Peter Drury
Peter Drury is a tiresomely pretentious, bombastic blabbermouth who flaps his gums during televised games on ITV.
While the old guard of commentators simply deliver a summary of events on the pitch, Drury takes a very different approach to the job.
Due to an inflated idea of his own importance, Drury feels it is his duty to use his role as a stage to perform his brand of rhetorical prose.
He has an obsession with using alliteration and will always give lists of three characteristics, even where one or more don’t really apply (E.g – Jermain Defoe, the perfect pint-sized package of pace, poise and panache).
Drury also loves to use contrived lines of prepared commentary and will often refer to a tournament as a ‘party’ in the opening minutes.
As his position at ITV has strengthened, Drury’s commentary has made increasingly infrequent reference to events on the pitch.
During Liverpool’s Group D win over Marseille in the 2004-05 Champions League, Drury took the controversial step of reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Romantic epic ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ instead of commentating on the game.
While ITV received nearly 600,000 complaints, the channel stuck by the increasingly flight wordsmith, issuing the statement: “you could see what was happening from the pictures, besides it was always going to be 2-1.”
These days Drury usually recites his own haiku poems or sonnets during games and is set to release a philosophical treatise entitled “The things I think during football matches.”