Alan Parry
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Alan Parry (born 1947) is a British sports commentator, born in Liverpool, concentrating on football and athletics. He has, uniquely, commentated for all three main broadcasters of football in the UK - the BBC, ITV and Sky, as well as for both BBC and commercial radio.
Starting his career at BBC Radio Merseyside, he joined the BBC in London in 1973, and immediately started regular football commentaries. Within a short time he was covering England matches, and by 1975 he was covering the European Cup final. After the death of Maurice Edelston he started working alongside Peter Jones covering the FA Cup Final in 1976. By the mid-1970s he was also BBC radio's athletics commentator, covering the 1976, 1980 and 1984 Summer Olympics.
From 1981 he largely relinquished his radio football commentary to commentate for Match of the Day on BBC television. In 1985 he left the BBC to join ITV, initially as an athletics commentator after the commercial channel won the rights to cover British athletics. However, by the late 1980's, Parry had also become a key football commentator for the network, and in 1990, Parry was Brian Moore's number two at the World Cup - this was a role he would retain until he left the network. As well as covering national football and athletics, Parry was also heavily involved on a regional level, being Central's lead commentator for a number of years. Between 1992 and 1996, the ITV regions held the rights to live coverage of the Nationwide Football League, and Parry commentated on a live match almost every Sunday for the Central region.
After covering Euro 96 for ITV, Parry left to join Sky TV by which time ITV's athletics portfolio had dwindled almost to nothing (he continued covering what little athletics ITV had left until 1997). Parry has also covered athletics for Sky, but his main role has been as a football commentator. For five years he was the Monday Night Football commentator, before working on the pay-per-view games on Prem-Plus for four years. In more recent times, Parry has been one of Sky's 'Big Four' commentators - including Martin Tyler, Ian Darke, and Rob Hawthorne - who commentate across a wide portfolio of matches in the Premiership, FA Cup, League Cup, Champions League and Football League. Parry has commentated on six League Cup Finals for Sky.
Between 1998 and 2002 he also worked as a football commentator for talkSPORT and a presenter during the World Cup hosting a phone-in. In the 2002-03 season he presented Saturday afternoon football coverage on Capital Gold.
The 2005/2006 season was one of Alan's busiest in terms of live football commentary for Sky Sports. He commentated on 1 live match from every weekend of the FA Barclays Premiership, (plus several live matches for overseas viewers for TWI), covered several FA Cup and Carling Cup ties including the Carling Cup final live and exclusive, 10+ UEFA Champions League ties live, occasional Football League matches live, as well as a number of end-of-season Football League Play Off matches.
He is a renowned supporter of Liverpool, and is also on the board of directors at League Two club Wycombe Wanderers.