Goode column: I have one rule for my TV work – call it as you see it

By Andy Goode
Anyone who says they don't miss a thing about playing rugby once they are retired is not being fully honest with themselves because you cannot recreate that buzz of winning a game on a weekend and celebrating it with your team-mates – which is why I kept going for as long as I did.
I think I've got the record for the longest career-span, in terms of years and months, of any player to have played in the Premiership (17 years, 155 days). You take those moments for granted a little bit while you're still playing – the highs and the adrenaline and all that sort of stuff – because it becomes a habit.
For me the next best thing is working in the media, as a pitchside analyst or co-commentator for BT Sports or Sky. It is still good fun to be able to rock up on a matchday, talk about the game and get your opinion across while still being part of a team and get a different type of buzz.
The humour among the broadcast team is equally as juvenile as a dressing room. We were big kids playing the game and now we're just big kids talking about it.
Austin Healey always tries to punch you in the nuts just before you go on air but, thankfully, I've always managed to have my guard up (or down) in the nick of time. Craig Doyle likes to induce a state of panic by throwing a dummy and claiming we're going live when we're not really.
Going into coaching was an obvious alternative career path but the right opportunities weren't there at the time for me and I felt going down the media route was the best thing to do for now. Dai Young offered me a coaching job at Wasps, but I couldn't get the itch of wanting to play on for a bit longer out of my system.
I thought I had got that out of the way when I retired from London Irish but then I came back to play for Newcastle. Also, the older you get the more you realise how stressful and time-consuming professional coaching is. Geordy Murphy is a big mate of mine and he hates it when I turn up to do a Leicester game on TV because I'm all smiles and he's stressed out about what lies ahead. With rugby being a results-driven business, that's just the nature of the beast, especially at a big club like Leicester.
As a co-commentator, I admit it's been a steep learning curve – like any new career. I remember being an 18-year-old player and looking around the Leicester dressing room and seeing people like Martin Johnson and thinking, ‘what am I doing here' and, to some extent, it was like that when I first started working with Nick Mullins, Ali Eykyn and Johnnie Hammond, because they had done it a million times whereas I was just starting out. Like any walk of life, things come more naturally the more you do them.
The important thing is to be true to yourself. Getting the balance right between talking a player up if they do something really well or criticising them if they make a mistake is one of the key things to get right; at the end of the day, I am paid to voice my opinions and pleasing the producer and director is far more important than worrying about what an old mate might be thinking sat back at home.
Your first instinct is to try to be positive, but you have to call it as you see it. Some French games I work on are awful. If the weather is bad and the pitches are heavy, they can degenerate into a kick-fest, which probably suits me because that is the way I used to play!
One of the pressures is to always stay relevant and not become that former player everyone loves to slate. To be able to validate my points during a match, I try to go to as many training sessions so I can get a flavour of how a team is setting up for the weekend and I also talk to as many players as possible for background info. Basically I do as much homework as I can on the match, whether that's going back through old games or studying stats.

Having played for a number of clubs in the Premiership I often get accused of bias. If Newcastle are playing, they'll accuse me of favouring them and the same goes for Wasps and so on and so forth.
I played at Leicester for ten years and I remember talking Freddie Burns up a few seasons ago when he was having a stormer against Northampton. When I had a look at Twitter at half-time I'd copped a load of abuse from Saints fans.
Just as you do as a player, you need to have a thick skin to do this job. You soon learn that you can't please everyone all of the time but what else would I be doing? Can you imagine the abuse I'd get if I was a referee? You have to be slim and fit to be a referee and be able to run around for 80 minutes, and anyone who knew me as a player will tell you that wasn't one of my strengths. When I got tired, I kicked it.
For the time being, I'm more than happy to have one hand on a microphone and the other covering up the parts Austin Healey cannot reach!