There’s a sheepskin coat hanging just inside the Pearly Gates. Yes, John Motson has died. That appears to be the case, Des. Very much so, in fact. Of that. There can be. No doubt.

It’s normal, when a beloved commentator of Motty’s vintage dies, for viewers of a certain age to mist over and fondly recall the days when there was humour in sports broadcasting, when those behind the mike – and indeed in front of the camera (David Vine, David Coleman, the recently-departed Dickie Davies) – had a smile on the lips and a glint in the eye. ‘Not like the over-earnest, stat-obsessed presenter-bots of today,’ etcetera. But actually Motty was different. He was over-earnest. He was stat-obsessed. He was, in short, a nerd. And that’s why we loved him.

It was Motty’s nerdishness, his love of a fact, that so endeared him to us

Back in the studio, Des Lynam would give it the urbanity, the raffishness, the sense that, underneath all the hype, football was only a game, and it didn’t really matter. But once the whistle went it was Motty’s turn – and for him it bloody well did matter. You could hear, in every breathless syllable, his schoolboyish excitement at the possibility that, within the next 90 minutes, Bradford City might, just might, score more than one goal away to Bolton for the first time in 17 years.

I have a friend who’s a Chelsea fan. Whenever we mention their appearance in the 1997 FA Cup final, we comment not on their victory, not even on the fact that Roberto Di Matteo scored the then-fastest ever goal in a Wembley FA Cup final, but on John Motson’s ecstatic reaction to Roberto Di Matteo scoring the then-fastest ever goal in a Wembley FA Cup final. ‘What about this?! What about this?!’ It’s pure seven-year-old-at-the-funfair. It makes you want to hug him.

Motty’s fondness for a stat led to him featuring in a documentary I once made for Radio Five Live, about the football statistician Ray Spiller. I mentioned to Motty that we were thinking of calling the programme ‘John Motson’s Best Friend’. It was then that his…how shall we put this…somewhat over-literal side emerged. ‘But he’s not my best friend,’ he said, with a tone that implied that agents or lawyers might be needed. (In the end we realised that the title wasn’t very good anyway – we went with ‘Vital Statistics’.)

That interview took place at Langan’s, a restaurant where Motty obviously felt very at home. For all the sheepskin coat image, he had by then got accustomed to the finer things in life. ‘Boss fits me quite well,’ he once said, ‘but I’ve got into a little bit more of Armani recently.’ He took to celeb life too. Rod Stewart once invited him to his house in Essex (whose garden contained a full-size football pitch), and inadvertently cured Motty of his pre-commentary nerves. ‘I asked him if he felt the same before going on stage. Rod said, “Why should I be nervous? Singing is what I do.” And I thought, commentating is what I do.’

The sheepskin coat, by the way, stemmed from a party in 1975, where ‘the hostess asked me to join her in the garage – I was single and few things went through my mind, but I wasn’t prepared for a rack of full-length sheepskin coats. I was hooked.’

His father was a vicar, which, said Motty, meant they were both always asked ‘what do you do for the rest of the week?’ In Motson Jnr’s case it was ‘prepare’. His research was legendary – in the run-up to a game he would even ask the director to show him the captions, to check they’d spelled everyone’s name correctly, right down to the linesmen. It meant that mistakes in a Motty commentary were rarer than Nobby Stiles’s teeth. Though he did once admit to: ‘For the benefit of those watching in black and white, Spurs are in yellow.’

But as I say, it was Motty’s nerdishness, his love of a fact, that so endeared him to us. St. Peter better not have made any spelling mistakes on his admissions list today.