Are the Match of the Day commentators at the stadiums?
Posted on 16th January 2013
Quite frankly, it is ridiculous when people say that the Match of the Day commentators dub their words on afterwards.
We are at the stadium; we do 90 minutes live commentary, and then do the post-match interviews.
Sometimes, and very rarely, for technical reasons you have to re-do a line or two of commentary; but I am now in my ninth season of working on the programme and have only once had to re-dub a goal call. That was because I got the identity of the scorer wrong, which is something that every commentator dreads, and then lies awake for hours that night worrying about.
Sometimes a line or two is moved about the edit by the producer in charge of producing the highlights for a match. Mostly the viewer won’t notice, but just occasionally it jars, when a commentator predicts something might happen and then it does. Although having said that you do say things to help an edit, for example if a team are losing 3-0 and score to make it 3-1 with time running out you do wonder out loud if it could be the start of a dramatic late comeback.
So the clear answer to the original question is that the Match of the Day commentators most certainly are at the grounds, we do commentary on the whole match live, we do the post match interviews and then we go home. We do not go to BBC Sport in Salford to dub some commentary on – it’s an urban myth.
