“Very, very occasionally, once or twice, amongst all the rubbish on Twitter, someone has said ‘Attenborough of football,’” Clive Tyldesley says towards the end of our interview. “And, wow, I’m sure as hell f***ing not that but if you want to throw a compliment my way, that kind of acceptance as being a part of someone’s life if they want to watch a bit of football, then that is the biggest praise that I can certainly deal with or process.”
It is a comparison which stands up because Tyldelsey has provided the sound to so many of the game’s biggest moments.
From Barcelona in 1999 and Istanbul in 2005 to numerous disappointments for England, his voice was present, etched in our minds as the backing track of iconic wins and losses.
And yet our conversation, a few days after Tyldesley has returned from covering an eighth World Cup in Qatar, is dominated by talk of continuing to improve, maintaining motivation and the importance of standards, the word that comes up most often in his off-camera chats with Graeme Souness and Roy Keane.
“Occasionally, I had people say ‘you’ve been the soundtrack of my youth’ and when you’re 68 years of age and maybe not getting as much work as you used to you think ‘is that a compliment or not?’” he continues.
“But the people who make an impression on us when we’re young are people we carry with us through our lives. This notion you need to be 25 to broadcast to 25 year olds, I can’t accept that. I’m a parent, I’ve got to be able to communicate with young people. I might have grandchildren one day.
“You’ve got to be good enough and broad-minded enough and smart enough to work out what the audience is and broadcast to it. Attenborough does that brilliantly.”
There are moments when Tyldesley accepts that he perhaps takes the job with an uncommon seriousness – “we don’t save lives, we don’t add to the GNP in a great way" – but this is equally the only role he has wanted to do since his teenage years. " My expectations of myself are alarmingly high, too high really, because I never do a commentary I’m happy with," he says.
He looks at social media, weighs up the precarious economic and political position much of the world finds itself in right now, and realises both that he is in a privileged position and the job of a communicator has never been more important in the era of misinformation and fake news.
“Even in the small world of football commentary it’s important to get it right and put a value on every minute of air-time you’re afforded," he says. "I’m sure that makes me sound a little bit pompous, vain and arrogant. But I’m sorry, I take this job really seriously because I’ve been given this opportunity.”
Now watch the full interview with Clive Tyldesley on the MirrorFootball YouTube channel
That explains why he was so “bitterly disappointed” to return home early from Qatar by ITV. “I accept the decision,” he says. “But I didn’t agree with it.” Station bosses had informed Tyldesley that he would not be covering one of two live quarter-finals, so he asked for permission to fly home. It was granted and he will be back on the channel for their FA Cup third-round coverage in early January.
But has he ever felt fatigued by it? Has the desire ever been diminished several decades into a career where he has seen everything apart from an England World Cup win? Most of all what is the secret to keeping such an insatiable level of motivation even now?
"Can I trust you with an honest answer?" he responds. "Are you sure? Vanity. I’ve discussed this with Graeme and Roy. Vanity is a risible way of saying it but with both of those people and a lot of people in football, the fear of losing is the biggest motivation of all.
"The feeling that comes with defeat - in my case the failure to perform at my best, rejection or having a job taken away from me or a match taken away - if you care about what you do then you feel that more deeply than what you should do.
"If you take a step back from football, it’s just a game. If you take a step back from television, it’s just some blurry pictures on a screen or tablet. It doesn’t really matter that much but it does to the people inside it. The fear of losing, I understand that as a motivation for players. Forgive the French but my biggest motivation is not to f*** up in front of 20 million people or even 200,000 people."
Still, there is an understanding that the industry is much changed to when he first started off – even if the broader principles remain. He has always approached commentary with a simple aim: to speak to the audience as if they were his grandmother.
Tyldesley fondly recalls the days when a live broadcast would conclude and those involved would immediately sit in a room and frankly dissect the good and bad. They would sometimes be brutally critical and much of that would not be allowed now, when almost everyone is a little bit more caring about the individuals across from them and careful in what they say.
Instead he carries out his own debriefs, listening back to the commentary and critiquing. He admits that he is “a b****” to watch any television with because he cannot help evaluating. There are strong opinions on almost every commentator across all sports – which he will not divulge – and, asking for forgiveness as he veers into cliche, he says that the next game is always the most important.
While the internal criticism has been dialled down, the existence of social media has ensured that the outside noise is louder than ever. It would be “arrogant” to completely ignore the feedback on Twitter, Tyldesley says, though he bristles at the definitive takes of people who do not really understand how television works.
Now watch the full interview with Clive Tyldesley on the MirrorFootball YouTube channel
“One of the things that makes me so angry about social media is there are so many people who are so damn certain about everything at the most uncertain time,” he says. “These are the most uncertain years I’ve known and yet there are people out there who are so, so certain about anything and everything from Gareth Southgate’s selections to Brexit, from Clive Tyldesley to Sam Matterface.
“Life isn’t like that. Life, and particularly sport, is about uncertainty and the wonder of commentating on a football match is that once the referee blows his whistle you have no idea where it is going. We as commentators are just hanging on for dear life so in that sense the techniques are very similar.
“Commentary develops like all things do, it’s become a bit too conversational for my liking, but that’s a matter of personal taste. There are still commentators you can find that you like. “The difference for all of us, particularly at a World Cup when the audience is 20 million plus for a big game, is the jeopardy of every word that you say. A lot of that jeopardy is artificially generated by these people who are certain about everything on social media. That’s changed it, of course it has.”
The conversational shift in punditry has been obvious in the past ten years, though at the same time the level of tactical insight has never been higher. Tyldesley holds Jamie Carragher, to name one, in very high esteem.
And yet…
“I’m still a little uncomfortable with ‘Mo Salah, you little dancer.’ Um, yeah, OK,” he adds. “It’s not a question of I don’t want you to pretend not to care about Liverpool like you do, just not quite sure. He’s a huge talent and a really conscientious pundit - the amount of time he spends looking for the clips to illustrate what he wants to say - he’s a proper pro. But that would be my only quibble with him.”
One of the great attractions has always been learning from those fortunate enough to have crossed the white line, “where most of us dream of going but will never go and come back and tell us what it’s like on the other side in very simple terms.”
He will never stop appreciating the wisdom of Souness, Keane and close friend Ally McCoist. There is also a clear affiliation to free to air TV and the irreplaceable buzz of broadcasting live to a significant percentage of the population.
“With the very greatest respect to Martin Tyler, what's the largest audience for a Super Duper Sunday on Sky? Maybe 3 million?” Tyldesley says. “Guy Mowbray and Sam Matterface will be broadcasting to 20 million plus people live during this World Cup. Seven or eight times more than Martin or Darren Fletcher will commentate to.
“There's the jeopardy, there's the test, there's the challenge. How broad is your church? How many of those people can you reach, get the trust of and hopefully the affection of? That's the challenge I faced and the challenge they now face. It's a wonderful challenge to take on. It really is. I'm very privileged, very lucky to have done that."
