Phoenix From The Flames

By Aiden McLaughlin

With no live sport for the foreseeable, Sportsfreak towers has tried to make Level 4 that bit more interesting for you all with the Looking Back series and Lockdown Recommendations along with other offerings where we can.

As we know, Radio Sport was the first major casualty of the New Zealand media landscape at the end of last month (it seems so much longer). Content would have been extremely challenging had they survived, but in my opinion, there were enough innovative employees at the station to have provided plenty of entertainment, ironically at a time that so many of us, would have had much more time to tune in.

To borrow a certain documentary title, there is indeed a last dance for Radio Sport this coming Monday as Jason Pine hosts ‘Extra Time’ between 9am and 12pm on the previous Radio Sport frequencies as well as iHeartRadio; the show will look back on the highs and lows of the last 22 years of sport as covered by the station.

Away from this retrospective, some of the station’s previous employees have been keeping themselves nice and busy, and perhaps giving us an early indication of what the future holds when it comes to online content.

Two thirds of the Radio Sport Breakfast team, Marc Peard and Nathan Rarere, have been two thirds of the ‘Daily Debrief’ team (along with former NRL player Blake Ayshford) which goes out live every weeknight at 8.30pm via the Marc Peard Sports Facebook page. The show generally lasts about an hour and usually has two guests; there’s been plenty of household names so far including Aaron Smith, TJ Perenara, Shaun Johnson and Tom Walsh. They’ve mixed it up too, with Dr Michelle Dickinson making an appearance to talk about COVID-19 and her background, as well as a bit of fun last Friday night when the owner of an Auckland whisky bar came onboard to give an entertaining masterclass.

Across the virtual corridor on Facebook, former Radio Sport afternoon producer Louis Herman-Watt has been working hard on output for the Boys Get Paid page. Boys Get Paid, a long-standing community of horse racing fans has reacted to the lack of actual racing (although some still exists across the Tasman) by ramping up its online content. There have been lengthy interviews under the title ‘The Last Leg’ thus far with Brendon McCullum, successful trainer Chris Waller and, most recently, Steve Hansen, with those interviews jointly hosted by Louis and Boys Get Paid community leader Luke Kemeys.

Both Marc Peard Sports and Boys Get Paid have been around for a while on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, but both have also taken the current situation as an opportunity to innovate and expand. The live interviews allow viewers to post questions to the guests there and then and give those fans interactive access beyond the norm. The guests certainly come across as less guarded too, away from the control of press officers and with a sense of freedom not usually seen. They’re relaxed and clearly having fun.

Boys Get Paid interviews are also available as a podcast and via YouTube, and Marc Peard Sports have teamed up with the highly popular Tribe Sports App this week so that the Daily Debrief is available on that platform..

You can be sure that other former Radio Sport employees have things in the pipeline too, but for now, three of them have got out in front to provide new online sporting content for the sports hungry public to digest. The world is seemingly their oyster.

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