Commentator Jinoch on the Champions League final: the experience of a lifetime. When the kick-off was delayed, it was a lifetime

The Champions League final is the biggest football festival and Michal Jinoch from Nova Sport had the honour to bring you the clash between Real Madrid and Liverpool directly from the Stade de France. He will tell you how he prepared for the match, which player impressed him the most and how he experienced the delayed kick-off in an interview with Ruik.cz.

If I’m not mistaken, it was the first Champions League final for Nova Sport, and therefore for you too. What was the experience like?

I’m not entirely sure anymore, but we’ve broadcast the LM before and I think the final was on CT and in our country… For me and for Vojta Tichava, who commentated the final with me, it was a career highlight. When we lost the rights to the Europa League as Nova Sport, we were a bit sad, but then we found out that we had the Champions League instead, so the excitement was huge. The fact that Vojta and I made it to the final like that and we were able to be on the spot, it was an experience of a lifetime.

You were already at the stadium in Paris for the pre-match training, where you met some legends. Who did you run into, for example?

There were quite a few football legends there as a lot of them work as experts, for example Stevie Gerrard, Rio Ferdinand, Julien Lescott or Per Mertesacker. Almost every country had a person there who had something to say because they played in those games.

At the Stade de France, you had perfect seats right in the middle as commentators. Are these seats drawn at random, or maybe Nova Sport somehow got these seats?

The seats are allocated by UEFA and this year they offered us some really great seats. Perhaps only BT Sport could choose, as the main international broadcaster. They had that position right down the middle, but otherwise I don’t think we could complain. The spot we had was ideal in every way, there was nothing in front of us, so there was nothing to obstruct our view. The photos distort it quite a bit, sometimes it looks like the players are ants, but the height of the position was great too. I don’t think we could have gotten a better spot.

How long have you been preparing for the final? Did you take extra care, given that it’s such an important game?

There’s a couple of ways to look at it. If you look at it any other way, I’d put myself under pressure. Obviously it’s a big event and you get a sense of how it’s being watched and you realize that a lot more people are going to be watching than ever before. So I’m generally not a nervous person, but of course you realise what an event it is. The preparation was classic like any game, but with the added benefit of reading many times more articles, like on The Athletic website, which goes into a lot of depth.

Except you don’t know exactly how big the place is and how much space we have, and by doing it in two, you have to allow for two laptops and a commentator’s box, so the only change from the classic was that I adjusted the format of the information. I had an A4 paper for each team and basic information on it so as not to take up all the space unnecessarily with just papers. But we knew that no matter how much preparation we did, we would generally use about one percent of that preparation in this paper, with hyperbole, because there’s no room for everything in a match.

Do you have a set amount of what you want to say and when you’d rather focus on the game?

We’ve said beforehand, or we have it in general, that the ratio of devoting ourselves to the game and the interesting things is about 70 to 30. I think that just in the final we devoted maybe even more to the game, because the game was quite decent for the chances and there was no need to devote to anything around it.

You mentioned yourself that it was the biggest commentary match of your career. Did you feel nervous before the match, for example, so that your voice didn’t shake?

Definitely not, it’s obviously a big fight, but I’m approaching two thousand uncommented broadcasts, so that’s completely beside the point. But we did get a bit rattled the moment we started the broadcast and thought we were going to go to the opening and that’s when the news of the postponed kickoff came up. It’s then downright a matter of figuring out how to get out of it, that’s when improvisation kicks in. But I think we all handled it well, whether it was us at the station, Milan Štěrba in the studio, or of course Štěpán Sokol, who also went among the spectators, where tear gas was sprayed and so on. The Prague director and the people around us also did a great job.

The action on the pitch and outside the stadium

This brings us to the postponed introduction. Did you immediately have information about what was going on outside?

We saw with our own eyes that the Liverpool sector is not full. But at first we thought they were just lingering around the stadium behind the turnstiles because the Real fans had the sector full 45 minutes before kick-off and Liverpool had half the people there. So we thought they were just having a beer outside, but when it was getting close to kick-off time and the sector was still half empty, it just seemed strange. But we didn’t know what had happened and we were finding out just like everyone else. Then they started showing us pictures of what was going on outside the stadium and it started to become clear to us. But as for the riots or what the police were doing, we found that out from Stepan from the reporter’s input.

Without a doubt, the best player of the match was Thibaut Courtois, who did impossible things. Was it him who impressed you the most?

It was 100% Courtois, nothing to talk about there. I don’t think anyone would be surprised if Liverpool were 3-0 up, because what he did was unbelievable. I dare say it was one of the best goalkeeping performances we’ve seen in a final in at least the last ten or fifteen years. He absolutely decided that game for Real, if it wasn’t for him I think Liverpool would have won.

How did the atmosphere in the stadium draw you in? Were you able to enjoy it at all or did you have to concentrate on commentating?

Every time you’re in the stadium, you get a bit “eaten up” because it’s something else. It’s a mess, popularly speaking, so no matter how you adjust the volume on your headphones, you still don’t hear much. Automatically you’re much more into the match and I think you can hear it when you listen to the commentary afterwards, that we’re so shouted down. We don’t really hear ourselves and we have an automatic tendency to drown out the hustle and bustle of the stadium, but I thought it sounded pretty decent.

Is it possible to compare who created a better atmosphere, Real Madrid or Liverpool?

That’s a tricky question, because each team had its stretch when it was most audible. But whether it was You’ll Never Walk Alone or Real’s anthem, when the whole sector started singing, you got goosebumps. Even in Prague with headphones you have that, but here, when we heard it live, it was something unreal.

Real Madrid or Liverpool?

Can you tell us if you have more sympathy for either team? Were you rooting for anyone, or are you impartial?

Firstly we have to be impartial and secondly given the cast I couldn’t even choose. Of course some people prefer the Premier League, some prefer La Liga, but with this cast I more or less didn’t care.

Were there Spanish or English commentators sitting around you? Were they experiencing a lot of it? For example, there was a video flying around on Twitter where a Spanish commentator banged the table with joy after a Real goal and jumped in the air for a few minutes.

I didn’t see that because you can’t see much around you as you sit. But there was a Turk next to us and he was quite emotional, I could hear him even through my headphones (laughs). Our producer was sitting next to us and he said he had a pretty good stereo at times.

How many Real games have you commentated in this year’s Champions League? Which one did you enjoy the most?

For example, I had the semi-final against Manchester City and that was a learning experience for us. It’s often said that players should play until the final whistle and we, and we weren’t the only ones, when I listened to my foreign colleagues comment afterwards, we said sometime in the 88th minute that it was over, that City were going to the final. That only a miracle would really help Real anymore. Well, it came.

At the Stade de France, fans came to see you thinking you were Ibai Llanos. Do they often confuse you?

It goes back to the covid days (smile) We got a video from the agencies of a Spanish tournament and I remember when we were planning our charity there was a report in the TV news with this Ibai, but I didn’t pay attention to it. Now during the finals, when I was sitting in the stands and we had a lot of time, a couple of Spanish guys came up to me saying I think I’m the youtuber. When they came closer they realised it wasn’t me and they realised that I was looking at them in a why are you looking at me (laughs) way. So then they came to tell me what was going on, that a relatively similar youtuber to me existed and that he was supposed to be at the final as well. It’s just a shame I didn’t get as many followers as he has (smile).

Nova Sport has the rights to the Champions League for 3 years, so we might hear from you again next year in Istanbul. Who do you think will make it to the next Champions League final?

That’s extremely difficult, especially we don’t know what will happen in the transfer window where it looks like a big pigeonhole. Haaland is already confirmed, Lewandowski wants out of Bayern, Mané will probably replace him… Hard to predict like that, but I think with Haaland the Citizens will be a bit stronger and probably go to the final unless something goes wrong. And I’m curious about PSG, if they’ll sit there after this year. So maybe PSG-City, but that matchup may come down to the quarterfinals, so it could be a different story.

Source: Michal Jinoch, UEFA