When the balls with team names were mixed up in the Champions League draw, it can be assumed that in the sports channel's management offices, champagne was opened at the sight of the "Paris Saint-Germain" ball.
A group that seems to wake up from a Playstation game with a trio of superstars that did not exist in the days of tiki taka is coming to Haifa - even the channel's promos rightly shouted "a once in a lifetime event!".
The Champions broadcasts are the most prestigious brand owned by the channel and the reason many of the subscribers pay for it, so it was interesting to see what the festival would look like around her arrival in Israel.
Well, the way Israeli football looks: quite a neighborhood.
The graphic packaging and famous opera singing that comes with the factory always delivers the luxury goods, what a shame the pre-match broadcasts didn't make it to the pitch.
Instead of a day of broadcasts that really amounts to a once-in-a-lifetime event, in the early evening broadcasts we were treated to two hours of "The Open Field" - a broadcaster that, in order to justify the name, probably broadcasts in an "everything is open" atmosphere, which means enthusiastic and stuttering line broadcasters, zoom calls in the quality of the league for workplaces and editing that misses the The young audience sitting in front of the channel on such a day.
Most of the broadcast looked like a "living room memory" in which past players and coaches recalled the Parisian team from 20 years ago and more: Daniel Brailovsky dug for past memories on the phone, former players Ofir Kopel and Alon Mizrahi in a truncated zoom conversation analyzed each goal against a background of yellowing archival material.
The latter went into great detail about every pass he received on goal.
And the two praised each other as if this is what interests the viewers of the channel at the moment.
Later there was an interview with the former coach and current star Eli Gutman, who explained the size of the class by, of course, the successful trip to Europe that former coach Eli Gutman himself led Hapoel Tel Aviv.
We said everything is open didn't we?
And if that wasn't enough, he got on the phone line (do you have to invite commentators to the studio?) Motl' Spiegler who had to remember his days in the Parisian team a million years ago, and honestly asked "Why are we talking about what was really long ago 50 years ago?"
Even two hours before the game the situation was not much better: the Perry Game panel once again included the pompous Gutman, the anemic Sharon Perry and the former goalkeeper of the Israeli national team Dodo Avatt who said the obvious.
One hundred days of kindness.
Tal Friedman, photo: Maya Baumel Birger
The items around the stadium were neighborhood with fans singing provincial love songs to the Argentine star Lionel Messi and their team Maccabi Haifa.
Presenter Tal Friedman tried to win over everything.
You can give the host Friedman the one hundred days of grace he deserves to step into the giant shoes of Modi Bar-On, and another two hundred days to manage to hold such a complex live broadcast.
But last night it was hard to see him making creepy faces for the camera, and reading over-written, artificial texts.
The highlight was the opening monologue which apparently tried to reproduce Bar-On's poetic style in practice, the pretentious text and the stressed delivery seemed like something that was reheated and served again.
It could have been a broadcast day that really deserves such status, but instead of a once-in-a-lifetime event, we got a once-in-a-lifetime event.
The Sports Channel, Champions League, 22:00 Were we wrong?
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