Dubbed the “voice of football” and known for his trademark sheepskin coats, the former football commentator John “Motty” Motson, who has died aged 77, gave an interview to the Methodist Recorder on his strong Methodist background. Published just weeks before his death, he talked about his family, his faith and his passion for the “beautiful game”. The article was printed on 3 February as part of a series called “Methodism and Me”, including Lord Blunkett, Lord Beith and Christine Morgan. It is re-published with kind permission from the Methodist Recorder.
I was brought up in the manse. My father, William, was a Methodist minister in the north west when I was born in Salford in 1945. He had trained at Didsbury College in Manchester, and he went on to do 40 years in the ministry. I found out later in life it had rather consumed him to a certain extent. The only time off he gave himself was Saturday afternoon when he took me to football.
My mother, Gwendoline, was born into a Methodist family in Boston in Lincolnshire. Her father was a lay preacher so both sides of the family were really very involved in the Methodist Church. I was christened in the Centenary Methodist church in Boston. All my uncles and aunties came from there and my grandparents and so on, and my father had been born in Swineshead.
In my youth I went to church every Sunday, sometimes three times on a Sunday. I had Sunday school in the afternoon and then church again in the evening . I was never in the church choir because I was never a good singer, but I got to know all the hymns in the Methodist hymn book and all that kind of thing.
I was aged only one when we moved down South and he took up an appointment at Plumstead Common Methodist church and that is where he first introduced me to football. From there he got moved to the Deptford Methodist Mission in about 1950, and he worked and lived there for seven years. My father was a great inspiration to a lot of people. When he went to the East End mission he got involved with the life of Cable Street and he was quite a well-known figure in trying to put kids on the right path.
During that period I went to Culford School, the independent Methodist boarding school in Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk. Fortunately, I got a scholarship that enabled him to send me to the school. While I was there I pursued my interest in football even though we didn’t play soccer; we played cricket and rugby and tennis. But my dad did take me in the holidays and gave me a real education in football and I owe to him what happened to me later in my life.
He was a supporter of Derby County, which was probably the nearest Division One club to Boston at the time. But he started to take me to all the other grounds. We went to Arsenal, Tottenham, Chelsea, Everton. Everywhere we went we went to a football match .My dad was friendly with the Rev Jimmy Butterworth who had this thing called JB Clubland, a well-known Methodist youth club. He had season tickets to Chelsea so my father and I became Chelsea fans and we got season tickets and went every week. His interest in football was a passion that came out of his own childhood. It was just something that ran in the family.
Once I got to school I had to wait till my father came to see me on three Saturdays in a season and we would go and watch Ipswich Town where we saw Alf Ramsey’s team in the 1960s. I got to know Bobby Robson later and I became very partial to the club.
When I was at school I used to write away to clubs and collect programmes and things like that and I used to write reports on football games I saw on the television or practice writing reports on the school hockey team. It soon became clear that English was my main subject so as time went on I thought more and more about reporting and journalism and started a school newspaper.
I left Culford at 16 – I did my O Levels but I didn’t stay in the sixth form – and I wanted to get a job on a local newspaper. But while I was looking I went to work at the Methodist Church press office in London. The then Methodist press officer gave me an opportunity to write bits and pieces about the Church. I even wrote for the Methodist Recorder. I used to report on the Methodist Association of Youth Clubs, which had a famous concert each year at the Royal Albert Hall, so I had my by-line there. Just under two years after leaving school, in 1963, I joined the Barnet Press in Hertfordshire. I did four years there and passed my proficiency certificate and made my way in journalism from then on.
My father and mother were both great influences on my career. My mother was a very meticulous person. I learned to be accurate and precise. My dad just encouraged me to go on and make football part of my lie – not my whole life because obviously I was still going to church every week and I became a member of the local Methodist church more or less wherever I lived, with Finchley in north London as the main one. I am not so strong in Methodism now and I go to the Church of England quite a lot as well but I have retained an interest in the faith all down the years and I am still very much a Christian.
My dad also taught me about speaking. I spent hours watching him in the pulpit and I know I didn’t realise it at the time, but the inflection of his voice was something that came to me when I went into commentating. I didn’t realise it at the time but the business of speaking to people publicly was something he obviously mastered, and he passed it on to me.
During my four years at the Barnet Press I learned to become a football reporter. I covered matches and wrote pieces about local clubs in the area of Barnet and Finchley I was advised by a friend of mine to get a job on a provincial newspaper and I started writing to all the papers in England that had Saturday night football pages. They are out of fashion now but then everyone had a “green ‘un” or a “pink ‘un”, the sports supplement on a Saturday night. I got a job at the Sheffield Morning Telegraph and the next thing I knew I was covering Sheffield United and Sheffield Wednesday and Rotherham United where Tommy Docherty was then the manager. I went through the whole editorial apprenticeship, learning how to write for a morning paper on biggish clubs while I was a subeditor at night. So I was fully occupied.
A big turning point in my career came in 1968 when the BBC launched its first range of local radio stations and Sheffield was one of the first six, by sheer chance. My sports editor David Jones was persuaded by Radio Sheffield to start a sports programme and reporters were commandeered to help them. My radio work started there in 1968 and I was only there for a year when I saw an advert in the UK Press Gazette for a Sports News Assistant at the BBC. I didn’t get the job at the first attempt but they were hiring more assistants so I did second time around. I started by reading the racing results and writing copy for the sports desk in the evening, but a man called Angus Mackay, who was the doyen of sports editors of the time, decided I was going to be a voice, that he wanted to use me to go out and do rounds ups and report on matches and interview people and things like that .
When I joined the BBC proper I would have been aged about 23 or 24. I was on BBC Radio between 1968 and 1971 and then in 1971 Ken Wolstenholme, the veteran commentator, left the BBC and they were looking for a junior commentator. I got a job in the slipstream of David Coleman and Barry Davies. I was the young guy in the office they all thought was going to go places. They asked whether I would like to try football commentary and I said I would and In 1969 I did my first live radio report on Everton against Derby County. I remember it like yesterday. I then had a good two years doing radio commentary and I moved to television in 1971. It just came naturally. I worked on Match of the Day from 1971 to 2018. I was actually 50 years at the BBC.
I covered 10 world cups, including the final on six occasions, 29 FA Cup Finals and some 2,000 plus games over the years. The highlights were those big matches. Paul Gascoyne was the best English player I ever saw and the best foreign player, in terms of his influence on one club, was Eric Cantona. I never saw Pele play in the flesh but I saw Maradona and Johan Cruyff and obviously I saw Bobby Charlton and Jimmy Greaves, who was a real hero. I enjoyed watching the last World Cup on television, and I don’t tend to criticise the commentators because I know how hard it is.
There is a strong link between Christianity and football. A lot of clubs like Aston Villa and Everton came out of local Methodist churches. I have to say that the game has changed so much from when I started. It is now so money orientated. The figures are just mind boggling and I think football could do with coming down a little bit. But at the same time it is the way of the world and you have to go with it. I do find it quite overwhelming that the players earn the amount of money that they do but it is only there because people pay to watch football.
I have been involved in Christians in Sport for probably 20 years. There weren’t football chaplains when I started but they certainly have come along now. The Rev John Boyers, one of the leading clergymen who got involved in football, was the chaplain to Manchester Utd and you can’t get any higher than that. Chaplains have become part of the scenery of most of the leading football clubs. They have had a good impact because young footballers need guidance amid all the pressure of the modern game
People say football is like religion, but I will tell you when there really was an affinity between a Methodist church service and a football match. It was when the hymn “Abide with me” was sung at the Cup Final. That really made me feel that I was part of something that was both a Christian and a sporting occasion. Whoever you meet in life, whether it is the Archbishop of Canterbury or a local minister or whoever, everyone has a favourite football team. That for me is what ties people together. I think that is at the heart of it.
