‘Fab five’ in Lisbon, the rest are 990 miles away!

JUST before 8pm tonight, Gary Lineker will look down the camera lens and hand over to the commentary team in Lisbon. That will be just about the only thing that is normal about the Champions League final.

At long last Europe’s most prestigious fixture gets under way. Just 85 days later than scheduled, in a city 2,000 miles away from the original venue and in front of a spectator crowd of nil. Same as the number of handshakes.

The coronavirus pandemic has not only shredded the football season and scattered its remains across the summer, but it has also redefined what we long believed to be ordinary life.

Yet, in many ways, football’s return has been the one beacon of escapism in these Unprecedented Times. The illusion of normality, brought to you by cardboard cutouts and fake crowd noise.

The Champions League final is the biggest match in club football. In this country, the responsibility of making the experience appear and, more importantly, feel as normal as possible to those watching from their sofas falls into the hands of BT Sport.

Fitting, perhaps, that they should see out the season after they showed football’s return urn with their coverage of the Bundesliga.

Yet how do you showcase normality when your very own way of doing so is as different as ever?

At last season’s Champions League final in Madrid, when Liverpool defeated Tottenham, BT had 150 staff in the city ity as they broadcast direct from the heart of Spain. They were all there: Lineker, the pundits, the commentators, the analysts, the directors, the producers, the lot.

This time, in the new world, they have five. Des Kelly, the pitchside reporter and interviewer; Darren Fletcher, the commentator; Steve McManaman, the co-commentator; as well as a production manager and a sound engineer.

Or, as one executive producer at BT has christened them, the ‘Fab Five’. Six if you include a cameraman who films around the city. Fans, of course, are free to come up with their own adjectives.

The rest are, well, all over the place.

The director will make sure the show runs to plan from a makeshift gallery inside a truck in the loading bay of BT studio’s at Stratford, some 990 miles away, having previously done it from her dining room in an Essex village. David Moss, the executive producer, will keep tabs on it all from his spare bedroom in Cheshunt.

Those stats that run so effortlessly off Lineker’s tongue? They will be fed to him by an operative in Hertfordshire.

Those fancy graphics? Done by someone in their home in East London. The senior production manager, they’re in Brixton. Another assistant producer is in Telford.

The editors, who put together all the interviews and packages, had been at home but a small team will be back in the studio for the final.

The engineering support team, the army of tech whizzes who keep an eye on the feeds coming from UEFA’s host broadcast into the television, the web, the BT app, YouTube, would usually be based at BT Tower in Fitzrovia.

Now they are sprinkled across living rooms, kitchens and bedrooms from Edinburgh to Cornwall and Belfast.

Everyone with their own makeshift desk set-ups, with an arrangement arrangem of monitors and mixers. m All able to share sha screens and talk to each other. The diaspora is not quite q as drastic as it was at the return of the Bundesliga when almost every member m of the team t worked from home ho apart from a couple cou in the studio in Stratford. Stratf For the first game, Dortmund against Schalke, Paul Dempsey commentated from his loft in Dublin while McManaman was on co-comms in Manchester.

Even on the last day of the Premier League season, Gemma Knight was directing from her dining room. ‘Afterwards, I took my headset off and went into my living room and played with my son,’ she says. ‘I thought “This is insane”.’

It will be Lineker’s familiar face that greets viewers tonight after Jake Humphrey did on Friday night as Sevilla won the Europa League.

Humphrey says: ‘People get obsessed with football being about 4-4-2. It’s not, it’s about emotion. Our job is to deliver that.

‘If we’re not able to plug into that emotion, then the audience won’t. That’s the most challenging thing.’