Peter Drury

Exclusive: Much-loved commentator on that night in Rome, Sergio Aguero's goal and not watching football as a child.

He is not on social media and nor does he ever intend to be. He recalls it from his first days watching regular live football at Boothferry Park, when he was a Hull University politics student in the 1980s. He is haunted by the prospect of uttering the wrong goalscorer’s name, the commentator’s nightmare. One of the lines the internet attributes to him upon a particular Manchester City substitution, “Silva for Jesus, an exchange of which Judas would be proud”, he says he never uttered. He did get through “Tess of the d’Urbervilles” in lockdown, the Thomas Hardy classic which is only slightly less depressing than the recent experiences of the average Manchester United fan. “I have to try to decode it, so I hope on a good day that makes it both prepared and spontaneous.” I offer the theory that the children of preachers often inherit a facility with words – and many have become famous actors, politicians, musicians, activists. When unexpected things happen on a football pitch it requires a voice that matches the emotions and significance of the occasion. Even the view from his bedroom window of his father walking up the road every morning with the newspaper was, he says, “commentated on like the Olympics 200 metres final”. He does not want to be a television personality and required some persuasion to be interviewed. “Manchester City were playing Liverpool that night and I was in the Olympic Stadium thinking ‘Nobody is watching this one’”. The only difference today, as we sit in his local, is that the rich, sonorous voice is operating at a much lower volume than on matchday, eager not to attract attention among the lunchtime crowd.