Whatever headers, volleys or fancy flicks we may marvel at on the pitch during the World Cup, the brilliance of the television production will, as ever, be taken for granted. Having worked in front of the camera for ITV Sport, I can tell you that not much I saw on the pitch came close to matching what happens in the control room or gallery, usually in a truck nearby. To me – in that I never quite figured out how they did it – this was all akin to closeup magic.
During the match, the director – and I was lucky enough to work with some of the best in the business – has as many decisions to make with every second that passes as any player on the pitch. For a start, there’s the ever-increasing number of camera shots to choose from, with cameras all around the ground – at the side of the pitch, high up, behind the goals, or offering a bird’s eye view from above – while others follow a single player, or are trained on each of the coaches. All of these shots are up there on different screens, to be chosen by the director. And each shot has to be dead right, wholly appropriate for that moment in the game. One false move when the shot doesn’t show what your average football fan wants to be seeing, and it’ll stick out like a bum note from a string quartet.
All this before you get to the action replays, an area rich in possibilities for cock-ups. The precisely right replay has to be there, ready to go, at the moment the director calls it up, and woe betide everyone if the timing is not quite right. If a player has been fouled and is writhing around in his death throes, for example, you’ll be wanting to see the incident to judge how much trouble the perpetrator might be in. But we don’t want to be looking at that while, out of our vision, the referee is pulling out his yellow or red card. And neither does the director want to have us admiring a lovingly curated slow-motion reprise of a fine save at one end of the pitch, while someone is putting it in the net at the other end. Such a calamity is the stuff of sports producers’ nightmares.
At big tournaments, the match coverage is done by production teams from a number of countries. And, from what I’ve seen, Britain’s are the best. If someone does, pardon the pun, drop the ball, you can bet your life it won’t be one of ours, and it certainly won’t be the fault of the crews putting out the ITV and BBC programmes. Without getting into crude national stereotyping, as I recall it, whenever there was a long, artful slow-motion replay of the wrong thing at the wrong time, the finger of blame – unfairly perhaps – would generally point at whichever French match director happened to be in charge that day. For me, this conjured up the image of some suave but frustrated Frenchman, pulling hard on a Gitanes – a man who yearned to be François Truffaut, but instead finds himself in a car park somewhere directing Ecuador v South Korea.
He should know that there’s no need to get fancy as it’s hard enough anyway – multitasking of a very high order. You’re editorialising, while effectively playing a video game in front of billions. And one wrong cut and you’re out.
Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
