Opinion

England’s women are outshining men on the football pitch – and in the commentary box too

Simon O'Hagan
Sat, 19 August 2023 


I think it’s safe to say that tomorrow’s World Cup final will be the biggest moment in the professional lives of the 11 Englishwomen taking the field against Spain in Sydney.

But there is another Englishwoman who will be central to the occasion of whom that is surely also true: the BBC commentator Robyn Cowen. And her presence should equally be a cause for celebration.

Cowen has been a Match of the Day commentator since 2018, but it was during last year’s women’s Euros that she really came to prominence. Her “Dream makers. Record breakers. Game changers” pronouncement when England won the final instantly entered the annals of sports commentary.

Now Cowen gets to commentate on an even bigger match, and it’s a moment to consider the state of football commentary and why she outshines so many of her counterparts (still nearly all male).

Football commentary is a fine art. Every commentator has their own style, and we won’t all like the same voices. But I think we can agree that there are a few basics to be adhered to.

It seems obvious that first and foremost a football commentator needs to pay attention to what is happening on the pitch, but increasingly – Cowen excepted – this is not the case.

A disease is rife in commentary boxes: the disease of digression. Whole passages of play will unfold while the commentator is talking about other things.

There are two main reasons for this tendency. First, a commentator is now nearly always sharing airtime with a pundit. The two need to interact. More and more, those interactions turn into meandering chitchat. Meanwhile, somewhere in the distance, a football match is taking place.

Balancing commentary with pundit input is tricky, but Cowen, who had former England international Rachel Brown-Finnis alongside her for the Australia-England semi-final earlier this week, always has that balance under control. She doesn’t indulge herself in the way that I heard one (male) commentator do during the tournament when he started quoting his mother-in-law.

The second reason for the digression disease is commentators’ obsession with statistics – the more meaningless the better, it often seems.

A glaring example occurred on the first Match of the Day of the new Premier League season last Saturday. The match was Everton v Fulham. As it kicked off, the commentator thought it worth telling us that the two teams had met twice before on the opening day of a top-flight season, in 1963 and 1966. Does that mean anything? Does anyone care? And while all this was being regurgitated, Everton nearly scored.

The absence of discrimination between what is a valid statistic and what is an irrelevant one is a feature of modern football commentary, but it is not a fault you will find in Cowen’s work. Dare I wonder whether the disappearance down obscure statistical byways is a peculiarly male thing?

Cowen is also mercifully free of the sermonising that has come to characterise a lot of football commentary. Commentating on this week’s other semi-final – Spain v Sweden – Jonathan Pearce was so concerned with comparing the tournament unfavourably to the previous Women’s World Cup (“It might be just my mind playing tricks on me … but I seem to think we had more gripping games more often in France 2019”) that he was almost caught out by a Spanish goal.

This is not how Robyn Cowen goes about things. Her commentary on Australia-England was as superbly focused as the performance of the England players.

It shouldn’t be too much to ask that a commentator concentrates on the game, reads the action, contextualises, anticipates moves, processes in an instant what is happening and finds the right words to describe it. Yet not many commentators are actually able, or inclined, to do this.

Cowen is a shining exception, and to be in her hands is to have the viewing experience immeasurably enhanced. Noticing what you notice (and more), she is another example of how the women’s game has improved on the men’s, the latter still riven with a level of gamesmanship that the former comes nowhere near.

Cowen provides all the emotion you require, too. Her simple “Oh, wow!” after Ella Toone had smashed the ball into the top corner to give England the lead against Australia perfectly encapsulated what we were all feeling.

In 1966, when England’s men won the World Cup, Kenneth Wolstenholme got the chance to say: “Some people are on the pitch, they think it’s all over. It is now! It’s four!” and pass into legend. Whether events land in Cowen’s lap in the same way tomorrow, we will have to wait and see. But at least we can be sure that she’ll be ready for them.

Simon O’Hagan is an editor and writer