Trivia,the BBC radio football game reports and the term Back to Square One

BBC Commentaries:

In order that listeners could follow the progress of football games in radio commentaries, the pitch was divided into eight notional squares. Commentators described the play by saying which square the ball was in. The Radio Times, the BBC's listings guide, referred to the practice in an issue from January 1927.

Commentaries that used a numbering system certainly happened and prints of the pitch diagrams still exist. Recordings of early commentaries also exist, including the very first broadcast sports commentary (of a rugby match). That commentary, and many others that followed, referred listeners to the printed maps and a second commentator called out the numbers as the ball moved from square to square. However, at no point in any existing commentary do they use the phrase 'back to square one'.

Despite this, the BBC issued a piece in a January 2007 edition of The Radio Times that celebrated 80 years of BBC football commentary. In this, the football commentator John Murray stated with confidence that "Radio Times' grids gave us the phrase 'back to square one'" and that "the grid system was dropped in the 1930s (not before the phrase 'back to square one' had entered everyday vocabulary)". This confidence is despite the fact that, although it could be true, it is nothing but conjecture. What is a fact is that the BBC broadcast a more measured view in the popular etymology series Balderdash and Piffle, in collaboration with the OED, in 2006. This questioned the claims that the BBC commentaries were the source of the phrase and that it was in circulation in the 1930s.