Sauce!”
But, for as long as the English call the plays, the World Cup will be especially fertile soil for Colemanballs.
“I don’t think there is anybody bigger or smaller than Maradona.”
“Beckenbauer really has gambled all his eggs.”
“England have not won a game for three months. The fact that we haven’t played one is irrelevant.” (Definitely my personal favorite.)
Like the World Cup itself, the 2014 contest among commentators still has two weeks remaining. Adrian Healey’s alliterative string of “bigs” and “B”s could well be a contender. I also liked Jon Champion’s line in the Brazil-Chile game: “Chile may be a long, thin country, but it’s thick with talent.” But, if you want some true Colemanballs, don’t rule out the perpetually overcaffeinated Ian Darke, who will be in the commentary booth again on Tuesday, when the United States take on the highly favored Belgians, they of the big hair and big goals.
Darke’s phrasemaking seemed a bit off during the group stage, but the man has a touch of the Lionel Messi or the Luis Suárez, needing only a single flash of inspiration to leave his mark on a game. After all, anyone whose past gems include “with four minutes gone the score is already 0-0” and descriptions of a player who “crossed the line with the ball almost mesmerically tied to his foot with a ball of string” is always likely to conjure up one of those moments that make the World Cup such a special experience.
