BT Sport presenter Jake Humphrey has leaped to the defence of the broadcaster’s Champions League final coverage.
Gary Neville was among the many who criticised BT Sport for their build-up to the European Cup showpiece between Liverpool and Real Madrid, with their handling of the ongoing situation outside the stadium attracting particular opprobrium.
BT Sport had no correspondents outside the Stade de France to report on the developing issue of Liverpool fans being treated abhorrently by French police outside the stadium, and the 36-minute delay to kick-off did mean that Humphrey and pundits Rio Ferdinand, Steven Gerrard and Michael Owen were reduced to a game of ‘What a player he was, by the way!’ as the cameras instead cut to images of former footballers in the stands, including the Brazilian Ronaldo.
Are you surprised? I’m not.They can’t react or aren’t agile to things like this happening 🤷🏻♂️ https://t.co/ohyAA2bse3
— Gary Neville (@GNev2) May 28, 2022
Humphrey issued a defence of BT Sport on his LinkedIn page:
‘Possibly one of the hardest sports events I’ve ever covered. And I’ve done some tricky ones,’ he wrote.
‘We had limited information about what was going on outside, my talkback (the umbilical cord to my production team) suddenly stopped working, the TV compound was impacted by the tear gas so our production team were barricaded in their trucks. And many of us had friends and family at the game and we had no idea if they were even safe.
‘And amongst all that we were trying our best to get the tone right, under the scrutiny that seems exclusive to live football.
‘Hopefully you wouldn’t have known too much about all that, the BT Sport production team are up there with the very best I have ever worked with.
You’d have thought BT have enough cameras to send someone outside and film the carnage to inform viewers. Prattling on with pundits and waiting for an opening ceremony is reminiscent of the tone-deaf TV…
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