Nick Mullins
He’s become the modern-day voice of rugby, guiding us through BT Sport’s Premiership rugby coverage every week, and ITV’s coverage of the Six Nations, but that doesn’t mean Nick Mullins doesn’t make mistakes, just ask Richie McCall.
My first introduction to rugby was on the radio, sitting in a caravan on the Manor Park caravan park in Hunstanton on the north Norfolk coast. It would have been 1974 and the Lions tour to South Africa. I was sat there with my granddad, listening to it on his little tinny transistor radio on a Saturday afternoon. The more I think about it that was a seminal moment because I was listening to rugby and commentary on the radio without knowing what either of them were, and yet I was still being gripped this description of this sport on the radio.
I have to think differently for ITV and the Six Nations. I've listened to a lot of Zoom [media] calls so far this week with England and Ireland, and I'm listening to them in a different way than I would do if it was Rob Baxter ahead of a BT game. Because I'm thinking, ‘what of this is interesting to my mum?’. It’s very different which information you have to share with the ‘five-games-a-year audience’, which is the bulk of the ITV audience. If we're getting eight or nine million and BT gets 250,000, at least eight and a half million people are only popping in for the Six Nations. A lot of those will be rugby supporters, but very few of them will know the nuances of the game. So, you have to ask, ‘is there any point in me, talking about Eddie Jones trying to defend against Ireland’s two-line attack?’. I find that interesting, but do I have time to explain it to my mum?
I didn’t grow up in a sporting family. We loved sport, but my parents didn’t play anything beyond school, so I wasn’t dragged along to rugby training as a five-year-old. But growing up in Leicester meant that you were exposed to loads of top quality sport and this is the 1970s, so you'd have Leicester City, the cricket and you'd have Tigers. You didn’t have to follow all three, but I did.
My first memories of going to sport are going to Filbert Street one Saturday, then going to Welford Road the following Saturday. I’d be standing on the old Crumbie terrace, in front of that old wooden stand at Welford Road, watching players who taught me how to love the game. It was players who played for England too, Peter Wheeler, Paul Dodge, Clive Woodward...
When I think of conversations around Tuilagi today, I think back to the 70s where the number 12 is the big bloke around who all the magic and chaos happened. That’s happened with Paul dodge and around him you had the more willowy, running 13, that was Clive Woodward. Yeah, yeah. the bloke who could catch a tray of beans in a storm was Dusty Hare and the cheeky chappy who did extraordinary things and made you make noises you didn't know you're capable of, was Les Cusworth. Then there was Steve Redfern and Robin Cowling, guys you’d never want to meet out on a dark night!
That Leicester side of the 70s was a train spotter’s guide to rugby. If you were introducing someone to rugby, every facet of it was in that team. Every player looked different, every player had their own job, and they all did it brilliantly. I've got so many memories of that side and being a kid growing up watching them.
I was a terrible player. I was a winger, I was a tall winger, I’m 6ft 2in now but I was tall from an early age. There was some pressure to go in the pack but it was the days when forwards wore different boots with different studs that went over your ankles, and I just saw them pulling these on, with fearsome yellow stripes on the side, and just thought they only spelt pain. So I was never going to play in the pack, but I played in the wing, flirted with the county for a year or so, but was never going to do anything. I had a couple of mates who played for Leicester, but that was never going to be me.
I knew from a fairly early age that I wanted to be a journalist. When my mates were playing rugby, I was away working at newspapers or radio stations as a snotty-nosed 14- or 15-year-old at weekends. That kind of set my social scene really, and so it was difficult to play when your job is watching other people play.
It was doing wedding notices and making sure you got Uncle Jack’s name right at first. Just general journalism and sports became an option later on, because at first the ambition was to do anything on Fleet Street in London. Rugby was only something I specialised in when I went into broadcasting.
You do feel like a bit of imposter sometimes. There are times when I almost feel embarrassed that I didn’t play rugby [at a high level] when I’m sitting in commentary boxes with world-class players, but on the other hand I’m offering a view that the majority of us have as spectators – looking at these people wondering how on earth they do what they do. And that’s the most of our rugby abilities. So much as I’d love to have played rugby to a high level, in a funny way, the fact I didn’t means I don’t make assumptions about the knowledge people have.
My first job was at Radio Kent where it was more about cricket. But they had Blackheath – although there always the debate about them being metropolitan Kent! – and that brought me into contact with Micky Skinner, who was making his way through, he was the first England international I got to know well. And some of the stories he told of late-night scrapes with the police after the kebab shop begin to make me realise that the mine of rich stories was much deeper in rugby [than football].
I used to get sent cornflakes in letters. We sometimes get angry letters from listeners that we called the green ink brigade, because they’d always write in green ink and capital letters. And there was one bloke in particular who would also throw some cornflakes in the envelope, for whatever reason. I don’t know what he meant to be honest, but I got a free breakfast with some helpful hints and tips.
I first worked in rugby at Radio Five. I had been a producer, basically making sure the wires worked, and that Cliff Morgan’s Sport on Four went out on time, and Radio Five needed a specialised rugby producer to work alongside Ian Robertson and I put my hand up and got the job, it was just before the 1995 Rugby World Cup.
Ellis Park in 1995 was one of the most extraordinary things I’ve ever seen. Because the television contract was with ITV, Bill McLaren was working alongside us, and I was making sure the commentary box worked. It was a paper-pushing role really, but in the middle of that I was able to do interviews, and I remember interviewing Mark Andrews in a dark tunnel alongside the pitch, on the day when South Africa made history [beating the All Blacks 15-12].
It was an exciting time for Radio Five. It was a time when it was really starting to grow and a lot of us were being brought up from local radio at the same time, so me, Miles Harrison, Jon Champion, Peter Drury, a lot of the names you listen to now on TV were part of the scene. And because there was so much output, we’d all be doing so much: voice 30-second reports, do the bulletins on Radio Five in the evening... ... and because I’d done local radio, I knew there was potential there [in commentating].
My first commentary was in the Allied-Dunbar Premiership. I can’t remember which one though! But my first television commentary I do remember, it was Leicester against Wasps for the BBC highlights programme. When you’re doing as many games as we’re doing though, I struggle to remember what I did last weekend. Every weekend you’re trying to remember 46 or 92 players if there’s two games, so my brain is like a hard drive, that gets wiped on a Sunday evening.
I’m always aware of the fact we’re being invited into people’s living rooms. And you need to behave properly, as if you have actually been invited into their living room. Cliff Morgan banged that into me, saying that when someone’s switching on the television, it’s incumbent upon you to behave properly and to do all you can not to annoy them. Which is almost impossible on television – radio less so, it’s much more forgiving – because one of the first things you learn is that not everyone loves you quite as much as your mum does!
If there aren’t nerves, then it doesn’t matter. But there always are [with commentary], just like when you meet your girlfriend’s parents for the first time or a university interview. I think the most nervous I’ve been was ahead of my first World Cup final in 2011. I looked down on Eden Park and it seemed so dark for some reason, and down on the touchline Steve Ryder was there with Sean Fitzpatrick, Francois Pienaar and Michael Lynagh. I looked down at those three – and one of my broadcasting heroes is Steve Ryder – and I suddenly thought, ‘you're part of this team’. It was ridiculous for a kid who hadn’t played rugby at any great level, and who just ran around on the wing for 40 minutes largely talking to his mates because you never got thrown the ball. And, before I knew it, I was shaking. It’s the only time I’ve every shook before a commentary, and it took me a couple of minutes to sort it out. I remember [Lawrence] Dallaglio, who was commentating alongside me, putting his arm around me, and it felt like it was going to be okay, I was part of Dallaglio’s dressing room.
I never thought a game would have an impact on me as much as 1995, but Scotland against Japan in 2019 would have to be there as well. As much for what was going on around it socially, as on the rugby pitch, and I love the idea sport plays such a role in binding us together, as a nation, as a continent, as an entire planet. It was the weekend of the typhoon, and it was extraordinary that a match was even taking place, we’d woken up to total devastation across the country, whole villages being swept away. Somehow, they’d got the game on.
And anyone who was in the stadium that day will know exactly what I'm talking about. At the end of the match, Japan had won [28-21, meaning they qualified for quarterfinals for the first time], which clearly contributed to the story, and while, at home, Scotland supporters would have been angry or depressed, I'm trying to tell a bigger human picture. And the shots the director is giving us paints that picture, shots of 50-60-70- year-old men in tears, they were among the most powerful scenes I’ve seen on television. I said to the director, I don’t think I’m going to have much to say over these moments that can add anything that’s richer than these images of a nation tied together. As a commentator, silence is the best thing you can do sometimes.
Bill McLaren was very old school but there isn’t a commentator that doesn’t live by the rules he had. And the first one was how disrespectful it was to get somebody’s name wrong. And what does it say to the viewer if you can’t be bothered to get somebody’s name right? How they can trust anything you say? And that goes back to my newspaper days too, when if I didn’t get Uncle’s Jack name right in the wedding photo, I’d be called up in front of the editor. Getting your information right is the first rule of journalism
My dad says, ‘when are you going to get a full-time job?’. ‘Because what on earth are you doing during the week?’. Well, I’m going to training sessions, going up to players, asking them how they pronounce their names. I remember going up to Matt Kvesic when he was first on the scene, and he was, pronounced, either Matt Kve-sich or Kve-sick. I collared him once at Worcester and said, ‘how do you pronounce your name?’ He said, he didn’t mind. So I asked, ‘how would your mum pronounce it?’ He said, ‘Kve-sick’, and I responded, ‘well, if it’s alright with your mum, that’s good enough for me’.
I got Richie McCaw’s name wrong. One of my first commentary games was Richie McCaw’s debut against Ireland at Lansdowne Road in 2001, he was a new player to us. And I’d written his name down on the commentary sheet, but during the match I called him Richie McCall at one point, I corrected it straight away. But I remember reading Rugby World and there was a letter where somebody was saying it was no wonder New Zealand won, they had sixteen players. According to the commentator, he wrote, there was a Richie McCaw and a Richie McCall! I couldn’t believe a slip of the tongue, had not only led somebody to write a letter, but it had been published as well! I remember standing in WHSmith reading this letter and thinking ‘you better get used to this’!
It’s such an enormous privilege to work with the people that I do.And to broadcast to the people we do, the occasional negative criticism just comes with the territory, and I'm afraid you've got to be big enough and ugly enough to deal with it.
