He was, he says, an okay player in school but even then, when some of the other kids were dreaming of kicking a ball at Lansdowne Road, Conor McNamara had other notions about his fantasy career in football.

His dream came true and this weekend he’ll be there, at Ireland against Scotland, a crucial qualifier for both teams.

McNamara will be in the stand, behind a microphone for the BBC, of course, not out on the pitch where most kids imagine themselves ending up but, he says, “if you feel like you’re calling it well, you’re making all the right decisions as it’s going on, you feel like you’re actually playing in it. It’s such a cliché but it’s true.”

Some managers recall becoming distracted by tactics while their friends were still trying to hone their first touch.

McNamara played for Crescent College and always enjoyed it but remembers from an early enough age how he felt about relaying the action, conveying the sense of a game to others. At home, in his teens, he would sit in front of a TV and simply commentate to nobody at all. Back then, it was all fired by his imagination; these days it is about firing the imaginations of others.

Early break

Radio was a big part of life in the household when he was growing up. His father, Michael, is better known as Micky Mac, then an RTÉ presenter who has more recently been hosting a show on Clare FM.

He doesn’t seem to recall having had any great burning desire to follow in his father’s footsteps but he watched and learned. He said it was instilled in him, even before he ever sat behind one himself for the first time, to be engaged and fully focussed when that red light went on.

He went to college in Manchester and did a placement as a fairly low-level researcher on a BBC Radio Four programme during which he took a liking to the organisation but his early break was doing reports for Radio Ireland, something that earned him the offer of a job with TV3.

“I basically used to do that four o’clock on a Sunday game for them,” he recalls. “That was always the Sky match, a big game, so I used to go to Highbury and Old Trafford, Anfield and Elland Road . . . every week. This was my first taste of it and I used to feel that I’d skipped a lot of stages of it to go in at that level. But once you get a taste for it you don’t want to let go.”

When TV3 panellist Mark Lawrenson told him that the BBC were looking for new members of its commentary team, he applied and, with the help of a recommendation from the former international he thinks, got the job. That was nearly 15 years ago, he wasn’t yet 25 and they haven’t hired someone so young to do the job since.

‘Nerdish levels of prep’

It’s a competitive world he was entering, “a meritocracy,” as he says himself, but he has made steady progress until he is now pretty close to the top of broadcaster’s commentary pile. It’s pretty clear, though, how hard he has worked to get there.

“When I was a kid in school, I struggled a bit,” he recalls. “I wasn’t one of those prolific studiers. I’d be doodling, drawing pictures, that sort of thing and this was the first time in my life that I realised that if I tune in here, if I really concentrate on what I’m doing, this will work out to my benefit and I’ll enjoy the gig more. So I do put in nerdish levels of prep’ for the commentaries, more than I’d put in to other things but I know that the more I put in before the game then the more I’ll enjoy it while I’m there.”

In person, the sense of his Limerick origins is a good deal stronger than it is on air but he dismisses the notion that he in some way hides his roots so as to progress at that most British of institutions.

“The BBC is very English,” he says, “but being Irish has probably been my number one asset. You want to stand out, particularly on radio. I hear people say that they can’t tell people apart but with me, because of my Irishness . . . ”

As for the accent, he says, it’s just about performing in public and avoiding the sort of colloquialisms that would leave the majority of listeners stumped. He is not entirely himself on air but then, he points out, that’s not the job.

After close to a couple of decades, and he’s still just 38, he feels he is still growing into it but the chance to mix with the managers he has worked with at World Cups and the like has made him more comfortable in their company.

The years of sometimes tricky post-match interviews have given him the confidence to know his territory.

“I used to feel intimidated,” he says. “But when you’ve been around long enough, longer than almost all of the managers, you kind of start to feel that ‘yeah, this is my domain; okay, you’re the manager but we’re in the tunnel now and I feel very comfortable here’.”

Squawk the Parrot

He’s had his questions thrown back on him by the likes of José Mourinho but he observes, “They’re playing a game and you’ve simply got to play it too.”

Saturday's will be the last game of what's been a good season for him. After this weekend, there'll be a few days at the Open to come in mid-July and then a break from sport before returning for a campaign in which he'll be doing more commentaries for Match of the Day and a stint back with TV3 for the Rugby World Cup.

Along the way, there'll also be a three-week spell working as his alter ego, Squawk the Parrot, the character he voices for BBC television's Swashbuckle, a show aimed at pre-schoolers.

“Yeah,” he says with a laugh, “I’ve been in those soft-play areas with my own kids, encouraging them to come down a slide or something – ‘come on, come on, you can do it’ – and I do see other kids looking over thinking, ‘I know that voice’.”

Not even he would have thought to imagine that back at home, all those years ago, in front of the telly.