We sat down with talkSPORT 2 legend Ian Danter to discuss the station’s 10th anniversary, his favourite ever commentary moments and what makes League One football as exciting as the World Cup
Spin-off radio station talkSPORT 2 turns 10 this weekend. And with it from day one has been commentator Ian Danter.
“It was such a huge compliment when they asked me to be the first voice on the station,” Ian told the Daily Star exclusively.
“Looking back, that’s probably what I’ve been most proud of, the sheer number of sports we’ve managed to cover – like darts, rugby league, golf, horse racing and the NFL, alongside the football and cricket – and the way we’ve put our own stamp on them.”
Radio commentary is, of course, a unique skill. It can also deliver its own special drama.
Here the team from talkSPORT 2 reveal their favourite moments from 10 years on air:
CRICKET – April 3, 2016 – In the last over, Carlos Brathwaite wins the T20 World Cup for West Indies vs England
“Oh, that’s sensational!” cries commentator Brian Murgatroyd. “He’s gone SIX! SIX! SIX! SIX! Ben Stokes is inconsolable…”
FOOTBALL – November 28, 2018 – Aston Villa 5-5 Nottingham Forest – a bonkers match, with crazy contributions from pundit Ian Holloway: “Five-all! That’s a little mouse from a film my kids used to watch! Fievel! Remember him?”
DARTS – December 17 2019 – Fallon Sherrock becomes the first woman to win a PDC World Championship match. “You are now Superstar Sherrock for ever!” cries co-commentator Paul Nicholson.
CRICKET – January 7 2020 – England beat South Africa in the Cape Town Test, played during lockdown, in a dramatic final session. “Stokes has done it again!” exclaims Guy Swindells. “Just when England needed a hero, they’ve found one!”
RUGBY UNION – June 26, 2021 – Harlequins beat Exeter Chiefs in 2021’s crazy Premiership Final, winning 40-38. The late Russ Hargreaves, at the mic that day, calls it “one of the greatest finals the world has ever seen.”
FOOTBALL – January 19 2022 – In the 95th minute, Spurs are 2-1 down at Leicester. Then, sensationally, Steven Bergwijn scores two in 80 seconds. “I cannot believe my eyes!” screams Joe Shennan. “The away fans are in delirium.”
DARTS – January 3 2023 – Michael Smith’s nine-darter vs Michael van Gerwen. “Oh, my word! I do not believe it!” cries Mark Wilson. “That was as near perfect a leg as you will ever get!”
FOOTBALL – August 16 2023 – “The Lionesses have done it, through to a World Cup final for the first time ever!” cries Joe Shennan, as England Women beat the Aussies in Sydney.
OLYMPICS – August 4 2024 – Novak Djokovic beats Carlos Alcaraz to win gold. “In tears, on his knees, in the centre of the court,” Joe tells listeners, “perhaps the greatest player we’ve ever seen.”
NFL – November 9 2025 – A record-breaking 83-yard touchdown run from Jonathan Taylor of the Indianapolis Colts – “He’s going to go all the way!” exclaims Will Gavin at the mic. “Ten! Five! Touchdown! Unbelievable!”
Here’s our full interview with Ian Danter
When talkSPORT 2 launched in March 2016, the thinking behind it was simple: If you’re a sports radio station and you keep running out of airtime because there’s way too much actual sport going on, the obvious answer is… another radio station.
It gave the network somewhere to put everything that couldn’t always be accommodated on its main station — darts, rugby league, tennis, NFL, golf, cricket tours and, yep, plenty more football.
The very first voice listeners heard when the station went live belonged to commentator Ian Danter, already a familiar presence on talkSPORT and someone who would quickly become one of the new station’s key voices.
Ten years on, Ian is still very much part of the furniture, commentating on football across the leagues and fronting talkSPORT 2’s darts coverage.
I caught up with him to talk about the peculiar craft of describing darts on the radio, the secret of a good pundit – and why, if you’re doing your job properly, a Tuesday night in League One should feel just as important to you as a World Cup quarter-final.
Mike Ward: You’ve ended up covering a ton of stuff for talkSPORT 2. From a commentator’s point of view, how different are those jobs? I’d always assumed darts must be the awkward one on radio.
Ian Danter: They’re very different. Darts is probably the most unusual one to commentate on, especially on radio. When we first started covering the World Championships in 2018 we were basically given a directive: “Darts is going on the radio.” But nobody told us how to do it.
You can’t just say, “He throws the dart… it lands in the board.” That wouldn’t work, would it? What you lean on instead is the atmosphere, particularly somewhere like Alexandra Palace, which is extraordinary. You also tap into the psychology of the sport.
It’s a one-on-one contest, so you can see a player’s whole demeanour change from one visit to the next. Sometimes it collapses completely, sometimes the confidence grows. That human drama is what you’re trying to convey to the listener.
Football is different because you’re describing the geography of the game: where the ball is, which end it’s at, where the corner is being taken from, that sort of thing.
MW: And darts has almost a gladiatorial feel to it, doesn’t it? Two people on stage, either of whom may be having the night of his life or falling apart.
ID: Absolutely. And you get these great stories of players who seem to come from nowhere. Luke Littler is the obvious recent example. Those who follow the sport closely had been talking about him for a couple of years before he burst onto the big stage, but when he arrived at the World Championships it felt like an overnight success.
I remember doing the draw live on the Hawksbee and Jacobs Show, and telling them: “Keep an eye on Luke Littler in this tournament.” He didn’t win it that year but he reached the final. That was the start of his extraordinary journey.
MW: But being brilliant in Britain often comes with a catch, right? As soon as someone reaches the top, we start trying to push them off it.
ID: That’s just British culture, isn’t it? We love watching someone climb to the top of the mountain, and then we immediately want to knock them off it.
But what Luke is doing is remarkable. It’s not necessarily that his averages are something we’ve never seen before — players like Phil Taylor or Michael van Gerwen posted incredible numbers in their primes — but it’s the speed with which he’s collecting major titles.
And he’s raising the standard of everyone around him. Other players are reassessing their games because of what he’s done.
MW: One thing about darts crowds is they’re loud, slightly chaotic, but rarely angry in the way football crowds can be.
ID: That’s right. There’s a lot of noise and a lot of beer flying around, but there’s also a lot of joy. The PDC made a really clever decision early on, by banning football shirts from the audience. That’s where the whole fancy-dress culture started.
People thought: if I can’t go in my team’s kit, I’ll come dressed as something ridiculous instead. One of my favourites was a group of four lads where three of them came dressed as seagulls and the other was a bag of chips. Every so often the seagulls would attack the chips, as if they were on Brighton Pier.
As a commentator, spotting things like that in the crowd is a big part of the entertainment.
MW: Let’s rewind to the start of talkSPORT 2. You were the first voice people heard when it launched. Not a bad line on your CV.
ID: Yes, it was such a huge compliment when they asked me. I was taken out to lunch by our head of live sport at the time, Mike Bovill, who told me that when the station launched I’d be the first voice people heard.
Even though I’d already been at talkSPORT for 12 years by then, I was incredibly nervous. Starting a brand-new radio station is a big moment.
My opening line was something like: “Oh, you’ve found us then — welcome to talkSPORT 2.”
MW: And the whole point was to give other sports a bit more breathing space?
ID: Exactly. With just one station there hadn’t been enough room for everything. talkSPORT 2 changed all that.
Looking back over the 10 years, that’s probably what I’ve been most proud of, the sheer number of sports we’ve managed to cover – like darts, rugby league, golf, horse racing and the NFL, alongside the football and cricket – and the way we’ve put our own stamp on them.
And importantly, we’ve gone out and covered them properly. For example, with cricket tours we’ve had people travelling to India, Sri Lanka and New Zealand to report from the ground rather than doing it off TV in London.
MW: Radio commentary is still described as “painting pictures with words”. That’s a bit of a cliché, I know, but it’s also pretty accurate, I take it?
ID: It really is. There are certain bullet points you must keep hitting. The most obvious one is telling people what the score is. It may sound an obvious point buy you can’t say it often enough.
People dip in and out of radio all the time, remember. Someone might be driving somewhere, stop for petrol, come back to the car and turn the radio on again.
If five minutes go by without you mentioning the score, you’ve failed the listener.
MW : Do you ever listen to other commentary and find yourself muttering, “No, no… that’s not how you do it”?
ID: I try not to be too picky because, you know, everyone has their own style. But that score thing is the big one. On television you’ve got the score graphic permanently on screen. On radio the listener relies entirely on you.
MW: And what about humour? How far do you reckon you can take that?
ID: I do try and bring a bit of levity to the commentary, I like to have a bit of fun with it when appropriate, The secret is not to cross the line into self-indulgence.
MW: So what does a typical week look like for you these days?
ID: Usually I do two or three football games a week. talkSPORT 2 has exclusive national commentary rights for the EFL, so I’m often covering Championship or League One matches.
Then there’s the darts — the World Championships, the World Matchplay in Blackpool and the Premier League nights. No two weeks, as they say, are ever the same!
MW: And how much homework goes into a match beforehand?
ID: Oh, a lot. But the trick is not to show off about it. One of my early bosses used to say, “If I want stats, I’ll buy a book. Don’t drown the listener in numbers.” That was good advice.
Peter Drury once told me the aim is to go into a game feeling like you know more about that match than anyone else in the stadium, but that you don’t necessarily have to prove it.
That “expected goals” stat particularly drives me insane, as though it’s somehow meant to happen. Stats are all well and good, and they can be useful at times, but the thing that matters most to me is getting a feel for the game.
MW: Doing your prep is kind of crucial, I’m guessing?
ID: Absolutely – although there are times when it still won’t help you. There was that game I was doing at Everton, at Goodison Park, where that Just Stop Oil protester ran onto the pitch and attached himself to the goal post with a cable tie. As a commentator, no amount of prep can prepare you for something like that.
There was one funny moment there – before I’d seen what was on the guy’s T-shirt and realised what he was protesting about – when I saw this groundsman running around the perimeter of the pitch with a pair of massive sort of pliers, which looked like they’d have been big enough to cut off the bloke’s head!
MW: Any memorable mishaps along the way? Be honest with me now.
ID: OK, well, I once threw up live on air during a talkSPORT show. I’d caught a virus without realising how bad it was. There was a plastic bin next to the desk for discarded papers and I had to lean over and be sick into it.
Jason Cundy was next to me at the time, answering a question. He was so alarmed at seeing me blowing chunks into a bin that he got his words mixed up between “club” and “country” and accidentally emitted a foul word that had to be dumped from the broadcast. So, yeah, that was a pretty unedifying experience for me.
MW: And 10 years in, what still makes the job fun?
ID: Every match is a unique occasion. And I really do mean every match. If I’m going to cover, say, Lincoln vs Bradford in League One on a Tuesday night, you have to believe me when I tell you it’s just as exciting and rewarding for me to go there as it would be to work in Qatar covering a World Cup quarter-final.
I don’t discriminate because I know there may be somebody who doesn’t live in Lincoln anymore, for example, who’s desperate to find out what’s happening in that game. He doesn’t have a Sky Sports subscription. He can’t afford it.
“How do I tune into this game?” he’s thinking. “Oh, there’s national radio commentary right there.”
Have respect for those people to whom you’re providing a unique service. That’s never lost on me, Mike.