Bad news for those of you who enjoy football commentary delivered in a non-homophobic, non-completely irritating, and at times – dare I say – actually entertaining and witty manner. The Golden Larynx himself Dennis Cometti is going to be hanging up the headset for good at the end of his current contract, meaning 2016 will be the last year for Cometti as a football commentator at Seven.
The tenured AFL commentator began calling football for Channel 7 way back in 1986, coinciding with the formation of the West Coast Eagles – Cometti himself is a Perth native and was a prominent media personality in the local WA markets at the time – following a reasonably uneventful playing career in both the WAFL with West Perth, and an over-before-it-began stint in the VFL with Footscray. Cometti has been a mainstay of AFL football commentary since 1986, including a brief period between 2002 and 2006 when the Nine Network had the rights to broadcast the AFL.
Consistently one of, if not the, most popular commentators of football in the history of the AFL, has been widely known for his witty “Cometti-isms,” including cliches that ended up becoming permanent fixtures in the football lexicon like “bobbing up and down like a cork in the ocean,” or “centimetre perfect.” And beyond footy, Cometti was a featured guest at the Meredith Music Festival on numerous occasions, acting as a guest MC and providing the live commentary for the Meredith Gift – a nude sprint across a field.
Cometti stated that when the next AFL broadcast rights agreement is up for renewal, that “it wouldn’t concern him” meaning his current contract will be his last, that he’ll be hanging up the microphone at the conclusion of the 2016 season, and from that point on we’ll be stuck with that complete flog Brian Taylor with his “Boy oh boy!”s and his “Wowee!“s. Great. That’s just great.
We’ve only got a couple of years left of Dennis. I hope he uses the time to squeeze in as many classic lines as he possibly can. Like, for example, this cracker in reference to former Geelong Cats premiership captain and notoriously carrot-topped Cameron Ling.
“Ling’s running off the ground a little bit gingerly.”
You just can’t teach that kind of language mastery.
Photo: Morne de Klerk via Getty Images.
via Herald Sun.
