position they find themselves in today, so they should just grin and bear it.
If it's any consolation, it's also bloody tough on our side of the cameras. I remember a radio interview I did at Arsenal when I was a reporter for LBC in London. You used to grab players as they walked through the marble halls at Highbury and I remember I'd been asked to talk to two young players who had just made their debuts - Paul Davies and Chris White. I approached Paul as he came out of the dressing rooms and convinced him to do a live link.
I said, ‘Well Paul, you must have been pleased with your contribution there …’
He looked confused. ‘Well, er, yeah …’
‘And you nearly came close a couple of times …’
‘Well, not that much, but I'm still pleased.’
‘And how do you think you teamed up with X, Y and Z in mid-field?’
‘Well, OK, but it's not really my role.’
‘Well, thanks, Paul.’
‘No problem, but why do you keep calling me Paul? My name's Chris White.’
So I understand, painfully, the difficulties of interviewing players under pressure – that was probably one of the most embarrassing moments of my career. That said, I, more than anyone, can become frustrated at the interviewing techniques of many football reporters. It really should be a simple business, but sometimes they will answer their own questions before the interviewee has had a chance to open his gob, which is really infuriating. For example, someone will thrust a mic in front of Rafa Benitez and say, ‘So great result today … well done, the way you set out your side with so and so on the left and so and so on the right, it was perfect, absolutely perfect … it worked a treat.’
And all the manager can say to that is, ‘Thanks.’
Crikey, it's hardly Sir David Frost taking down former US president Richard Nixon, is it? So generally, after the dramas, the highs, the lows, the shouting and the screaming of a Soccer Saturday afternoon, it can be a low-key end.
TIME:
6:00 AFTER THE SHOW
With the show over, we'll sort out the various bets which have been laid before the programme began. At this point, the two real challenges are to get Charlie Nicholas to pay up in something other than Scottish notes and to get any sort of cash out of Paul Walsh. He never has any! By this point, I am absolutely exhausted. I'll just drive home to Winchester and watch Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway. The likes of Charlie and Thommo get a plane home. Sometimes they'll bump into people who have been involved in the games. Referee Mark Clattenburg will often run into them. When he sees the boys, he'll often say, ‘How did I do today?’ And they'll reply, ‘Crap.’
I'm absolutely spent afterwards. I remember when Big Sam Allardyce came onto the show, he found that he enjoyed it, but he reckoned it was a long haul. And it is, especially for the boys: once they've done their match reports, they have very little to do apart from twiddle their thumbs and sit quietly. Me, I'm dreaming of my sofa in Winchester and a pint of nice, ice cold Hoegaarden.
To the untrained eye, Winchester's motorway service station, positioned as it is on the M3, is just a run-of-the-mill stop-off point: a loo break for passing travellers; a lunch haven for weary truckers travelling towards the south coast with a consignment of Kerry Katona-endorsed frozen lasagnes. Inside, there's not much more to pass the time than a Wimpy, some fruit machines, a WHSmith's and, in one corner, a modest branch of Costa Coffee. But despite these modest surroundings, it's from this very spot that most of my research for the well-oiled Soccer Saturday fact machine takes place.
Every week, with a stack of newspaper cuttings, stat packs and material downloaded from the World Wide Web (no, not that kind - not unless I'm researching a piece on Dwight Yorke's ex-girlfriends anyway), I'll load up on caffeine and absorb reams of info, figures and snippets of useless trivia. This is quite a down-at-heel environment in which to work, I know, and this revelation may come as a shock to some fans of the show, who, for reasons I cannot fathom, seem to think that I have a glamorous office at home, surrounded by up-to-the-minute data and TV screens playing sports bulletins and non-stop football. I wish. In fact, I have fantasized on many occasions about ‘The Stellodrome’ - an underground compound similar to the one used by Robert Downey Jr in Iron Man, its high-tech interior consisting of a cavern of HD plasma-screen TVs, with banks of blinking computers downloading the latest Opta Index stats. In one corner, a ‘Bat Phone’-style communications link even patches me through to the offices of Sir Alex Ferguson, Fabio Capello and Chris Kamara. Well, Chris Kamara at the very least.
The truth is far less glamorous. I can usually be found staring dolefully into a car park, the rain drizzling down the service station windows, as my latte turns cold. Kammy might ring on the mobile, and sometimes, if I'm feeling racy, I'll head into Winchester and take a corner in Caffè Nero. But generally much of the studio magic and preparation takes place from a plastic table in the corner of a food court, my thoughts interrupted only by the sound of a jackpot on the nearby ‘fruity’.
Why a service station, I hear you ask? Well, firstly, I live nearby, which means I can take a drive out there whenever I want, but I mainly visit this modest spot for a bit of peace and quiet. When I first started working on the show, my kids weren't quite school age and so doing any homework became problematic, especially as I found much of my research screwed into paper footballs and covered in a charming shade of pink crayon when my back was turned. Since then, Winchester Services has become a rather familiar makeshift office, though any ‘Stelling-ettes’ planning on mobbing me as I scan the sports pages of the South London Press should note that I tend to switch between the northbound and southbound stations, just to keep the stalkers on their toes.
Generally, I'm left to my own devices. Well, who would want to approach a man surrounded by bags stuffed with local newspapers and magazines? Occasionally people will recognize me, but they'll usually pass me off as ‘someone who looks like that bloke from the football show on the telly, only he's a lot shorter’, which suits me fine. I have a week's worth of news to go through, not to mention all the results, league tables and goalscorers from the previous weekend, so the less hassle the better.
In reality, this is probably the hardest part of the job - I get the groundwork done in the week so I have all the info at hand when it comes to Saturday afternoon. A lot of people have asked me whether I memorize the stats and information I present on the show, but the truth is that, while I do have a certain amount of knowledge that I can bring to Soccer Saturday without any assistance, I also have a set of papers positioned discreetly on my desk, so I can refer to them at all times. Each sheet has statistical info on all the games being played that day, along with interesting facts and figures on the teams involved, and all the vital info including league positions, numbers of games won and top goalscorers.
OK, I think I know what you're thinking at this point: ‘Oh, I thought he properly memorized all that stuff. What a disappointment. To the BBC and Final Score!’ But hang on, no anchorman worth his salt could memorize all that info. And as they say in showbiz, it's not what you say, it's the way that you say it. So yes, I'll have the basic facts and figures to hand, but I'll also research pages of human interest stories and funny news to throw out to the panel. How else would we have covered The
