31-01-2022, 01:12 AM
Eurosport did a similar mess last weekend with the tennis and skiing. On the Friday, Eurosport 2 left Naomi Osaka's defeat a few minutes before the end to go to the Kitzbuhel downhill with 15 minutes build-up, with Eurosport 1 only showing Rafael Nadal's warm--up, meaning they missed one of the headlines of the tournament. Then on the Saturday, Eurosport 2 UK (but not other versions of ES 2) kept with the tennis over the skiing, and of course missed the first ever win of an Alpine Ski World Cup event by a British skiier ?♂️?♂️.
Reviewing Eurosport's coverage at the end of the Australian Open I'd say it was satisfactory, just about. Apart from a few clashes both Eurosport 1 and 2, both channels were wall-to-wall live coverage which was is a positive. And every match was fully live on Discovery+, which was not the place everywhere else (*cough* ESPN *cough*). The ad-free streams on Discovery+ of the matches shown on the main channels is a great feature, and is good that they usually put effort into these breaks (commentators keep talking during change of ends for example) rather than leaving blank air. The coverage itself was okay - nothing spectactular and not much effort at times (all commentary from London a basic example). I saw this review of the coverage from the Telegraph last week, which I thought was a little too harsh but this line did stick out to me as perfectly accurate summary of Eurosport's coverage, "has that trademark character of having been made for multiple different markets and audiences, while not quite understanding any of them.". Alizé Lim made her debut as Eurosport's main host and she was a little green to the role, I'd say she was a downgrade on Barbara Schett but from what I understand she does live in Australia so makes sense that she didn't travel over to London and contributed from courtside instead. Amazon's and BBC and ITV's coverage of the other slams over the last year was comfortably better though I'd say.
Reviewing Eurosport's coverage at the end of the Australian Open I'd say it was satisfactory, just about. Apart from a few clashes both Eurosport 1 and 2, both channels were wall-to-wall live coverage which was is a positive. And every match was fully live on Discovery+, which was not the place everywhere else (*cough* ESPN *cough*). The ad-free streams on Discovery+ of the matches shown on the main channels is a great feature, and is good that they usually put effort into these breaks (commentators keep talking during change of ends for example) rather than leaving blank air. The coverage itself was okay - nothing spectactular and not much effort at times (all commentary from London a basic example). I saw this review of the coverage from the Telegraph last week, which I thought was a little too harsh but this line did stick out to me as perfectly accurate summary of Eurosport's coverage, "has that trademark character of having been made for multiple different markets and audiences, while not quite understanding any of them.". Alizé Lim made her debut as Eurosport's main host and she was a little green to the role, I'd say she was a downgrade on Barbara Schett but from what I understand she does live in Australia so makes sense that she didn't travel over to London and contributed from courtside instead. Amazon's and BBC and ITV's coverage of the other slams over the last year was comfortably better though I'd say.