Why the montage is here to stay in TV football
Over-the-top mash-ups are now a mandatory element of the sports viewing experience, says Adam Hurrey
If any day was susceptible to being caught in a deluge of pseudocinematic broadcast hype, it was Derby Day.
Sky Sports’ eight-hour, three-match marathon of bragging-rights negotiations was a pumped-up edition of its usual Super Sunday, and it was padded out with what has become a mandatory part of football coverage: the montage.
Derby Day began in earnest at 11am and, over the next hour and a quarter of broadcast time that straddled the first half of Chelsea’s unspectacular win over Fulham, there were no fewer than nine montages. With three games to whet our appetites for, that meant a mash-up of stellar players, slick graphics and indie-pop every eight minutes or so.
The montage’s recent domestic ubiquity owes much to its glorious international history. The BBC’S posttournament showreels have tugged on viewers’ heartstrings ever since Des Lynam’s “for one more time, it’s cue Luciano” brought the distinctly inglorious Italia ’90 to a glorious close.
Rob Facey, a producer at BBC Sport, says the most memorable montages must have a pinch of everything.
“We all watch each other’s work on other channels, so by osmosis you figure out what works and what doesn’t. Broadly speaking, the subject matter must have that mixture of drama, joy, despair – which English football has nailed in recent years.”
Never more so than during England’s redemptive World Cup summer of love, when the Beeb spliced together the penalty shoot-out heroics against Colombia with heartbreak from tournaments past, backed by the imperious – and aptly titled
– England by The National.
“You want something to resonate, move people and be memorable, especially for such a historic occasion as England vs Colombia,” Facey says. “People remember the posttournament montages of Euro ’96 and the World Cups of 2006 and 2014 because they caught a moment in time.”
And this is where we venture into too-muchof-a-good-thing territory.
Crashing out of a World Cup is the sort of gravitas-laden moment that Facey is talking about, but does the build-up to a mid-season Premier League match really need the same treatment? The answer, it seems, is yes: or, rather, it’s an emphatic, slowmotion “yes” to the beat of some urgent drums.
Perhaps we should be grateful for these visual, musical departures. After all, there is only so much Graeme Souness can growl about in the studio, only so much Jamie Redknapp can manipulate on his ipad.
We have now halfwatched so many of these pre-match montages that we know their golden rules: for example, if the colour’s slightly washed out, that means it’s a game from a poignant corner of memory lane.
If it goes full monochrome, with an echoing commentator’s words over the top, we’re revisiting a serious nadir.
As for the soundtrack: there’s a fine line between appropriate and over-literal – the Clash’s
London Calling has, thankfully, been retired from derby-day duties – and Facey says the backing track can be the trickiest decision of all. “I wanted something that was grand, melancholic yet triumphant [for the World Cup this summer]. I think most producers and editors always have a few evolving playlists in their head: ‘happy’, ‘sad’, ‘triumphant’.”
As the tackles – not to mention the goals – flew in on Derby Day, you got the sense that the football should be able to speak for itself. But, as long as there is airtime to fill, broadcasters will continue to condense the action into 30-second chunks of pure cinema.