Barry Davies
Encyclopedia : B : BA : BAR : Barry Davies
Barry Davies (born 24 October 1940 in Kent and educated at Cranbrook School) is a sports commentator. Although best-known for his football commentary, Davies has also put his talents to numerous sports including ice skating, tennis, rowing, gymnastics and athletics, primarily in the BBC's Olympics coverage.
Davies started his broadcasting career on BBC Radio in 1963; he then worked briefly for ITV and was part of their commentary team for the 1966 World Cup. However, most of Davies' career has been spent with the BBC, and perhaps most notably he commentated for 35 years on the BBC's Match of the Day, from 9 August 1969 (Crystal Palace v Manchester United) up until 25 September 2004 (Manchester City vs Arsenal). Davies' reason for retiring from football commentary was that he felt he wasn't getting enough "big" matches, and was being "downgraded".[link]
He continues to work for the BBC on a freelance basis, covering the Winter and Commonwealth games and most recently, the Wimbledon Championships in June 2006.
Memorable Quotes
As with any long-serving commentator, Davies has managed one or two eternal lines in his time. Below are a few of the more memorable sound-bites attributed to him:
- "Lee...Interesting...Very Interesting...Look at his face...Just look at his face" (After Franny Lee scored for Derby County against his former club Manchester City)
- "The crowd think that Todd handled the ball.... they must have seen something that nobody else did."
- "If it had gone in, it would have been a goal"
- "A peep, peep, peep, another peep, and that's it." (greeting a final whistle)
- "It's Brazil 2 Scotland 1, so Scotland are back where they were at the start of the match." (from opening match of World Cup 98)
- "The Dutch fans look like a huge jar of marmalade." (They wear orange team shirts.)
- "Poland nil, England nil, though England are now looking the better value for their nil."
- "And Watford acknowledge the support of the crowd, indeed of the crowd that supported them."
- "Where, oh where were the Germans? And frankly, who cares?" (After Great Britain's second goal in the 1988 Olympic Hockey final against Germany.)
- "The Games are coming to London...absolutely brilliant!" (After it was announced London would host the 2012 Summer Olympics.)
Guest Appearances
Davies brought his talents to the comedy world in cult BBC sketch show Big Train, commentating with his distinctive enthusiasm on the fictional "World Stare-Out Championships" with Phil Cornwell - one of the most memorable sketches in the series.
In 1995 Davies put his voice to Actua Soccer by Gremlin Interactive alongside Trevor Brooking, arguably the first football video game to offer a realistic match commentary (the offering of its contemporary, FIFA '96, seemed clunky and repetitive by comparison). He also provided commentary in all of the many sequels to the game, including the UEFA European Championship official video game of the 1996 UEFA European Championship (Euro '96).
Since 2003, Davies has voiced the various football video games produced by Codemasters: the two Club Football titles released in 2003 and 2004, England International Football (also 2004, released to tie in with that year's Euro 2004 competition), and the LMA Manager series since LMA 2004.
External links
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.