FEATURES: BROADCASTER PITCHES HIS MATCH OF THE DAY MEMOIRS
Ex-Match of the Day editor Paul Armstrong opens up about amazing memories, broadcasting pressures – and telling irate viewers to ‘get stuffed’. Chris Burn reports.
MOST FOOTBALL fans are not naturally sympathetic towards referees. But after 15 years of editing Match of the Day – and
frequently incurring the wrath of supporters convinced of unfair bias against their beloved side – Paul Armstrong can certainly see things from their perspective.
The genial Middlesbrough fan likens the pressure of delivering a successful live 90-minute broadcast each week to an audience of millions to being one of the officials who are more often derided than praised.
“It is a bit like being a referee, if nobody has noticed your performance that is a good thing,” he explains. “The running order is subjective but if you have a reasonable explanation for it and you leave thinking you haven’t dropped a clanger or missed anything, then you are ok.”
Armstrong, whose extraordinary career has also involved travelling the world to work at seven World Cups and five Olympic Games alongside some of the greats of sports broadcasting, has just published his first book, Why Are We Always on Last? Running Match of the Day and Other Adventures in TV and Football after taking redundancy from the BBC in 2016 due to worsening ear problems.
His job entailed deciding how long the highlights and analysis of each game were shown for – and most contentiously, the order they were shown in.
The book title is a light-hearted reference to the frequent complaint of fans of smaller clubs who perceived their sides were being discriminated against when it came to choosing which order to show matches in – a problem that reached its zenith when Armstrong set up a short-lived Twitter account called @motdeditor, which swiftly amassed 300,000 followers in 2011.
“Once people got the idea you could talk straight to the editor and let them know their feelings, it took off,” he says.
“I was probably not the best person to deal with that because I did occasionally lose my temper!”
He explains in the book he ended up being “ticked off by the uber-bosses” after one too many “squabbles with the more abusive and pig-headed” viewers.
It was not the first time online remarks had got him into hot water. In December 2006, he wrote a BBC blog attempting to dispel a persistent rumour that MoTD commentators did not actually attend games – something he now describes as “an early example of fake news”.
When he responded to comments on his post from people insisting he was not telling the truth, the trouble really began.
“Appropriately for pantomime season, this just degenerated into ‘Oh no they’re not, oh yes they are’, and after several days of ping-pong with the kind of people who probably think the moon landings were staged I ended the conversation with a not particularly festive, or Reithian, ‘Make like a turkey and get stuffed’,” he explains in the book. “It’s quite funny in retrospect but I was hauled over the coals for insulting the licence payer.”
But despite his occasional run-ins, Armstrong says he generally enjoyed the feedback he got from viewers as it showed how much people cared about the show.
But social media is not the only development broadcasters have had to adapt to in recent years. Armstrong says the biggest change since he started at the BBC in the 1980s is the sheer number of competing sports channels – something he says is not necessarily negative.
“It is definitely a good thing you don’t have a Grandstand-type situation any more where every major sport is trying to find airtime on one channel. I remember trying to watch England in the 1979 Cricket World Cup final and they kept going to different sports so you hardly saw any of it. I don’t think anybody would go back to that and you can’t ever turn the clock back.
“The problem now comes with people having to subscribe to Sky and BT to see what they want and the next football deal will involve certain games on Amazon. But that is where Match of the Day comes in with the chance to watch a digest of it all. When Sky first came in, I don’t think anybody thought Match of the Day would survive but it has gone from strength to strength.”
Armstrong, who grew up in Stockton-on-Tees, landed a place on a BBC production trainee scheme in 1987 after “letting rip” about a “boring and predictable” Match of the Day broadcast as part of an application task to review a programme. Thinking of becoming a newspaper journalist at the time after graduating from Oxford, he says he was shocked to be offered a place on the BBC scheme and believes he was chosen as something of a ‘wild card’ as the “token blokey sports one who was northern as well”.
His breakthrough moment in BBC Sport came at the end of the 1990 World Cup, where he made a montage of England star Paul Gascoigne set to Mark Knopfler’s Local Hero that ended up being praised by Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire producer David Puttnam among many others. “It just caught the moment. It wouldn’t look that special now as the things people can do are light years ahead of it. But it was the luck of being in the right place at the right time.”
He says one the greatest highlights of his career was being in Munich in 2001 as the match editor when England famously beat Germany 5-1
– a production that was nominated for a BAFTA. Armstrong says the pressure of broadcasting to millions, particularly during England matches, was something he learnt to cope with. “You are always thinking you are broadcasting to one living room. I’m thinking ‘my dad is watching this and this should make sense to people I know’. But you are always conscious about it. There is nothing else on television, apart from maybe a Royal wedding, where you feel everybody is watching.”
Armstrong says he placed himself in the role of ‘chief worrier’ on Match of the Day – and reflects that the broadcasting approach of ex-players was often similar to the way they had played the game.“As a former defender, Alan Hansen had the mentality of ‘what might go wrong?’ He was always nervous. But Alan Shearer and Gary Lineker had the confidence of ‘I’m going to score today’. Maybe it is because I am a Middlesbrough fan but my mindset was always, if it doesn’t go wrong, it is a bonus.”
Armstrong now spends most Saturdays watching his beloved Middlesbrough. But he says he still misses the camaraderie of watching the Saturday afternoon Premier League games live alongside football legends like Shearer and Lineker. “It is just like being with a big group of mates watching six games – it just so happens they have all played at a very high level. Between 3pm and 5pm, the job is an absolute joy.”
■ Why Are We Always on Last? by Paul Armstrong is out now and published by Pitch Publishing.
When Sky first came in, nobody thought Match of the Day would survive but it has gone from strength to strength. It is like working with your mates – they just happen to have played at the highest level.