From travelling with the great Liverpool sides of the 80s to presenting top-flight football for ITV and even covering Crown Green Bowls for Sky, Elton Welsby has seen it all.

The retired journalist opened-up to MerseySport Live about the highlights of his career, which began at a local newspaper and led to him presenting top-flight football.

Born in St Helens, Welsby got into sports journalism on the back of reading a copy of the Liverpool Weekly News.

“I thought, I’ll get a copy and they must have had 15 pages of sport. So I thought, I fancy this,” he said.

“That very night, I wrote a letter to the Managing Director, who was called Ron Carrington, and said I would be very interested in making a career in journalism. I went for an interview and later that night, I got a phone call asking if I could start in a month’s time.”

Despite supporting Everton, the former presenter found himself covering the Reds home and away for Radio City.

Shortly after Bill Shankly retired in 1974, his replacement Bob Paisley reached out to Welsby. The journalist said that Paisley took him under his wing, and from that moment, he followed and covered Liverpool games home, away and across Europe.

Welsby described being in such company as a joy, despite his allegiances to the blue half of the city.

In particular, Welsby built a great friendship with the two goalkeepers Ray Clemence and Bruce Grobbelaar. Clemence was even Welsby’s best man at his wedding.

Embed from Getty Imageswindow.gie=window.gie||function(c){(gie.q=gie.q||[]).push(c)};gie(function(){gie.widgets.load({id:’Vinl6Xu9RCFWiDzLvstndg’,sig:’HwzBeqk29kjEZnknvj-Nd87POYtyDD5Q0TJnmKSAPwA=’,w:’594px’,h:’382px’,items:’78964817′,caption: true ,tld:’com’,is360: false })});

His work was first noted by Granada Sport when he was commentating on Liverpool’s famous European Cup quarter-final victory over St-Etienne, in 1977.

This was whilst he was working for Radio City. The former-commentator revealed: “My commentary on David Fairclough’s winning goal went down in folklore. I got a call shortly after saying when will I be free to come and join Granada, if indeed I wanted to. I couldn’t quite believe it.”

The 71-year-old discussed his role covering four World Cups and an the 1988 Olympic Games.

“I worked as a reporter in 82 and 86 World Cup. Then I was a joint-presenter live from the stadium in Italia 90. For the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, I travelled down to the Thames Studio from Lime Street, and I was covering it from midnight until about nine o’clock in the morning,” he said.

ITV Granada introduced a new football programme called The Kick Off. The show would show highlights of the fixtures that took place earlier in the day, like Match of the Day does now.

Welsby fronted the show throughout the 80s after working for the show in 1978. When broadcasting, the presenter would be joined in the studio by Liverpool legend Ian St John and Manchester United legend Dennis Law.

After St John went to work on the popular show ‘Saint and Greavsie’, the Lancashire born presenter hosted live ITV fixtures on ‘The Match’ between 1988 and 1992. During this period, he continued to front Granada’s regional sports output.

Following on from ITV’s loss of top-flight football to Sky Sports in 1992, Welsby’s final work for ITV was the UEFA’s 1992 European Championships in Sweden.

Now he can be found communicating with Everton fans on social media, posting tweets and hosting Twitter spaces. He described the board’s decision to not turn up to home games as ‘cowardly’ and that protests won’t have any impact on whether they choose to stay or go.

 

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR