Right, so...
I know quite a lot about football (soccer), but when I got the call yesterday morning, I only knew the basics about French football, and the only player on either Montpellier or Caen I'd ever heard of was Stephane Sessegnon, who had played for Sunderland and West Brom a few years ago in England. So I spent most of yesterday doing research, and by the time I went to bed after midnight last night, I had created the file full of facts and figures attached below - it was in Excel, but I've converted it to a PDF here - along with a separate Word file with other background material and potential items I might use to fill dead air. (I'm enough of a geek to somewhat enjoy making and color-coding worksheets like these in such a way that I can immediately find a fact to use in the heat of battle.) I also downloaded several French football podcasts to listen to during my journey by way of additional research and getting some French pronunciations into my head.
The problem was that by the time I'd finished doing this, I was so amped up with adrenaline that I couldn't get to sleep - and then when I finally did get to sleep, I woke up less than four hours later, well before my alarm was due to ring. I was beginning to think I'd been set up to fail: foreign league, unfamiliar players, no sleep, seven-hour drive ahead. Luckily I didn't crash my car on the way down and did absorb some information from the aforementioned podcasts, and I arrived more than three hours before kickoff, so I had plenty of time to familiarize myself with the studio. This setup is rather weird insofar as my booth wasn't soundproofed or indeed surrounded by any walls or glass at all; instead, I and the commentators around me calling the other French matches this evening (who I could hear when the crowd in Montpellier was quiet) were effectively in cubicles. And instead of using a microphone attached to my headset, for the first time I used one of these old-style handheld mics that apparently are better at eliminating background noise and only picking up what you speak directly into them:

The one thing I really wish I'd been able to do was script my introductory material to perfectly fit the running order. I wrote what I thought were a few good lines - "Hello and welcome to Night 2 of Ligue Un, Round 1" and "These two clubs are both craving the security of mid-table obscurity this season" - but they were in an opening paragraph which was about 10 seconds too long for the top of the broadcast before the lineups appeared on the screen, and I simply ran out of time to time-test what I'd written and also script some lines to accompany the pregame lineup graphics. If I were more familiar with French football and the teams in question, I could have winged it and done OK, but as it was I got a bit flustered, and also nobody told me there would be a minute's silence for the recently deceased Montpellier club president - I knew he'd died recently and had material prepared on him, but I hadn't introduced it in a timely fashion and wound up speaking over the first 10 seconds of the period of silence.
The good news is that once the match got underway, I found my voice and from there I think everything went very well. I think I did a good job in calling the game's only goal, the only disallowed goal and the one other he-should-have-scored moment, and I think my pacing was good as well in knowing when to describe the action vs. analyzing the game as a whole vs. dropping in informational tidbits. (I'll maybe talk about that process more in a future post.) The bad news is that I don't think I'll have access to my own copy of the broadcast any time soon unless I get some VPN software that allows me to pretend I live in Canada, subscribe to DAZN and access its On Demand service myself - I think that's the best way for you guys to follow me as well, if you're really interested - but I knew that was coming and recorded some of my broadcast myself in the form of a video of the monitor I took using my smartphone. Some people hate listening to themselves, but I always want to go back and here what I've done well and what I've done badly so I can learn from it going forward.
Anyway, I don't know if this is all *way* too much for you guys to want to read, but it sounds as though some of you might appreciate the meta aspects of this. I'm pretty sure I'll write less next time, anyway!