Cardiffdaffs
Well-known member
Wont be missed by many with their Champions League coverage. The guardian's take.
This was BT Sport’s last curtain call but, sorry to say, the Champions League final coverage was not widely applauded as “high performance”. Its properties now under new ownership, BT Sport’s channels will be replaced by something called TNT from July 18 and details remain sketchy about what sport will be on, who’ll be presenting it, and what it will cost to view. But one thing at least is certain: Jake Humphrey will not be the main host of the football.
Rio Ferdinand gave the presenter a generous farewell at the end of Saturday night and Jake will now spend more time with his High Performance Podcast audio series and his authorship of LinkedIn-tastic books like High Performance: Lessons From The Best On Becoming Your Best.
What lessons, then, might the new broadcaster learn from this weekend’s coverage? In terms of talent, analysis, news coverage, and what you might call an understanding of an event’s broader context, there is a lot to improve.
Firstly, the on-screen mob: hopefully BT kept the receipt for the hire of Mario Balotelli. Handing a new pundit his or her debut is always a gamble but the man who was one of football’s most enjoyable wildcards in his playing prime was a total plank on screen. Maybe nerves were a factor but it was genuinely surprising how subdued he seemed.
This could in part be due to a strategy that BT had embraced throughout its tenure: absolutely crowding the screen with pundits, giving Humphrey and main man Ferdinand a cast of thousands including Cesc Fabregas, Joleon Lescott, Balotelli and passing players/coaches to corral. Fabregas is a perceptive chap but the rest, not so much, and it adds up to a complete bunfight where it seems hard to get a word in edgeways. Boys will be boys and the tendency for proceedings to descend into a matey-matey banter-fest proved hard to resist on Saturday, and that has been the case for a while.
For instance, this exchange with an emotional Kyle Walker, explaining his life’s journey from Sheffield poverty to today:
Walker: “I remember when mum didn’t have a pound for the ice cream van.”
Ferdinand: “Let’s kick it up a notch, what’s your drink of choice tonight then?”
Lescott [who played more club games for Wolves, and Everton, than he did for City, and used to support Aston Villa] was also deployed in a peculiar role, that of Resident Manchester City Superfan. He was asked time and again by colleagues and commentator Darren Fletcher how his nerves were, how was he holding up etc, as if he were an eight-year-old on a grand day out rather than a highly paid expert.
In the era where Sky Sports has encouraged constant argument between its pundits, the jolly boys outing feel of a BT match hasn’t necessarily been an unwelcome change but a more serious gap in quality had opened up between the UK’s main two pay-TV sports broadcasters.
But as with the Liverpool-Madrid Champions League final in Paris, where a potentially grave news story was unfolding around entry to the ground, BT was in dereliction of duty on Saturday in not dedicating more time to the financial and regulatory context of Man City’s achievement here. Not everyone wanted them to win. While it is true that sometimes you just want to watch the match without Gary Neville yelling at you about food banks, equally BT has far too often presented a Potemkin Village vision of Big Sport; the coverage has been credulous and lacking in rigour. Real “watch the birdie” stuff here, and people clearly don’t buy it.
Humphrey has his qualities but it is fair to say that he is not everyone’s cup of tea, and the same applies to Fletcher. Des Kelly, the former journalist, had a shocker on Saturday, removing the armband he had been given for media accreditation/pitch access and getting Ilkay Gundogan to sign it. Extreme cringe.
We can allow some leeway for an understandable fin de siècle atmosphere, and respect the shock of the recent death of an important BT team member, floor manager Mat Wayne. But there is a sense that some of those on the BT broadcasts had been allowed to form the deeply mistaken impression that it’s about them rather than the sport and the story.
While I wouldn’t go as far as to say that TNT should blow the whole thing up and start again, Saturday night was certainly a cautionary tale of how to deliver a damp squib.
This was BT Sport’s last curtain call but, sorry to say, the Champions League final coverage was not widely applauded as “high performance”. Its properties now under new ownership, BT Sport’s channels will be replaced by something called TNT from July 18 and details remain sketchy about what sport will be on, who’ll be presenting it, and what it will cost to view. But one thing at least is certain: Jake Humphrey will not be the main host of the football.
Rio Ferdinand gave the presenter a generous farewell at the end of Saturday night and Jake will now spend more time with his High Performance Podcast audio series and his authorship of LinkedIn-tastic books like High Performance: Lessons From The Best On Becoming Your Best.
What lessons, then, might the new broadcaster learn from this weekend’s coverage? In terms of talent, analysis, news coverage, and what you might call an understanding of an event’s broader context, there is a lot to improve.
Firstly, the on-screen mob: hopefully BT kept the receipt for the hire of Mario Balotelli. Handing a new pundit his or her debut is always a gamble but the man who was one of football’s most enjoyable wildcards in his playing prime was a total plank on screen. Maybe nerves were a factor but it was genuinely surprising how subdued he seemed.
This could in part be due to a strategy that BT had embraced throughout its tenure: absolutely crowding the screen with pundits, giving Humphrey and main man Ferdinand a cast of thousands including Cesc Fabregas, Joleon Lescott, Balotelli and passing players/coaches to corral. Fabregas is a perceptive chap but the rest, not so much, and it adds up to a complete bunfight where it seems hard to get a word in edgeways. Boys will be boys and the tendency for proceedings to descend into a matey-matey banter-fest proved hard to resist on Saturday, and that has been the case for a while.
For instance, this exchange with an emotional Kyle Walker, explaining his life’s journey from Sheffield poverty to today:
Walker: “I remember when mum didn’t have a pound for the ice cream van.”
Ferdinand: “Let’s kick it up a notch, what’s your drink of choice tonight then?”
Lescott [who played more club games for Wolves, and Everton, than he did for City, and used to support Aston Villa] was also deployed in a peculiar role, that of Resident Manchester City Superfan. He was asked time and again by colleagues and commentator Darren Fletcher how his nerves were, how was he holding up etc, as if he were an eight-year-old on a grand day out rather than a highly paid expert.
In the era where Sky Sports has encouraged constant argument between its pundits, the jolly boys outing feel of a BT match hasn’t necessarily been an unwelcome change but a more serious gap in quality had opened up between the UK’s main two pay-TV sports broadcasters.
But as with the Liverpool-Madrid Champions League final in Paris, where a potentially grave news story was unfolding around entry to the ground, BT was in dereliction of duty on Saturday in not dedicating more time to the financial and regulatory context of Man City’s achievement here. Not everyone wanted them to win. While it is true that sometimes you just want to watch the match without Gary Neville yelling at you about food banks, equally BT has far too often presented a Potemkin Village vision of Big Sport; the coverage has been credulous and lacking in rigour. Real “watch the birdie” stuff here, and people clearly don’t buy it.
Humphrey has his qualities but it is fair to say that he is not everyone’s cup of tea, and the same applies to Fletcher. Des Kelly, the former journalist, had a shocker on Saturday, removing the armband he had been given for media accreditation/pitch access and getting Ilkay Gundogan to sign it. Extreme cringe.
We can allow some leeway for an understandable fin de siècle atmosphere, and respect the shock of the recent death of an important BT team member, floor manager Mat Wayne. But there is a sense that some of those on the BT broadcasts had been allowed to form the deeply mistaken impression that it’s about them rather than the sport and the story.
While I wouldn’t go as far as to say that TNT should blow the whole thing up and start again, Saturday night was certainly a cautionary tale of how to deliver a damp squib.
