ON THE AIR

History was made at Highbury on Saturday January 22nd 1927 when the First Division fixture (then the top division) between Arsenal and Sheffield United became the first football match to be broadcast live on the radio. Just three weeks after the BBC had received its Royal Charter which allowed it to broadcast coverage of major sporting events. 

Henry Wakelam, became the first football commentator. In order to help the listener follow the play the Radio Tmes printed a numbered grid of the pitch with Wakelam giving grid numbers in his commentary. (There are two main theories explaining the origin of the phrase ‘back to square one’: 1. Returning back to the beginning in children’s games such as hopscotch and snakes and ladders; or  2. The first live radio commentary featured a Division One match between Arsenal and Sheffield United, broadcast on January 22, 1927. A grid of a football pitch divided into eight numbered squares had been printed in the previous week’s Radio Times so the commentator could describe the ball’s location. Square one meant the rear left quadrant of the defender’s side of the field.) 

Arsenal's, Charlie Buchan (below), scored the first broadcast goal, the match ending 1-1 in front of a 16,831 Highbury crowd.

At the end of that season Arsenal were involved in another first with the first radio broadcast of an FA Cup Final. Cardiff beat Arsenal 1-0 in that final, on Saturday April 23rd 1927, to become still the only non-English side to win the competition. 

Ten years later, on Thursday September 16th 1937,  when television broadcasting was very much in its infancy Highbury again staged a notable first, the first live TV broadcast of a football match. This time it was an all-Arsenal affair with the first team playing the reserves in a match arranged to test the cutting-edge technology of the time. Not that many people saw it with only a few thousand TVs in the whole country at the time but, as they say, the rest is history........

'Welcome to Match of the Day, the first of a weekly series on BBC 2. This afternoon we are in Beatleville....' So started the first Match of the Day which was broadcast on Saturday August 22nd 1964. Only the highlights of one match was shown - Liverpool v Arsenal - and it's audience on BBC2 was estimated at less than 100,000 because of the difficulty in tuning in to that channel at the time. Two years later it proved popular enough to move to BBC1.

The first attempt to offer the British TV public regular live League football started – and finished – on 10th September 1960 when ITV broadcast the Saturday evening fixture between Blackpool and Bolton. In 1953 those two clubs contested a famous Cup Final but by 1960 they were both struggling in the First Division and the fixture was missing its star player – Stanley Matthews – because of injury. It was a dismal match with poor TV ratings and the following Saturday (17th) Arsenal refused permission for their match against Newcastle to be televised as did Spurs the week after that (24th) for their match against Aston Villa. As a result ITV abandoned the project which was planned to last for 26 matches and nearly a quarter of a century passed before there was another live League match on British TV – Tottenham v Nottingham Forest - on 2nd October 1983.

The first MOTDs were of course in black and white.

The first colour transmission was on 15th November 1969 at Anfield when Liverpool beat West Ham 2-0. At the time colour TVs were still rare so the commentators had to ensure that their commentaries were suitable for viewers with either colour or black and white sets. That caused problems. John Motson once famously said "For those of you watching in black and white, Spurs are in the all-yellow strip”. 10  million or so fans, switched on.

Yet another TV first for Arsenal came at the Emirates, on Sunday January 31st 2010. Their 3-1 home Premier League defeat against Manchester United was the world's first live sports event to be broadcast in 3D. The experimental Sky Broadcast was beamed to 9 pubs to test the technology and public opinion.