From Weymouth to Amsterdam
This week, the Match of the Day Live operation moves from the to on Wednesday.
was as good an early-round Cup tie as we've shown in the five years we've had the contract. A 2-2 draw, good football, harmony between players, officials, managers and supporters: all in all, a great day out.
Not to mention excellent fish and chips and glorious sunshine as we filmed the harbourside opening sequence. Even the coach journey back to London went smoothly.
Just time to pick our (³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ ONE, 1pm Sun 3rd Dec) - before we head off to Amsterdam for the England game on Wednesday.
As I've explained previously, for the Euro 2008 campaign the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ only has the live rights to England's home qualifiers. So this will be the first away England game we've shown live for a while.
At the major tournaments, such as the World Cup just gone, there is a restriction on broadcasters taking in their own cameras, so we take the host broadcaster's coverage and add in pictures from the couple of extra cameras we're allowed.
For a game like the one in Amsterdam, where we and Dutch TV will be the only broadcasters present on site, there'll be what's called "double-sided coverage".
We'll have 12 cameras working to our match director, Alan Griffiths on one side of the ground, and our Dutch colleagues will have a similar number on the opposite side providing their domestic pictures. So, on this occasion at least, we won't be able to blame our old friend "the local director" for any aberrations!
Alan has directed similar overseas operations before, notably for a certain .
Our Executive Producer, Phil Bigwood, and I will be in a separate van working on the studio elements of the show talking to Gary and guests inside the ground, just as we were in Munich.
The Dutch FA will have sold perimeter advertising accordingly, so don't be surprised to see a lot of familiar brands on view in the background. The producers of the "" movie had a
³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ TV Football hasn't been back to the Netherlands for a live game since Euro 2000. I had five weeks based in the international Broadcast Centre in Amsterdam for that tournament, so know the city well.
At the time, that trip was somewhat overshadowed by our losing the rights to Match of the Day Premiership highlights halfway through, but fortunately for us, that turned out not to be a permanent state of affairs.
This will just be a flying visit - we arrive Wednesday morning, leave Thursday morning - so we'll probably see very little of the place, which is a shame for those on the production team who haven't been there before.
I was last in Amsterdam with friends under my own steam before and after Middlesbrough's draw away to last season. Alkmaar being another picturesque place, like Weymouth, that I would probably never have visited were it not for football.
What struck me, as ever, was how well-informed the Dutch are about Britain, and our football in particular. ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ ONE, and therefore Match of the Day, is shown on public television over there, and we have a loyal (and opinionated) regular Dutch audience.
Most of whom speak better English than we do - we recently had a letter from a lady in pointing out a repeated grammatical error committed by one of our pundits!
My last trip to her country was , and I have to say the city of pulled out all the stops and did everything it could to make a 4-0 defeat as palatable as possible. At the risk of offending Dutch - and indeed other non-English readers - I sincerely hope the English team do slightly better than that on Wednesday evening!
With no game for another three months afterwards, it would be good if they could sign off for the year with an encouraging performance. Either way, we'll be back in the office, and have moved on to planning the next Premiership weekend - as well as our forthcoming outing to Salisbury - by Thursday lunchtime.
