Voices of Football: James Alexander Gordon - The Voice of Saturday Tea-Time

For forty years, JAG's soft Edinburgh lilt the the sound of the football results.

Professional football, especially at its top end, is changing, and at an increasingly rapid rate. We’ve absorbed many of these changes as though by osmosis. Over the course of my football-watching life… three points for a win, matches being shown live on the television, automatic promotion and relegation between the Football League and non-league football, The Taylor Report, the Premier League, the Champions League, the backpass rule, Bosman, millionaire players, social media culture, VAR. The laws of the game are simultaneously more precisely defined and open to interpretation than ever before. The spirit of the game has been lost. Only victory matters.

Within such a culture, that some things remain the same is something to cling to. “Out of the Blue”, the music that introduces BBC Radio’s Sports Report at five o’clock on Saturday afternoon, is like a mug of hot chocolate. It’s an Ovaltine advert. The smell of friend onions, tobacco smoke, and beef-based drinks of dubious origin. It has a sense of permanence about it, as though it’s always been there, and for any football supporter under the age of about 80, it always has.