Martin Tyler: ‘I put some air in my lungs, shouted Agüero’s name and kept going’

Martin Tyler in his local cafe. ‘There’s a lot of luck in this,’ he says of commentating. ‘The luck is being asked to do the game.’ Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

“I get asked to shout two things in the street,” Martin Tyler says wryly on a drizzly afternoon in Surrey. “The first is ‘And it’s live!’, which I do, while the second is the Agüero moment which I don’t do because you need to go somewhere special for something truly extraordinary.”

A moment that perhaps best captures the addictive drama and madness of the Premier League came in May 2012 when Manchester City needed two goals in stoppage time to beat QPR and win their first league championship since 1968. When the ball fell to Sergio Agüero, and he struck the winner that meant City had clinched the title on goal difference from Manchester United, Tyler’s gloriously strangled cry of “Agüeroooo!” echoed around the world.