'We're kind of like a fat, overweight, totally unfit rugby team...'

It’s a strange old world right now. When RugbyPass caught up with Nick Mullins on September 7 when he was high up in the BT Tower overlooking the kaleidoscopic London skyline, the enthusiastic patter was about the start of the new Gallagher Premiership season on BT Sport. On the grand horizon was the opening of the tenth live campaign of the tournament on the upstart broadcaster that first muscled in on the English live rugby TV rights scene back in 2013.

Just over 24 hours later, though, those best-laid plans had encountered an unexpected hitch. The death of Queen Elizabeth II had been announced and for a considerable chunk of time afterwards, it seemed that no ball would be played as scheduled that first weekend.

In the end, just the Friday night - including the live TV offering from Ashton Gate - was canned and the Saturday rescheduling of the match in Bristol resulted in a broadcasting blackout of the derby versus Bath due to the satellite trucks having already moved on elsewhere.

Mullins, though, wasn’t left at a loose end. Far from it. There was the Exeter-Leicester match at Sandy Park to cover as planned followed by a Sunday at Kingsholm for Gloucester against Wasps. Both live commentaries passed off sweetly, the sombre note struck for the Queen’s mourning morphing into a pair of matches you just couldn’t keep your eyes off.

The rolling with the punches, however, didn’t end there. Just days later, Mullins learned of the death of his old broadcast colleague and good friend Eddie Butler. “While the rest of us fumbled around in the dark to add anything worthwhile, Eddie made it all seem so simple. His genius was delivering effortless poetry and storytelling. We have all lost a unique voice,” he tweeted poignantly.

Mullins does himself a disservice here. Just 13 weeks ago, the 56-year-old was hardly fumbling around in the dark when it came to him delivering his own effortless poetry, his gripping commentary on the denouement of the 2021/22 Premiership season from Twickenham. “It’s the greatest moment in Freddie Burns’ life” was his spontaneous spine-tingling description of the Leicester sub pulling the trigger and landing the epic title-clinching drop goal.

It's no surprise to hear the commentator three months later describing it as the favourite moment of his considerable broadcasting career which began way back in the mid-1980s when he first joined the BBC, switching to BBC Radio Sport in 1991.

“I love the Freddie Burns moment at the end of the Premiership final last season because of where we were, the Leicester story, the most extraordinary Leicester story from where they had been a couple of seasons ago and Freddie is one of my favourite people in the entire world. So because my memory isn’t what it used to be, I will go for the most recent which happened to be that drop goal,” he told RugbyPass.

The eruption of crowd noise and Mullins’ appetite to allow it to be heard only added to the perfection of the live TV moment. “As a television commentator, if we are at Twickenham I like to give the 80,000 their time, their voice when we have seen something extraordinary. If I’m commentating on a wonderful piece of play or a big tackle or a fabulous try, I try not to talk over that moment of celebration.

“I remember when I was a football commentator in my early days at Radio Five one of the best bits of advice I ever got from the head of sport starting out was unless what you are about to say is going to be more arresting than the sound of 80,000 celebrating a goal, shut up. That has always stuck with me. It doesn’t matter what the size of the crowd might be or wherever we are, the noise of the crowd and its rise and fall is absolutely part of our sporting experience.”

Mullins was raised in Leicester but insists there was no hint of bias when he came to describing the Tigers’ recent big day versus Saracens at English Rugby HQ. Having an allegiance would only open a messy can of worms when it comes to giving voice to the roller coaster that is the Premiership season.

“I grew up in Leicester, grew up on the terraces in Welford Road, but I promise you - and I not just saying this because I have a PR person standing next to me - when you are a journalist you have no time for affiliations. You travel around and get to know players and coaches and when you get to know people as individuals, as humans at every club.

“You don’t have time to have allegiances because whoever wins the match is not a priority. I just want to make sure that I don’t make some horrific cock-up or misidentify a player or say something ridiculous. I’m equally keen on player A to do well as I am player B. I just want the game to be a good one and the moment you start to introduce allegiances you make the job ten times harder than it is.”

That said, Mullins does like a good old match day outing with BT Sport at Welford Road. “There is a bit of the Welford Road DNA in my blood but I wouldn’t be alone in saying that Welford Road is one of the great grounds to go to because of the noise. The Stoop is a great place to go these days as well if you can get a ticket, which isn’t so easy to get hold of these days.

“They really put on a show around the match as much as anything, and the new Brentford Community Stadium, largely because there are about 500 pubs worth visiting within 50 feet,” he said, naming his three current favourite Premiership grounds to visit, a list onto which he adds Munster’s Thomond Park when it comes to his expanded horizons when covering the Heineken Champions Cup

Mullins is proud that BT Sport have become a voice of authority in the rugby broadcasting business. No one knew in 2013 how they might fare as the new kid on the block but their innovations have stood the test of time, something vindicated by how their gambits are now copied as new in football. “There are things that we introduced back then that we are now starting to see become commonplace in football coverage,” remarked Mullins, harking back to those innocent days nine years ago when BT Rugby came into being.

“Stuff like having the presentation team down on the touchline and not up in some corporate box three miles behind the pitch. Stuff like talking to players on the pitch before the match, stuff like doing post-match interviews with coaches and directors of rugby at our studio table on the touchline. We are seeing this happen in football now and all of a sudden football is saying, ‘Oh my god, this is fantastic’.

“We have got Erik ten Hag coming across and he is joining the guys on the touchline and they think they have just reinvented the wheel. We have almost made a rod for our own back in those early days because the production team who look after the rugby at Sunset+Vine - who introduced all the innovations in Channel 4’s cricket coverage all those years ago - have been looking after rugby.

“So they gave it the Sunset+Vine treatment back in 2013 and as much as we have tried to do things differently, it’s actually not that easy sometimes. Partly because we are aware that every time we bring in an innovation, our innovation is someone else’s annoyance and I understand that not everyone totally buys into us suddenly chatting with Rob Baxter 20 minutes into the game at Sandy Park.

“But genuinely we have had a presentation this morning [September 7] from the guys who are going to be looking after our statistics and graphics side of things and we are going to see stuff on screen this season that we have never done before. We are moving it up in terms of helping hopefully to understand what we all know is a complicated game in a way that even people as stupid as me will understand.

“It’s about bringing in new audiences, attracting them to things that perhaps they don’t see right now in other sports, being able to innovate because rugby is one of those sports that is genuinely forward-looking so hopefully the stuff we are doing now is the stuff that football might be saying in ten years’ time, ‘Hang on, look at this new thing we are doing’ when actually we all know that BT Sport and rugby were doing that ten years previously.”

That said, there is no hubris from Mullins or BT Sport. They know how fickle the business there are in is and it was only in December 2020 that it was widely speculated that Premier Rugby were on the verge of jacking in its relationship with the broadcaster and jumping in with a different provider.

In the end, they stuck by BT Sport and will do so until 2024 when the rights are next scheduled to go to market. For Mullins, the tension two winters ago was a sharp reminder that nothing lasts forever in professional sport. “It is something that all of us as journalists/broadcasters have become accustomed to over the last decade or so,” he admitted.

“The world that we aspired to move into when we were teenagers isn’t the world we live in now, we know that. We know that journalists and newspapers, radio and television have changed and we live in a world of shifting sands, particularly in the world of sports contracts. I worked at the BBC for what felt like 500 years and felt I had a job for life and one of the first things you realise when you move into the freelance world is that life works in two, three maybe four-year cycles if you are very lucky.

“It is disruptive and you have moments where you think, ‘Crikey, how am I going to pay the mortgage next year if BT Sport don’t renew?’ But it is just the nature of not my job but of the world we all live in now whatever job you do. What I would say is if it sounds on the telly at the weekend that we all get on and we all enjoy each other’s company at BT, that is because we do.

“We are kind of like a fat, overweight, totally unfit rugby team at the start of our pre-season. We are not going to go and play rugby but we are hopefully going to talk about it in a way that if you are listening to us at home you’d be happy enough to join in with us if you were next to us in the stands. I’m pleased we are going to get the chance to do that again and I’m pleased that all the people who brilliantly produce the thing at Sunset+Vine have got some security as well.”

• BT Sport is the home of Gallagher Premiership Rugby. The new season continues with Harlequins versus Saracens at 2.30pm on BT Sport 3 on Saturday, September 17. Visit www.bt.com/sport/rugby-union