Iconic moments in sport and in football often become further immortalised by the words that accompany them. Try recalling Roma’s miraculous revival against Barcelona in the Champions League without Peter Drury’s prose pinballing around your brain and you’ll soon realise it’s an impossible task.
“Manolas, the Greek God of Rome!” is perhaps the most revered, or at least most quoted, Drury line, so fitting for the moment it described that many have since speculated whether it was scripted or not. Dedicated though Drury is to his craft of 32 years, pre-planning for such an implausible event would not only be impractical but also go against his one golden rule of the gantry.
“I have a very strong rule: anything that happens between the first whistle and the last whistle you would be a fool to try and script in advance,” Drury tells i. “I know that the teams will line up in a tunnel and walk out side by side. I know that I’ll get a graphic of the home team and a graphic of the away team. I know there’ll be a close-up of the referee. But what you imagine might happen the night before never quite plays out in precisely the same way that you’ve imagined it.”
Drury highlights Sergio Aguero’s title-winning goal in 2012 as the ultimate example of football’s unpredictability. “Any commentator worth their salt ahead of that game – in the knowledge that City just had to beat QPR to win the league – would have been ready for a final whistle where City are champions,” he explains. “They might have prepared a few words for the winning goal, but if you’d rolled those out in the 95th minute it just wouldn’t have done the trick.”
— Football on BT Sport (@btsportfootball) April 10, 2019
OTD in 2018…
"Roma have risen from their ruins! Manolas the Greek God in Rome!"
One of THE great Champions League moments
Take it away, Peter Drury…pic.twitter.com/GGmRvrHrbz
That isn’t to say that Drury works completely off the cuff, far from it. On a typical day, he spends seven to eight hours at his desk, meticulously preparing for an upcoming assignment, scribbling it all down on paper in what he describes as “terrible handwriting that is impossible to plagiarise”. He estimates that only 10 to 15 per cent of his research ever gets used.
Whatever Drury’s processes are they are evidently working. The reverence with which Drury is held has perhaps been enhanced during the social media age where each goal of significance is meticulously clipped up and beamed out over the internet. Drury is not on Twitter and given his self-effacing demeanour it is fair to assume that the burgeoning popularity he has on the platform, where football fans routinely call him the GOAT [Greatest of All Time] – could make him somewhat uncomfortable. He simply does his job because he “loves words and loves football”.
“My opinion is, for what it’s worth, is of no value, I’m there to simply articulate what’s happening. If you’d seen me play you wouldn’t be interested in my opinion! The commentator is just the guy who is lucky enough to be in the stadium with a really good seat.”
Drury has sat in plenty of good seats during his time, from starting out as a local commentator for BBC Radio Leeds to covering major international tournaments for ITV and BT Sport and the Premier League both at home with Amazon Prime and overseas as NBC Sport’s lead man, amongst others.
Given his breadth of experience, Drury’s three most memorable matches are unsurprisingly eclectic, ranging from Soccer City to the Santiago Bernabeu to South Yorkshire. Halifax Town’s improbable 4-3 win away at Doncaster Rovers from 3-0 down in a fourth division game in 1990 and Real Madrid’s epic comeback over Manchester City in May are pipped to the gold medal position by South Africa vs Mexico back in 2010.
Peter Drury’s Tshabalala commentary
“Modise… it’s a really good ball. Tshabalala! Goal Bafana Bafana! Goal for South Africa! Goal for all Africa! Jabulile! Rejoice! Bafana Bafana have popped the first cork on their day of days. Sips Tshabalala!”
“The moment that still puts the hairs up on the back of my neck when I think of it is [Siphiwe] Tshabalala scoring the opening goal of the 2010 World Cup,” Drury recalls. “That game was so significant. It was a game of such substance.
“I’m not trying to put some sort of halo on here but Africa was so excited to have that World Cup and given South Africa’s problems leading up to that point, to walk up to that stadium, that day and see black and white people arm in arm, smiling, thrilled, excited… to just being there in Johannesburg was in itself spine-tingling.
“And then when this kid from Soweto belted an absolute pearler into the top corner to launch the tournament, that to me was, forgive pretentiousness, a goal that transcended a football match. It was way beyond that. It was a monstrously significant goal and I was very, very lucky to be there and see it.”
Drury is one of the finest commentators of his generation, but for him, Peter Jones and Bryon Butler of the BBC, where he began his career back in 1990, were the standard-bearers.
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John Motson, Barry Davies and Brian Moore lent their expertise to Drury once he had got his foot in the door. Moore’s retirement in 1998 opened an opportunity for Drury to swap radio commentary for the small screen. “I have a letter from Brian Moore which he wrote me when he retired, a really encouraging letter, and certainly in the early days when I was getting plenty wrong – as of course I still do – if I had a bad day I looked at it and thought well if he thinks I’m doing alright I must be halfway there.”
Peter Drury’s all-time top three games
- South Africa 1-1 Mexico, World Cup, 2010
- Real Madrid 3-1 Man City, Champions League, 2022
- Doncaster Rovers 3-4 Halifax Town, Fourth Division, 1990
The enthusiasm with which Drury treats his work suggests he has plenty more years left in him, but there will eventually come a time when the microphone is passed on to the next generation.
“My advice, I guess, would be not to worry too much and I’m being a hypocrite because I worry all the time,” he says. “I’m motivated, I guess like everybody, by a fear of failure and getting it wrong, but I try to remember to enjoy it along the way because it is an immensely privileged thing to do. It doesn’t really matter that much. You’re shouting footballers’ names. It’s fun. It’s what a lot of people would love to do.”
Amazon Prime Video is broadcasting 10 Premier League fixtures between 18-20 October, including Manchester United vs Tottenham Hotspur and Liverpool vs West Ham. Peter Drury will be providing commentary for Leicester City vs Leeds on 20 October
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