A short drive from London’s Heathrow Airport sits Stockley Park, a business estate home to TNT Sports’ studios. Inside the building, it soon becomes clear to The Athletic that everybody loves Nando’s, the fast-casual food chain that specialises in Portuguese chicken.
“I treat it like my football career,” Karen Carney, a former England international-turned-pundit, says. “Have I eaten? Have I hydrated?”
Carney has not yet eaten. Soon enough, she will be tucking into a vegan wrap before going live on air at 7.30pm GMT (3.30pm ET) as the coverage, which TNT have sublicensed from rights holder DAZN for Arsenal’s second-leg showdown with Real Madrid in the Champions League quarter-final, begins.
She completed her prep yesterday, including watching last week’s game back in full and on mute to form an original analysis. With one hour and seven minutes to go until she is on air with presenter Becky Ives and fellow ex-Arsenal and England professional Fara Williams, Carney is about to make her way to the clips room to make sure they have the correct videotapes ready to go for her pre-match analysis.
“You are learning every day. You’ve never mastered it,” Carney says. “Same with football, same with this. You’ll never be a master because it always changes and evolves. That’s why I like to overprepare.”
Along with ordering Nando’s, overpreparing seems to be a running theme at the ground-floor studios of TNT, the sports division of Warner Bros. Discovery.
(Caoimhe O’Neill/The Athletic)
“It might be a female thing, if we are being honest about it,” lead commentator, Jacqui Oatley, says. “It’s definitely a female thing,” her co-commentator Lucy Ward jumps in seamlessly, like they are already on air.
“There are people sitting at home waiting to clip something up,” Oatley, who in 2007 became the first woman to commentate on BBC highlights show Match of the Day, says. “In this modern era of technology, if you get one little thing wrong … It might even be a slip of the tongue. You could say ‘I was in Birmingham last week’ and you were meant to say ‘Burnley’. In the context of football, that’s unforgivable.”
“You are talking live and constantly for 90-plus minutes, under pressure and unscripted — you are going to do things wrong. The less you think about that, the better,” Ward says.
The former Leeds United forward has been the victim of some horrendous abuse, on social media in particular, after she has commentated on men’s matches.
“I get messages that say, ‘Please die, please kill yourself’,” Ward says. “I get (abuse) from people who have never kicked a ball in their life. That’s what makes me laugh. It’s ridiculous and it’s unpleasant but I always say I’d never take criticism from someone I wouldn’t go to advice for.
“I listen to the people I respect and I don’t take any notice of the rest. It’s very difficult. I have a really thick skin. When I go out with my friends at home and show them the messages I get, they are in tears asking me how I deal with it. It isn’t easy. You end up being quite numb to it.”
As team news breaks, there is an impeccably timed check of the watch from Oatley, who knows it is time for her and Ward to disappear into their small commentary booth to organise their mountain of notes which they have already committed to memory.
Ives, who had earlier informed the wardrobe department of her plan to wear a black Karen Millen jumpsuit to not clash with the show’s guests nor the enveloping green screen behind her, is already mic’d up reading through her notes. Call time for her was 6.30pm. This gave her time to rehearse the more technical aspects of the evening, like the links in and out of commercial breaks. At 7pm, she is joined by Carney and Williams to gear up for kick-off together and one final rehearsal.
“I feel much more relaxed if we’ve been through everything,” Ives says. “This for me is the fun part because the prep is already done.”
Every few minutes, floor manager Donna Tait shouts how long until the three cameras start rolling. At this point, makeup artists Coco Nettey and Georgina Sergi fly in for final touch-ups. Armed with powder brushes, combs, hairspray and lint rollers, their attention to detail is meticulous.
Ives, whose first port of call at 4pm was the salon, says the make-up artists double up as therapists. “I need to add that to my invoice now,” Nettey jokes when she finds out. “What is said in the make-up room stays in the make-up room,” Sergi adds.
(Caoimhe O’Neill/The Athletic)
“You go in there and anything you’re feeling, you can offload. Whether that be at work or personal, these girls, bless them, get the brunt of it,” Ives says. “Then they stay all night throughout the production. They’re the ones checking the monitors. You put your trust in those girls, like, ‘I’m going to take care of what I have to do on screen, can you just check that I haven’t got my Nando’s still in my teeth and that my hair is not all over the place?’”
When the show goes live, Nettey and Sergi watch on intently.
“On that green screen, there can be one cascading hair and we are like, ‘Oh god that has to be brushed down!’” Sergi says.
“We see everything,” Nettey says, turning to look at Carney on screen. “OK, good. That hair has gone away. I was in the gallery earlier and I was like, ‘That needs to go.’”
“Twelve years ago, when I started in TV, I didn’t have a female presenter whose make-up I did. It was all male. And now I do the make-up for mostly females,” Sergi, who is also a trained barber, says.
“That shows the shift, which is lovely,” Nettey, whose father is a floor manager at TNT, says. “They are all so different. Different backgrounds, different skin tones, different hair types and that’s important to have that representation as well.”
In the gallery, with various snacks smattered about the desks, it is all systems go. There are 12 people wearing headsets and surrounded by an uncountable number of TV and computer screens. This is the calmly-talking team who will direct and produce the game that Arsenal will win 3-0 to set up a semi-final with Lyon.
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Next door to the gallery, and separated by a glass soundproof window, one lone audio engineer is making sure everything is audible.
Back in the green room, the voices of Oatley and Ward sneak down the corridor to guide through the game. With their 30 minutes of pre-match chat having gone smoothly, Ives, Carney and Williams relax on the couches and watch the first half alongside Scott Young, WBD Sports Europe’s senior vice president of content, production and business operations. Carney is laser-focused on the match and is already speaking to the gallery asking for a particular Alessia Russo chance to be clipped up.
Williams and Carney, former England team-mates, are locked in as Ives makes handwritten notes of key moments. They feel Madrid’s plan to defend is unsustainable and, in the second half, their instincts are correct as Russo’s brace sandwiches a Mariona Caldentey strike to overcome a two-goal deficit from the first leg. Oatley hails it “a night that Arsenal fans will never forget”.
When the match ends, Oatley is on her feet to wrap up the commentary. This excited energy seems to infect all of them even though they are a 22-mile drive from the Emirates stadium and their pitchside reporter colleague, Katie Shanahan. The decision to be “off tube”, commentary speak for not being on-site, is becoming more common, Oatley says. “We all put 100 per cent effort in whether we are here or on-site, whether it is women’s or men’s football,” Ives said.
With her job done, Ward, who skipped into the building singing, skips out with the same energy. These women have much to shoulder and contend with but just like the empowered athletes on display, they all have so much to give.
(Top photo: Caoimhe O’Neill/The Athletic)