I have to admit it, when Englishman Callum Williams was first announced as the future voice of Sporting Kansas City I was both happy and a little cautious.

I grew up in the Pre-Sky TV era in England when the vast majority of games where not televised and avid football fans listened to the radio for their fix. It was the BBC most of us tuned into and standards were and remain high. The voices literally could paint a picture of the game over the airwaves, and they were good enough that you really did feel like you were not missing out by not seeing the games. Of course the radio culture in British football extended beyond weekday evenings and Saturday afternoon road games, thousands of fans would attend live games and listen to radio broadcasts of the game they were watching eagerly waiting news from other games that might affect them. Radio and the BBC were simply part of the game back home… and now it was coming here ..

Yeah I was happy, but the caution came with Callum’s age. Could he really live up to that standard at such at twenty one years old? It was time to meet this lad and have a chat with him and so I headed out to training after introducing myself on Twitter and found myself standing on the sidelines at Swope Park chatting very happily with a young man who I have quickly come to admire. After watching Sporting KC Juniors train it quickly became evident that he simply loved the game as much as anybody I had ever met. He also knows the game inside and out and was quickly able to put me in my place gently a couple of times early on taking me down a peg or two on my know it all scale.  I came away impressed.

Thinking back over those early meetings a few things stand out to this day. He didn’t then, and never has seemed like a twenty one year old guy. At least in terms of his working knowledge and his grasp of the game he is infinite more mature and on top of that he simply oozes drive.  A drive I rarely have seen in anybody.  For example one of the first times I met him he was speaking about wanting to ‘help make the Americans love this game’. That got my cynical little mind spinning a bit and I simply dismissed it as the folly of youth. My mistake was thinking this was outlandishly cocky or even naive.

One of the absolute worst aspects of being a fan of MLS is watching it on television. The commentary and in game discussion and analysis is ranges from the simple brilliance of Arlo White in Seattle to the tawdry awfulness of pretty well everybody else. If I as a fan of the game am reaching for the remote control to turn these guys down I can’t imagine that endless prattle appeals to the non-fan. All of a sudden Sporting Kansas City broadcasts on KSMO have a appealing and engaging presence accompanying the game.

After sweltering my way through the game yesterday I came home with my daughter and slowly rocked her to sleep while I watched the second half of the game. In the dying embers of the game Besler hoisted a desperate long ball forward, it was flicked on by Kamara, badly cleared by a defender and powered into the net off the head of Omar Bravo … it was a desperate last second goal and was accompanied with a simple BRAAAVOOOO call from Callum. One word captured the passion of the guy on the mic but also the importance of the goal and the mood within the stadium. Simple, effective brilliance that Ian Darke and Arlo White would have been proud of and that simply demands that I forget that Callum is merely 21 and English or anything else.  Callum has the rare ability to enhance a game by speaking rather than detracting from it and I am so thankful he is working for us.  He is simply the man for the job of that I have no doubt.

Whether Callum’s goal of switching America onto the beautiful game will happen remains to be seen but fans already engaged in watching Major League Soccer cannot fail to notice the quality of his work. With all the change of the last twelve months I cannot help feeling that the voice behind the mic wasn’t one of the best acquisitions made by Sporting Kansas City in 2011 and a quality addition to MLS as a whole.

And he is just going to get better.