It was just half an hour after she'd won the Australian Open down in Melbourne that Naomi Osaka turned up in Eurosport's London studio, standing alongside our hosts Barbara Schett-Eagle and Mats Wilander and having the chats.
This would have discombobulated Eurosport-watching newbies, not least when she was then beamed up like Scottie and disappeared in to the ether, reappearing seconds later back in Melbourne where she commenced celebrations with her team.
Those who aren’t Eurosport fly-by-night-blow-ins would have known this wizardry is thanks to their Cube, a live presentation studio that brings together a variety of technologies to create an interactive mixed-reality set and features virtual guests beamed in from green screen studios around the world and makes use of augmented reality. Those who might allege that this description was lifted from a press release would, well, be right.
The spooky thing about the Eurosport Cube is that it first appeared at the 2018 Winter Olympics, but it’s almost like its inventors anticipated that in two years’ time there’d be a pandemic so something like the Cube would be very useful to broadcasters who were locked down in their studios several thousand miles away from where anything was happening.
Eurosport-watching veterans of an exceedingly rusty vintage will recall those days when the UK-based Archie McPherson would commentate on sundry sporting events around the globe from what sounded a little like his bathroom, the channel’s budget rarely extending to actually sending their commentators anywhere.
And they’d conclude that it’s far from the Eurosport Cube Archie was reared. Otherwise he could have beamed, say, Sampdoria’s left-back in to his bathroom to ask him how proud he was of his 92nd minute assist that led to the winner against Bologna.
The Cube isn’t flawless, mind. For example, Boris Becker was beamed in to stand beside Barbara and Mats before the men’s final but shouted so loud it was as if he thought that was the only way they could hear him from, say, his green screen in Baden-Württemberg.
And Barbara was looking about three feet to his left when she was addressing him when she should have been looking in his green screen eyes, a bit like a weather forecaster meaning to point to Dingle but picking out green-screen Dunkineely instead.
Barbara and Mats, then, found it a bit easier to talk to each other because, while socially distanced, they were actually physically in the Cube, so could confidently look each other in the eye because their eyes weren’t virtual.
That being said, Mats didn’t really know where to look, certainly not in to Barbara’s eyes, when she noted how big a star Osaka had become.
“Look at all these magazine covers she’s been on,” she said, as a whole heap of covers featuring Osaka appeared on screen. “It reminds me a little bit of Mats Wilander,” she said. “You’ve been a rock star, you’ve been a little bit of a sex model as well ...... believe it or not.”
Mats could, of course, taken offence at the “believe it or not” bit, but it was the “sex model” allegation that turned his cheeks so red that not even a green screen could have spared his blushes.
Sporting sexiness, as it proved, was the theme of the weekend.
"I think you'd look very sexy indeed if you tried it on," said Marty Morrissey to Limerick hurling God Cian Lynch during Saturday's All Stars show.
You had to be there, really, but Cian was having a Zoomy chat with Marty from a room where, over his left shoulder, there was a pink wig and pink lips hanging from the wall and over his right a framed picture of a psychedelic panda. If you mentioned this to a Garda at a lockdown checkpoint, you’d be done under the Misuse of Drugs Act.
“Where are you,” asked Marty, a touch apprehensively.
“I had to sneak away,” Cian explained, “the auld house at home is a bit hectic, so I’m with the sister in her house. She’s a make-up artist.”
“What exactly is behind you – is that a wig?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t examine it fully, Marty. I might try it out, the auld pink seems to suit me.”
It was at this moment that Marty, on February 20th in the Year of our Lord 2021, told Cian Lynch that he’d look sexy in a pink wig.
The only shame is that RTÉ didn’t have a Cube so that Cian, in his pink wig and pink lips, could have been green-screened alongside Marty, accompanied by a psychedelic panda with Archie McPherson providing a running commentary from his bathroom.
God, we really need lockdown to end.
