Green's Ulster cussedness, his towering self-regard and his indifference to the opinions of the former players and managers with him in the commentary box, who are clearly unqualified to pass judgment because they have been involved in the game only at the highest level, make him an irresistible target for the affection of many, your correspondent included, and the enmity of others. But the attention Green receives hides the fact that in their quieter way, 5 Live's other commentators are no different. Mike Ingham and John Murray will tell you if a game is awful, while Gabriele Marcotti is the finest sports analyst on radio because he never panders to his listeners but argues with them incessantly.

A neat explanation for 5 Live's uniqueness is that loyalty to your team and its players is like loyalty to your family. You may curse them and denounce them, they may exasperate you beyond measure, but you will abandon them only in exceptional circumstances. 5 Live certainly feels like an old-fashioned family. Although fans phone in straight after matches in states of high excitement or furious disappointment, I have never once heard anyone swear. I am sure the BBC vets them before they come on air, but given the numbers who pile in with usually ferocious opinions, pre-broadcast censorship cannot be much of a protection. Rather, the fans protect the BBC by instinctively and touchingly upholding the traditional working-class rule that industrial language should not be used in mixed company.

Yet the special loyalties football generates are not a complete explanation. Sky Sports televises the same matches 5 Live puts on the radio but the commentaries could not be more different. Where 5 Live is critical, Sky is gushing because it has paid £1.3 billion for the rights to broadcast Premier League matches between 2010 and 2013, and thus has a strong financial incentive to pretend that every Sunday is "Super Sunday" and to seek spurious excitement in a 0-0 draw between Bolton Wanderers and Burnley on a wet February night. The BBC paid a mere £43 million for the radio rights to the same matches. It can relax and talk to its audience without resorting to hype or illusion. Or at least it used to be able to relax. The most depressing news from the latest round of bidding was that the BBC had lost the right to broadcast a third of its live Premier League radio commentaries — 64 games — to its commercial rivals TalkSport and Absolute Radio. Whenever I listen to TalkSport, and I try to avoid it, I get the impression from its phone-ins that it is the BNP's favourite station — indeed one member of staff was fired after he was found on a BNP membership list. It broadcasts George Galloway, who saluted Saddam Hussein for his "courage, strength and indefatigability" after he had slaughtered the Kurds in the penultimate genocide of the 20th century. Its tone is consistently yobbish and mean.

If 5 Live ran a pub in your street, you would pop in for a drink and a chat, and have no worries about taking your family with you. If TalkSport took over the licence, you would move house to get away from it. 5 Live's quixotic blend of bluntness and civility ought to be encouraged. Instead, it is being cut back and snuffed out.