Supply Throughout December and January, Red Bee and Channel 4 teamed up to provide live audio description on the Africa Cup of Nations. For the first time ever on British television, both semifinals and the final featured live AD as well as live subtitling. For us as audio describers, live sport is always an exciting challenge, and AFCON certainly delivered plenty to keep us on our toes.
Live AD differs from pre-recorded AD in that we do not record a prepared script and then send it off. We must become part of the live loop, which involves liaising closely with the many departments responsible for putting live broadcasts to air. Once the football match goes live, these presenters, directors, crew, playout and broadcast engineers keep the show on the air, while we in Live AD must keep our delivery agile enough to adapt to whatever unfolds on the pitch. What does that entail exactly?
Doing Our Homework — Squads, Formations and the “Pitch Sheet”
Before a ball is even kicked, we engage in several hours of prep work. We start by familiarising ourselves with both squads, the managers, predicted starting XIs, substitutes, formations, and, crucially, all the player names we’ll need to recall quickly during the game. You can “get by” with more general commentary such as “a Senegal midfielder charges down the right channel”, and sometimes being generic is unavoidable as we can be hamstrung by unclear camera angles or other limitations of not being in the stadium itself. But being able to vary delivery and identify the star players marries our AD with that of the commentary and helps paint a more complete picture for a blind and partially sighted audience.
We transpose all this information into our own hand-assembled pitch sheet. And when we say “pitch sheet”, think less “beautiful graphic” and more “functional spreadsheet”. It’s a crude but incredibly useful representation of where players tend to operate on the field.
The idea is simple: the more information we have at-a-glance, the less thinking we have to do in the heat of the moment. In live sport, if you spend even a second mentally rummaging for a name or position, you’ve already lost the time you needed to describe what just happened.
Commentators, Pundits, and the Art of Working Around Them
One of the interesting quirks of covering football is the agreed assumption built into traditional commentary. TV commentators and pundits work on the basis that their audience can see almost everything on screen. Perhaps as a consequence of that, their styles vary a lot more than people might imagine.
Some commentators concentrate heavily on the on-field action — identifying players, describing the shape of a pass, or capturing the speed and angle of a shot. Others drift quite comfortably into stats, history, background stories, or tactical theories, only snapping fully back to the pitch when something dramatic occurs: a goal, a counterattack, a crunching foul, a moment of total chaos in the box or, as happened in the AFCON final, an entire team being ordered off the pitch by their manager in defiance of a controversial penalty decision!
As audio describers, our job is to flex and blend with whatever commentary style we’re paired with, and we make it part of our preparation to research the commentators we’ll be working around. When the main commentary is covering the key on-pitch action thoroughly, we speak less. When they aren’t — and especially when they’re knee-deep in a discussion about a manager’s playing career from 1998, while on-field a player is through on goal — we step in, even if it means clashing slightly. Our job is to prioritise access, making sure the AD audience has a clear idea of what is happening in the game itself, moment by moment, so their experience is as rich and engaging as possible.
Why We Speak in Short Bursts
There’s also a very good reason why many live sports commentators … talk in short … clipped bursts … rather than long, flowing sentences. Elite-level football moves at an exhilarating pace — the game can completely change within seconds. If you launch into a long, flowery description of a passage of play, you then have to finish the sentence in real time, while the entire situation might have already transformed. You might also end up clashing important commentary that comes in while you are waxing lyrical. Better to break your delivery into flexible chunks: bursts of description that allow you to pivot instantly when the ball ricochets off a defender or a winger suddenly decides to drop their shoulder, lose their defender and drill in an early cross.
"The final gave us Brahim Diaz’s missed penalty, which we described in real time as a 'duffed Panenka'”
Football Parlance — Speaking the Sport’s Language
Another key consideration in live football AD is parlance. Every sport has its own vocabulary, and football’s is not only colourful but incredibly efficient. Using the right footballing terms in context not only adds credibility to what we’re saying but also helps convey information more quickly and clearly. The final gave us Brahim Diaz’s missed penalty, which we described in real time as a “duffed Panenka”, showing that the flavour of live AD comes not only in the actual moment but in the split-second choices you make of how best to describe it. Whether it’s “pressing high”, “driving into the box”, “a looping cross”, or “a heavy first touch”, the language and sometimes clichés of the game are often the clearest way to paint the picture.
In the End… That’s Why We Love It
AFCON gave us all the entertainment we could wish for: drama, unpredictability, last-minute twists, and moments where commentary, production, and AD had to dance together in perfect timing… and a few moments where we all had to sprint to keep up.
The final had one of those rare, breathtaking stretches in which the match descended into chaos and confusion, with Senegal players leaving the pitch in protest and play being suspended for 14 minutes. As 1.7 million people watched live, E4’s commentary team, working from the same feed we were, could only speculate. And like the commentary team in the gantry, we live describers were pre‑empting what might come next, just as the fans in the stadium and those watching at home were. When football becomes chaos, live AD becomes a dance of instinct, timing, and ruthless prioritisation. Our job is to clearly communicate that disorder, translating confusion into clarity without ever losing the pulse of the moment.
But that’s the beauty of live football. When it works, it’s exciting — and when it goes a bit rogue, it’s sometimes even more thrilling!
Either way, we loved being part of the coverage. And we hope that for those listening along with us, the matches felt as alive, vivid, and dynamic as they did from our side of the mic.
By Scott Hammond & Simon Williams