Finally!

Funny sometimes how you can pass by the same thing every day and never really notice it, so much is it a part of your routine. Walking down the road towards the office that Sunday evening it struck me that it was more or less exactly eight years to the week that I had first made this journey, feeling my way around an unfamiliar part of London to the nondescript brick office building which contained the national radio station who’d hired me for a couple of hours on the weekend. My first day at work in a job that would ultimately take me to this moment right now.

Eight years of walking past the same landmarks. The pub on the corner, the speed humps in the middle of the road, the startlingly large wind turbines on the roof of the telephone exchange nearby, the corner shop which amusingly shares its name with one of our most celebrated production colleagues, the bin store whose purpose it seems is to afford easy access to the flat roof of the nearby building for the local graffiti taggers to go to work, and the artificially turfed football pitches that sit across the road from the radio station front door.

After eight years you can be forgiven for allowing all of that to blend into the background noise of life, part of the routine of your journey to work. On nights like these however I tend to take them into account as if to memorise every step of the journey, because part of the magic of this job is that every once in a while you do something that isn’t so routine, something that your mind tells you is a very big deal indeed.

This you see was no ordinary Sunday evening. This was the night of the 2010 World Cup Final and I was there to see that it all happened the way it should. I wanted so much for this to be something special.

In a sense there was an air of routine about it anyway. This was after all the 64th match we had broadcast in similar circumstances over the course of a little over four weeks. It was coming just 24 hours after the 63rd, the third play play-off match which was broadcast out of a sense of duty rather than out of any assumption that there was widespread public interest in the result. Still, when the time comes to look back in one’s dotage and to reflect the high points of a life well lived it surely means a great deal more to say “I did the World Cup Final” rather than “I did the Paraguay v Japan second round game that was settled on penalties after a dour 0-0 draw”. History can put things in their proper context for us all.

The truth of the matter is that most of the time these theoretically massive nights rarely live up to the hype. I’ve worked on a few spectaculars in my time – Liverpool’s second half comeback in the 2005 Champions League Final springs to mind, an evening when every one of us in the studio sat breathless as we watched something rather memorable and rather moving unfold in front of us on a evening none of us really wanted to end. It is fair to say however that the 2010 World Cup Final will by no means end up being one of them. An angry, almost bitter game which saw the two sides content to kick lumps out of each other rather than stroke the ball around. A match which seemed destined almost from the first ten minutes to go to penalties, settled almost at the death by a single Spanish goal at the tail end of extra time and one which thankfully meant the most deserving side would win the game in open play rather than trusting to the lottery of a shootout.

So really the mental hype was for no avail. No matter how much we wished for it or how hard we tried, nobody will ever reminisce about where they were when they heard the 2010 World Cup Final live on the radio. For every one of us on the show, out part in it will only be remembered in a brief line on our CVs or mentioned in passing when remembering our days on the radio. After all the time we had put in building up to that moment, we could be forgiven for turning around to fate and complaining that we kind of felt a little bit cheated. There wasn’t even a technical failure, a new noise from the crowd or even a dramatic in-game interruption of any kind to put some kind of memorable flag on the event. We just turned up, switched on, talked and then went home. In a dramatic novel this would have been the chapter discarded for space reasons for simply not advancing the plot or developing the characters in any meaningful way.

With no particular incident of note in the game and nothing really to argue about save the actual scoreline itself, the post-match segments of the game felt a little flat. Compared to 2006 when everyone was reeling over the Zidane red card and whether one of the greatest players of his era was going to end his career labelled a cheat – a debate that took us through well into the small hours of the morning – the climax to 2010 was little more than a final exhaling of breath. In a sense I think we were all glad of this, at both ends of the line. Every single one of us was burned out, sated on football, trying to remember what life was like without an outside broadcast to plan and just about aching to get back to something resembling a normal routine.

I know for the team back in South Africa there were still a few tears to be shed. The group of people who had practically lived in each others pockets for close to five weeks were finally packing their cases, stowing the souvenirs and heading home. For those of us back home and in particular those of us in the studio that evening, this special, memorable and quite momentous broadcast was at the end of the day just another shift. Most of us had more work to do the following day, more shows to plan and another shift to turn up for. It all turned out that the day of the 2010 World Cup Final was a day just like any other.

Know what? I would not have missed it for the world. If I’m still here to say the same thing in 2014 you can either say my career will have stalled badly on the same track or I can once again view myself as the luckiest producer in radio. I did the 2010 FIFA World Cup on the radio. What did you do last month?