Alan Parry
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Alan Parry (born 1947) is a British sports commentator, born in Liverpool, concentrating on football and athletics. He has, uniquely, commentated for all three main broadcasters of football in the UK - the BBC, ITV and Sky, as well as for both BBC and commercial radio.
Starting his career at BBC Radio Merseyside, he joined the BBC in London in 1973, and immediately started regular football commentaries. Within a short time he was covering England matches, and by 1975 he was covering the European Cup final. After the death of Maurice Edelston he started working alongside Peter Jones covering the FA Cup Final in 1976. By the mid-1970s he was also BBC radio's athletics commentator, covering the 1976, 1980 and 1984 Summer Olympics.
From 1981 he largely relinquished his radio football commentary to commentate for Match of the Day on BBC television. In 1985 he left the BBC to join ITV, mainly as an athletics commentator after the commercial channel won the rights to cover British athletics. However, he also covered football for ITV until he left to join Sky TV in 1996, by which time ITV's athletics portfolio had dwindled almost to nothing (he continued covering what little athletics ITV had left until 1997). Although mainly a football commentator for the satellite broadcaster, he has also covered athletics for them. Between 1998 and 2002 he was a football commentator for talkSPORT and a presenter during the World Cup hosting a phone-in. In the 2002-03 season he presented Saturday afternoon football coverage on Capital Gold.
He is a renowned Liverpool fan and is also on the board at Wycombe Wanderers.
The 2005/2006 season was one of Alan's busiest in terms of live football commentary for Sky Sports. He commentated on 1 live match from every weekend of the FA Barclays Premiership, (plus several live matches for overseas viewers for TWI), covered several FA Cup and Carling Cup ties including the Carling Cup final live and exclusive, 10+ UEFA Champions League ties live, occasional Football League matches live, as well as a number of end-of-season Football League Play Off matches.
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