With an all-English final, the profile of the Uefa Champions Lague match in Moscow this week was considerably high. But with the final venue being outside of the EU, lengthy negotiations are required for everything from truck movements to radio frequencies.
At O21 Television, we provided the outside broadcast facility for ITV Sport's coverage of the match between Manchester Utd and Chelsea FC.
The decision to bring O21's full presentation add-on out to Moscow was made two months prior to the final, long before the finalists were decided. Within this time frame we had to compile the carnets, apply for crew visas and travel arrangements and recce the venue.
To get the OB trucks over to the venue was a logistical mission, resulting in an eight-day journey that required all the broadcasters meeting in Finland to create a 22-truck convoy into Moscow. After a 27 hour boat from Germany to Finland, it took 18 hours for the convoy to clear the Finnish/Russian border.
Having traversed the poor quality roads to the internal customs on the edge of Moscow, there were still 22 hours of paper work to be carried out. Following this, the huge escorted convoy - weaving their way through the Moscow streets - took nearly four hours to complete the final 21km to the stadium. Let's just say that the language barrier was the biggest problem over the 1,515 miles.
With the penalties taken and the celebrations over, everything now needs to be pulled out for the reverse journey back to England.
The kit and crew we used were as follows:
Unit 7, Tape 4, Tender 7 and uplink vehicle
8 cameras including Dolphin Arm and 7 Sony E30s
15km of cable
40 technical crew
4 EVS's
HD record decks
EVS X Stream linked directly into Final Cut Pro Edit system
Graphics Piero Studio Touchscreen for live match analysis
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