The Big Interview

Well, we made it!

The Big Interview will be produced for at least another year … and it’s all down to you!

We thought long and hard before choosing to stake our future directly on the generosity of the listeners. The response to the KickStarter campaign has surpassed anything we had hoped for. Thank you, once again. We owe you big. We’re working on a repayment plan.

The campaign is still very important and we’re working hard on it. We want to make a weekly show. To realise that ambition we still need a lot more support. If you’re on board already, please spread the word about the podcast. If you’ve not pledged yet – now’s the time! You can change the future of this show, and you can get one of our great rewards. Speaking of which…

If you’re in Aberdeen, London, Glasgow or Dublin, tell the football fans in your life about LA FIESTA – the backers’ parties we’re holding in those cities. Even if they don’t listen to the podcast (yet) they can pledge and get a ticket for what’s going to be a great night of football, music and surprises. We know it’s not a cheap ticket, but we’re going to pull out all the stops to make these nights special.

Finally, some more good news. We’ve been nominated for Podcast of the Year in the Football Supporters’ Federation Awards. Not to ask you for yet more help, but if you have the time, and you think the show beats the awesome competition in that category, you can vote here

Thanks again. We’ll have a new episode as soon as we can. And many more after that. Because of you!

 

Graham

Graeme Souness might just be the best British midfielder of all time. Here’s his origin story – from frustration at Spurs to his emergence at Middlesbrough – and fantastic insights into the mechanics of the Liverpool winning machine of the 1980s, an easy life in Italy with Sampdoria, and revolution at Rangers.

If you’d like to know more about our KickStarter campaign to keep The Big Interview going, you can do that here. Our campaign runs until November 17. If you think a year’s worth of the show is worth £5 – or more – we’d really appreciate it, and you can get yourself some great rewards at the same time.

Enjoy!

Graham

My chat with Harry Redknapp went on a bit, so we had to split it. Here’s the first half – extraordinary tales from an extraordinary life in football, including the dumbest move West Ham ever made; how not to sign Ian Wright; and what happens when you pull a fast one on Barry Fry.

If you’d like to know more about our KickStarter campaign to keep The Big Interview going, you can do that here. If you think a year’s worth of the show is worth £5 – or more – we’d really appreciate it, and you can get yourself some great rewards at the same time.

One of the more disappointing things in this business is the reasonably regular amount of times when you meet a player who’s been given the talent you’d have loved to make a footballing career out of and he either doesn’t actually like the game or isn’t aware of the massive good fortune he’s had.

And then there are guys like Darren Fletcher.

No sooner did we put up The Big Interview with this guy who played nearly 350 times for Manchester United than I got a message from Frank Cameron on Twitter (@rathersheepish) with the outlandish claim that he’d bumped into Darren in Oporto back in 2004 during the European Championships, when Italy were about to play Sweden.

Now the Frankster reckoned that he’d met the guy who’d win Fergie’s total admiration plus a handful of Premier League titles, the World Club Cup, the FA Cup and the League Cup (for evidence of how much that mattered to Darren just listen on to the podcast) dressed in a full leg plaster, his kilt and an Alex Del Piero top.

BackPage already know that’s the kind of thing I’d do, and I like to hang around with similarly eccentric people but …. Darren?

So I checked it out with him and when he’d stopped laughing at the memory he confirmed that it was word for word correct.

I guess it fits with the opening anecdote in the Big Interview with Mr F. We talk about him using some of that horrid time when he was out of the game and fighting back to health to go and follow United with their fans at City. “Did you sing?” I asked. No doubt about the answer there either. “Ohhhh… Yes!”

Maybe I should have intuited all this.

Again when Darren was still in his recuperation phase, he nipped over to the Camp Nou to watch Barcelona v Real Madrid with me in a massively entertaining Copa Del Rey tie (his first Clásico) and then subjected himself to a night out (featuring Aurelio Capaldi, Santi Ezquerro Jorge Messi and Jimmy Bullard – how’s that for a five-a-side team?)

He’s mad passionate about football. He loves it to its bones.

Never mind hell in a handcart, Darren will travel to Portugal in a plaster-cast to watch Del Piero, and away to City with the United fans to watch ‘his’ team because he was missing being a supporter, plus he’ll fly over to Barcelona just to sample that great Xavi-Messi-Iniesta era at first hand.

I like that. A lot.

People – he’s US! But with talent!

He’s always known, long before getting ill, how lucky he is to not only be gifted at football but intelligent about it, too.

I think there are some misconceptions about this guy – many of which stem from the fact that he’s smart, well mannered, honest, and a real gent.

My two main suspicions are that, because  it was easy for the eye to be drawn to Giggs or Scholes it was thus easy for some people not to watch Darren closely and to fail to understand how fantastically he complemented their work.

Fans and journalists like to wax lyrical about how a team ‘clicks’. How it’s fabulous to see all the working parts smoothly blending together to make a powerful, exciting whole. Yet when one of those components does a job which makes those around him better, greater, I think it can be too easy to fail to spot it. Or appreciate it.

More, I think that if Darren hadn’t chosen to play the way he did, in order to ‘click’ with those around him, he’d have been able to prove that he’s a rampaging, attacking footballer who was able to go box to box, who had more goals in his boots than he was allowed  to show and who also had the judgement about when to go, when to stay and how to pass to an extremely high level.

One of the anecdotes not in this podcast stemmed from me having lunch with Juan Sebastian Veron in Berlin a couple of weeks ago. “Send Darren a big hug from me,” Veron made me promise. “Great guy, smart footballer.”

DF told me that when he first saw Veron and Scholes playing one and two-touch football in the United dressing room he asked himself: “How am I going to get in this team?” But he did. Over and over again. And won big respect from Keane, Veron and from Fergie.

The other thing I reckon people get way wrong about Darren is that because he’s a kind, mannerly, articulate sort that, perhaps, he’s ‘just’ a nice guy. He’s both mentally and physically tough, he’s brutally determined to win and I’d bet you a million dollars that it was as unpleasant as hell to play against him.

He’d hunt you down all over the pitch like a Pinkerton Detective in football boots (®Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid).

Top footballer, top man, great guest on the Big Interview.

Watch this space – one day you’ll see Darren Fletcher managing Manchester United to the Premier League title.

Stand on me.

To pledge to our Kickstarter campaign – and ensure the continued existence of The Big Interview – click here

In the early months of his reign at Marseille, Chris Waddle used to be picked up for training by the Brazilian defender Carlos Mozer.

Chris didn’t have Portuguese, Mozer not a word of English. French was a long way away.

As they drove, initially in silence or with bad French pop on the radio, this impish man, who became known as ‘Magic Chris’ or ‘Bugs Bunny’ while winning three straight French league titles, came up with a way to break through the language barrier.

He just said: ‘Pele.’ And looked to his left.

Mozer was silent for a few seconds. Then answered: ‘Bobby Moore.’

Chris countered with: ‘Jairzinho.’

Mozer came back with: ‘Bobby Charlton.’

And so it went, day after day, week after week, the entire litany of famous British and Brazilian players – the only way these two thoroughbred footballers had to communicate with each other while they briefly morphed into commuters.

When he told BackPage and I this story, Chris stood up and mimed how the two men would arrive at training, leave the car and give a tiny nod of ‘see ya’ to each other and not speak again until the next morning, when they’d start with Nobby Stiles and Garrincha.

It’s the germ of an idea for Peter Kay for the next series of Car Share.

But it was told with wit and warmth and Chris’s natural raconteur style. I’m full of praise, I know, for the guests on the Big Interview podcast whenever I write or talk about them. But there’s a reason for that. They are not new to me, instead they are handpicked because I already like, admire or revere them.

Yet when it turns out that they are not only good at what originally attracted my attention but also natural story tellers, well, that’s an additional joy.

In this podcast Chris talks about playing motorbike-sidecar musical chairs with his brothers en route from the North-east to Watford in 1966. This is him reliving the moment. Loco.

He’s engrossing about how Arthur Cox bullied him, remorselessly, at Newcastle. But bullied him into being a better pro, a dedicated winner and someone who valued professionalism as highly as he did entertainment. It was a painful journey but one which rewarded both men handsomely.

Karaoke, Top of the Pops, World in Motion, Beckenbauer, World Cup Italia 90, Jack Charlton, Gazza, Hoddle, Papin, Ossie Ardiles, Sheffield Wednesday, the technique of how to toast a full-back, being booted by defenders, England’s skills deficit and how to cure it … it’s all here.
And much more.

Chris also talks, calmly, honestly and carefully about depression and stress in football and emphasises one of the only sure-fire remedies to that feeling which sportsmen and women hide behind a positive exterior – quiet, hopeless desperation. That remedy is to talk, to share, to seek help and to realise that you are neither alone nor the first. Not anywhere close.

But it’s an upbeat, colourful, very funny chat. A morning well spent talking about a career well spent.

When the mic was off and we weren’t recording, Falkirk came up. When he signed at Brockville he was ushered to the ‘sponsor’s room’ and, literally, couldn’t get in because of the crush of people there. Several had to squeeze out the door so that the star signing could get in. He loved the eccentricity.

How did it compare to his welcome at Marseille when he became the third most expensive footballer in the world?
Quite well actually. On that day in southern France there was nobody from the club, no fans – just a clutch of French media who mobbed him.
Slowly it became clear that the initial conversation, in the reporter’s perfectly adequate English, was going astray.
“What songs will you be performing tomorrow night?” Chris was asked.
‘Wow! Diamond Lights DOES travel well!’ he began to think to himself with gentle satisfaction.
Until it emerged that the French media were convinced they were dealing with the lead singer of Pink Floyd, not Marseille’s expensive new winger.
Somewhere, a few kilometers away, perhaps David Gilmour was doing ‘doggie’ runs in the blazing sunshine, passing to and fro with Eric Cantona and crossing for Jean Pierre Papin to volley home.

That part we’ll never know. Everything else is here in the Big Interview. Enjoy.