Crouch, Bind, Set: Eir Sport Rugby Team Packs Down for Pro14 Season

Crouch, bind, set: Eir Sport rugby team packs down for Pro14 season By Fergal Ringrose, SVG Europe

Thursday, October 1, 2020 - 11:25

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Less than three weeks after serving as host broadcaster for the delayed Guinness Pro14 2020 rugby final at the Aviva Stadium in Dublin, the Eir Sport production team is preparing for the start of the new season this Friday with holders Leinster returning to their home RDS ground to take on the Dragons.

Eir Sport OB and studio director Jamil Abubakar and head of production Chris Blake spoke to SVG Europe about the challenges involved in broadcasting the condensed finish to the 2019-2020 season after a five-month layoff due to COVID-19, and the necessity to pivot quickly in order to go back on air for the 2020-2021 season this weekend.

Pro14 is the professional club championship featuring teams from Ireland, Italy, Scotland, South Africa and Wales. The final matches of the 2020 season featuring Irish teams were condensed into four weeks in August and September, with all fixtures held at the spacious 52,000 seat Aviva Stadium.

Leinster vs Ulster in the Pro14 final on 12 September at the Aviva Stadium in Dublin. INPHO/Billy Stickland

Eir Sport took the helm as host broadcaster for the final on 12 September along with OB facilities partner TVM, providing the live world feed for Premier Sports in the UK, DAZN for Austria, Canada, Germany, Italy and Switzerland, Sky Sports New Zealand, Super Sport South Africa, ESPN+ for the USA and live on Rugby Pass TV for Asia and Australia.

Outside centre Garry Ringrose captained Leinster for the first time as the province, with a straight 17 wins for the season, overcame Ulster 27-5 to seal the competition's first three-in-a-row run of victories.

The Guinness Pro14 will break new ground as it introduces prime-time Monday Night Rugby to its schedule for the 2020/21 season. The first Monday night game will occur in Round 3 when Munster host Cardiff Blues at Thomond Park on 26 October as the tournament enters the week day prime-time market with a 20:15 kick-off slot.

In total, 14 Monday night fixtures will take place between Rounds 3 and 8 with scheduling aimed at preventing direct clashes with the extended international calendar.

With the finale of the Guinness Six Nations and the Autumn Nations Cup taking place from October through to early December, the majority of Pro14 fixtures during this time will take place on Sundays and Mondays. Where possible, Monday night fixtures have been set across two time slots of 18:00 and 20:15 (both UK/IRE).

Rounds 9, 10 and 11 of the tournament will feature the derby matches across the UK, Ireland (where they are known as interpros') and Italy and the scheduling for those games will occur in due course.

This is our third year of a three-year deal covering the Pro14 in the Republic of Ireland, said Blake. We have exclusive rights to nearly all games, and have sub-license agreement with [Irish-language channel] TG4 to produce the Connacht games and some other games for Irish-language purposes only.

TG4 is host broadcaster for all Connacht home games, and then as part of the package they're also able to show Leinster and Munster games against Welsh opposition, home and away, and also the final.

Premier Sports have rights in the UK exclusively, but again BBC Wales and S4C have some sub-licensing rights. It's covered by DAZN in Italy through a production company, and by Super Sport in South Africa. These are the main broadcasters involved in discussions and then Pro14 has another couple of OTT partners for other areas.

Let's go back to when everything stopped in March. As it turned out you had a long five-month layoff and then had to quickly put a plan in place when it looked like the go-ahead would be given to restart the Pro14 season?

Chris Blake: Yes the conversation ceased from March to May, when we were all in complete lockdown, not knowing what the future held. Then from late May conversations re-ignited about getting the season back up and running. I think the Bundesliga was probably the lead for all sports, to see that it could be done and how it could be done.

There were many discussions but eventually it was felt best to allow an off-season to happen from June to August, coming back to play in mid-August. It was decided the best idea was to just play high value matches [such as Leinster v Munster or Edinburgh v Glasgow] every week and condense it into a four-week window. And as it turned out we ended up getting four weekends of interpro games, which was huge for us - especially as three of the four Irish provinces got into the knockout stages.

Once that started we quite quickly turned to production mode regarding what it would look like and how it would be done. That came with quite a lot of challenges out of our control. Obviously the IRFU runs the Irish provinces and we were using the Aviva Stadium, so it had to go through many layers before it really got to us, and what we would be allowed to do.

In fact everything went brilliantly and I must speak very highly of the Aviva, the IRFU and our

Steadicam operator and assist at the final. INPHO/Billy Stickland

broadcast partner TVM OB. But the biggest challenge was numbers: we just didn't know how many would be allowed into the ground. In fact, the government made an announcement of further restrictions to numbers allowed in stadiums just five days before the first game which required us to reduce our numbers for Leinster v Munster game from close to 50 to below 40. That was our biggest challenge.

Thankfully we have a very good relationship with Premier, the other lead broadcaster, so we were able to take a unified approach to the IRFU and Pro14 about how many bodies we genuinely and essentially needed. We were able to get past that bridge and then it got a lit

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