https://theathletic.com/1705187/2020.../?redirected=1
On a similar theme of pathos, for anyone with an Athletic access this whole thing is just pure Lovejoy gold.
https://theathletic.com/1705187/2020.../?redirected=1
On a similar theme of pathos, for anyone with an Athletic access this whole thing is just pure Lovejoy gold.
Helen was never a looker.
Copy and paste for the lads.Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd
Running for more than 25 years, Soccer AM has been one of the most influential football shows ever made. In the “perfect storm” of late 1990s Britain, it gained a cult following, and made Tim Lovejoy and Helen Chamberlain household names. Here is its full story, told by the people who made it…
Russ Williams (presenter, 1994 to 1996)
Helen Chamberlain (presenter, 1994 to 2017)
Tim Lovejoy (exec producer and presenter, 1996 to 2007)
Julian Holmes (vision mixer, director, 1996-)
Neil Smythe (producer, 1999-2007)
Chris Nutbeam (producer, 2003-2013)
Robbie Knox (producer, 2000-2007)
James “Rocket” Long (producer, 1998-2017)
Rob Wakeling (exec producer, 2007 to 2015)
Andy Goldstein (presenter, 2007-2008)
Max Rushden (presenter, 2008-2015)
Lloyd Griffith (presenter, 2017 to 2019)
John “Fenners” Fendley (producer 1996-2007, exec producer and presenter, 2015-)
Russ Williams: “The sole motivation for everything Sky Sports did in those days was to encourage people to get satellite dishes. I was hired by Vic Wakeling and Mark Sharman in 1994. Vic had set up two shows in the mornings, Soccer AM on a Saturday, and Soccer Extra on a Sunday. Bradley Walsh used to come on a lot, he knew his onions. (Former Tottenham and England defender) Gary Stevens came in as the football expert. We’d show all the highlights, we would look forward to the games. We’d do the football weather. The studio was so small, and we wouldn’t get fans in, that came in later. In those days, people would phone in. There was no internet, you couldn’t text in, but you could fax. There weren’t many people faxing in, from memory. It was completely another world.
Helen Chamberlain: “Sky Sports had just launched Sky Sports 2 and they needed stuff to fill it. At the start we’d all be sat in the same place for the entire four hours. It was just a lot of VTs and bits and pieces — putting something on to fill a gap.”
Russ: “I got moved off Soccer AM in 1996 to go and host the Endsleigh League, and my match summariser was Alan Brazil. They kept Helen on, but obviously they knew that they had to find a replacement.”
Tim Lovejoy: “I was working on the Big Breakfast. At that time most people in TV didn’t take football very seriously, but I loved it. I wrote to Sky and asked if they had any jobs going. I got called in and Mark Sharman offered me the role of producer of Soccer AM and Soccer Extra. I thought ‘that’s a lot of work and I’d have to take a bit of a pay cut to do it’. So I said no… Then they called me back and said I could produce and present it — it was like a dream job. I said yes. I was going to be player-manager!”
Helen: “Tim turned up and said, ‘I love Soccer AM but it’s really boring. I want every Saturday to be like the build-up to the FA Cup final’. When Tim came in and started doing funny stuff I just thought ‘oh my god, this is what I want to do’. I didn’t want to do serious telly, I just wanted to do fucking about.”
Tim: “It was a really exciting time in television. It was the 90s, there was Britpop, the British art scene, all that stuff going on. It was fantastic, it was exciting, just a thrilling time. The mantra in television was ‘push the boundaries as much as you can’. These days it’s more like ‘please stay within the boundaries as much as you can.’
Julian Holmes: “Tim gave Soccer AM its flavour, its attitude. He gave it that freedom and licence to be a bit knockabout, irreverent, anarchic, just a little bit Tiswas. That’s when Soccer AM really found its voice.”
Tim: “The first thing I did — it was old-school, you’ve got to remember — was to say ‘we’ve got to get rid of this woman, she’s rubbish, what the hell is she doing on the show?’ You’ve got to remember at the time it was a very male-dominated sport. And then ‘why is it called Soccer AM and not Football AM?’ We were told: ‘It’s Soccer AM, shut up, that’s what it’s going to be called.’ Then I started talking to Helen and immediately was like, ‘oh my god, this woman knows more about football than I ever have done.’”
Helen: “Tim wasn’t a presenter. For his first couple of weeks, he thought it was easy, but he was shit. It didn’t take him long, only a couple of weeks. But for his first few shows, I think he thought ‘I need this girl’, because I bailed him out over and over again.
Tim: “Helen taught me so much, she saved my arse in the first season because I was all over the place. She was so kind and generous and such a great presenter. She absolutely got me out of every hole. And she could present to timing, she was amazing. She also knew everything there was to know about football.
Russ: “Tim and Helen invited me on their first show funnily enough, we did this handover. I did get a sense it was going to go in a new direction. And as Sky’s audience was organically growing, it would pick up more viewers. They very cleverly tapped into the Britpop music scene at that time.”
Tim: “I had to find someone to work the gallery. I contacted a guy called Andy Harris who I’d worked with at the Big Breakfast. He’s better known as ‘Shandy, the Gooner in the Gallery’. Sadly he passed away a few years ago. He would go into the bosses and say ‘we need more, we need a bigger studio, we need this, we need that’, and I never had the balls to do that. Without him I don’t think the show would have become as big as it was.”
Julian: “Andy, working behind the scenes, was just as much the brains of the Saturday morning stuff as Tim. He was just a deeply, deeply infectious Arsenal fan. Having someone at the centre of the production team that loved football that much, how could the show not be successful?”
Neil Smythe: “Tim and Andy Harris had come from the Big Breakfast, which was this crazy mix of cultural references. He brought that to Soccer AM. There was so much Chris Evans in what we did, even though he wasn’t there.”
Tim: “I loved all the excitement that went with football. But I wanted to make an entertainment show. I wanted to use football to make entertainment. I realised that football and music went hand in hand. We realised there was a massive hole in the market for like-minded people who loved footballers, indie bands, the urban music scene, soap stars — all that stuff that we loved. It was around the time that everyone really started loving football. People started really buying into football, so it became easier and easier.”
Rocket: “The style of the show was very Big Breakfast. It was organised chaos, a bit of carnage. The camera’s whipping round, and you never know what you’re going to see next.”
Tim: I wanted to make a football show that you could enjoy without liking football. It was people having fun, and I’ve always thought that’s what TV should be. There were a couple of people who worked on the show who really, really loved football and took it really seriously but my thinking was ‘hold on, football’s about entertainment and having a good time’. The more political side of it all, to me, wasn’t something I was interested in.”
The on-screen chemistry between Lovejoy and Chamberlain was almost instant (Photo: Sky Sports)
Helen: “I was a football fan, not a fricking expert. I can spot a Rotherham shirt from 100 paces, but I couldn’t tell you the best right-back in world football. That was another reason why Tim and I worked so well together. He was the one saying ‘all of the shows on TV, they analyse everything, they criticise managers, they criticise chairmen, they criticise referees, he did this wrong, let’s have a look at that.’ We got sick of it. And we were just the antidote to all of that in-depth analysis.”
Tim: “Getting Robbie Fowler on was a real turning point. We couldn’t believe we’d got Robbie Fowler on, it was absolutely huge. He came on the show and started taking the mickey out of Chelsea. But Chelsea had just come back from 2-0 down against Liverpool to win 4-2 (in January 1997). I just put my fingers up, and said ‘4-2, Robbie’. It was a real changing moment. That someone had said to a footballer, ‘I’m taking you on here as a Chelsea fan versus a Liverpool player.’ He laughed, we all laughed, it was great.
“I just remember thinking ‘oh god, am I going to get away with this?’ and Robbie laughed. It was so cool. Because I don’t think TV presenters had really taken the mickey out of footballers like that before. We took the mickey with the footballers. I think that was the difference. I never wanted to offend any of the footballers. We always wanted the footballers to feel like they could watch it and enjoy the show. I always wanted the footballers to tune in and think ‘it’s our show as well’.”
Helen: “There was such a feeling around the show. People would go to a match on a Saturday, and there would always be a moment in the show where people would go: ‘Did you see Soccer AM this morning?’ It was, for a while, that thing that everybody watched. It’s difficult to say it was a cult following, but that’s what other people called it. We never called it anything. We just turned up and did Soccer AM every week.”
Tim: “We found out Noel Gallagher was watching the show and we could not believe it. When we got him on the show it was absolutely huge. We got him a few times and it was fantastic. And the great thing was that when we got people like Noel Gallagher and Ray Winstone on the show they weren’t doing it for publicity. When they were after publicity they’d do all the other TV shows. When they weren’t they’d go ‘right, now we can go on Soccer AM and mess about.’ They used to love coming on. Suddenly all the music PR people are getting in touch going ‘can I get my band on your show?’ The music industry was changing and people were having to work a lot harder for their cash. Then we started getting our pick of guests.”
Rocket: “The big thing for Soccer AM was that we embraced the music scene, with your Noel Gallaghers being on. Your rock and roll stars wanted to come on Soccer AM, talk football, have a laugh and do the catwalk with Tim. As soon as you get a few big names, suddenly it becomes the place to be.”
Tim: “Footballers really wanted to come on because it was seen as a cool show to be on. They were only allowed on if they were injured or suspended and it got harder and harder as the years went on. Sir Alex Ferguson never let us have a player in his whole tenure at Manchester United. Then we heard Gerard Houllier didn’t want his players to come on. Then Arsenal stopped their players from coming on. At least Jose Mourinho loved us. I once went to a Chelsea do, and he walked in to a crowded room, spotted me and walked straight over. ‘Hey, Soccer AM guy! We love your show, it’s great for morale in the morning, getting all the players ready for the game.’”
Tim: “My bosses at Sky Sports left me alone because they were busy getting so much live sport out. On those other shows, there’s the producer, the exec producer, the commissioning editor and the lawyers, and you have go through all those different stages before something gets out on TV. That makes it quite tough to push the boundaries too much. But on Soccer AM, basically everything stopped with me. I just decided what went on TV. The stuff we were doing didn’t go through any lawyers. There’s no such thing as TV without gatekeepers anymore, this was the last thing. And it was only because we were an entertainment show on a sport channel and no one really knew what to do with us. It would never happen again. That’s why it’s such a freak of nature. We ended up being an entertainment show on a sports channel.”
Neil: “The origin of ‘Save Chip’ was that Tim walked in one morning, and said ‘my mate Chip can’t watch as much football as he wants because of what’s happening at home.’ That turned into, six months on, me trawling through tapes of the Ashes test in Australia trying to find a banner that somebody told me they’d held up halfway through. Knowing that we’d tapped into something that so many people were getting involved in, I can’t even put it into words. We were like a social media TV show before social media even existed.”
Robbie: I remember when Liverpool won the UEFA Cup in 2001 there was a big ‘Save Chip’ banner on the front of the open-top bus the team rode through the city. It was on a Football Manager game, in the background on EastEnders. It was everywhere.”
Tim: That’s when we realised the impact we were having. Bands were going on stage and putting signs up, ‘Save Chip’, it was an incredible time.”
Helen: “It was like a club, only a select group of people would know what we were laughing at. ‘Save Chip’ and all the little phrases and sayings. The ‘Easy’ chant that spilled into the darts for several years. I’d sit there watching the darts and go ‘oh shit, this has come from Soccer AM’.”
Chester players line up for the ‘Save Chip’ cause (Photo: Sarah Bruntlett – EMPICS)
Rocket: “We used to get a lot of fan mail. The Third Eyes, I think, were the key to how big we were. We would ask people to point out weird things they’d seen at football or on TV. We would get inundated with letters and emails. ‘I spotted this in the 52nd minute of the United game, look out for the steward falling down the stairs’ or whatever. Some of them were hilarious.”
Robbie Knox: “In the run-up to the 2005 election, Vic said ‘have you tried to get Gordon Brown on? Give him a ring’. I phoned up (Brown’s special adviser) Damian McBride and he said ‘I’m sure Gordon will do it, we watch it all the time in the office on Saturdays’. I got an email from Vic the day before. ‘As the probable next Prime Minister, he will have a big say in Premier League football rights, so can you make sure you make a good impression?’ Just before the interview, our cameraman had to go to the toilet. We said ‘no, Gordon Brown’s going to be here in two minutes and it’s just a five or ten-minute interview.’ But he went, Gordon Brown turned up with his aides, I had to make small talk with them while we waited. Then the cameraman came back and said something along the lines of: ‘I’d give that five minutes!’ But Gordon Brown’s knowledge of football was unbelievable, he was rattling off starting elevens of old Raith Rovers teams.”
Robbie Knox: “When Oasis brought out ‘Don’t Believe The Truth’ in 2005, I went to see them at the Clapham Grand. We worked our way forward to the front. I’d never met Liam before but I knew he watched Soccer AM. They started playing Wonderwall and he said ‘alright lad, how are you doing?’ Then I saw Noel look up, see me and start laughing. Just before Noel did ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ he moved to the microphone and said ‘well, well, well…. Robbie Knox.’”
Helen: “Tim and I never ever got lost in all of that stuff. Tim wandered over to me one Friday and said ‘Max Clifford has been on the phone, he wants to meet us both.’ This was about four or five years in when it was properly at its peak. Tim said: ‘I don’t know how I feel about that.’ And I went: ‘me neither’. ‘Should we fuck it off?’ ‘Yeah’. We carried on with our normal lives. Neither of us wanted to spoil it. Neither of us wanted to be famous. I was never in FHM, I was never in Maxim, I was never in Loaded. We just cracked on and did our thing. Neither of us had the desire to be crazy famous.”
Tim: “I started going to football and people would go ‘Lovejoy! Lovejoy!’ Bizarrely everyone starts calling you by your surname. We were getting letters to begin with, we were getting quite a lot of interaction, but it was when I was going to football matches that I realised a lot of people were watching the show. I was going out and suddenly people were coming up to me. And they seemed to have such a love for the show, they knew the catchphrases.
“Then one day I saw a kid at a game, I think it was Liverpool, with a sign saying ‘Lovejoy is a legend’. We saw it and I said on the show ‘If anyone does that and gets it on TV, I’ll send you a fiver’. So many people did it that I had to say I wasn’t giving any more fivers away because it would have cost me thousands. People were just going everywhere and writing ‘Lovejoy’s a legend’ to try to get on TV. Political broadcasts, bowls matches, Crufts. It was a bit embarrassing to be honest, but I didn’t realise it would have an impact like that. But we all went with it, we were all laughing, it was all very self-deprecating.”
Tim: “What I worked out at the beginning was that we were all going to have to be committed to the show. We were asking the team to work really hard and I realised that meant they had to have some ownership of it. And I think that’s what you saw on screen. All the people had ownership of it. It was their show just as much as mine. Everyone who came up with an idea ended up on screen, everyone had their moment, everyone shone, and everyone felt great about it.”
Neil: “The beauty of the show was that it was a team effort. Even though I was on one of the lowest rungs of the ladder, everyone had equal responsibility for making the show tick, in terms of coming up with ideas and executing them. And Tim and Andy were fantastic at giving us responsibility. Tim nailed it at the time. He said ‘You won’t know a team like this again.’”
Helen: “People worked so hard. We made it look like we just turned up on a Saturday morning and had a massive laugh. But people don’t realise how hard you have to work to make it look like we just turned up on a Saturday morning and had a massive laugh.”
Neil: “They were the highest highs I have ever had in my career, and some of the lowest lows. Pure tiredness. I slept under my desk fairly regularly on a Friday night, and I wasn’t the only one. Nowadays it wouldn’t be allowed. It probably wasn’t allowed then.”
Chris Nutbeam: “The hours were incredible. Thursdays we’d finish at 10 or 11pm. Fridays you wouldn’t finish before midnight, ever. Sometimes you’d finish on the late edit at 2 or 3am, sometimes you wouldn’t go home, you’d stay in the edit suite, and find an hour on the sofa to sleep.”
Rocket: “Sometimes it was stressful. At times you’d end up working the whole night. Friday night we’d go all the way through. The amount of times I slept on the green room sofa, then wake up at 5am, do rehearsals, then perform on camera with a couple of hours’ sleep. But that was part and parcel of it, part of the excitement, part of the appeal. It wasn’t polished, it was very rough and ready, and when things went wrong people used to love it.”
Chris: “I was once asked to find a lamb for a gag, out of lambing season. A real lamb. I just started driving around asking anyone if they’d seen anything in the fields. Phoning farmers. All sorts. Lambing season is spring, I think this was September. I remember, I was frantically driving around the M25 and just spotted some lambs in a field. Looked on a map, found out what the farm was, phoned the farmer. The next thing I knew I had a lamb to film a gag with Sheephead.”
Neil: “We were such a close team that naturally the highs were high and the lows were low. When you had a fall-out, it felt like your world was falling apart. We didn’t always get on. Tim and I had some huge rows. When you fall out with a mate, who’s also your boss, it takes an emotional toll. It was a tough environment, but I stuck at it because I wanted to make the best show. I’d come home some weekends and I’d be close to tears. It would be a 40 to 42-week stint. We couldn’t take holidays until the summer. We couldn’t take time off during the season. It’s that constant grind, an emotional grind, it’s a physical and a mental grind. And undoubtedly there were times when we were all burned out.”
Tim: “I did apologise to some of them when I left, and told them ‘I worked you far too hard and I feel embarrassed about it’. They all said ‘but we loved it.’ I think that came across on screen.”
Tim: Every time you had a hit — and maybe out of every three sketches, one would be crap, one would be alright, and one would be a massive hit — it was such an amazing feeling. It was like ‘we’ve done it, we’ve created a little bit of magic.'”
Chris: “Tim was iconic at that stage. He was front of house, like the king. The exec producer and presenter. He had a real aura about him when he walked into the room. It was like: sit up straight, work hard, because there was a lot of expectation from him. And that equated to the success of the show.”
Rocket: “Tim obviously had great banter. He worked so well because he was a good-looking guy, good fashion sense. He was the kind of guy that your mates would want to have a beer with down the pub, but also girls would probably want to be with. He ticked both boxes.”
Andy Goldstein: “Tim could laugh at himself. He didn’t take himself too seriously. He was just a bloke’s bloke. You could identify with him. If you met him in the pub you could go and have a couple of drinks with him. If you knew Tim, that’s probably the last thing he’d want to do with you. He was great in that role.”
Julian: “Back then, if you go back 20-odd years, there was no suffering fools gladly. If you weren’t absolutely delivering and being brilliant, you were letting the team down, and you never wanted to do that. Individuals, across the team, would let you know you’ve dropped the ball there. If the producer or presenter had an amazing brainchild of an idea, and then you go and fluff it up? Quite often you’d see that with Tim for example. You could see he was annoyed that you had dropped the ball and ruined one of his ideas.”
Andy: “He was hard to work for. But that’s because he wanted perfection. He was a perfectionist, but you’ve got to be if you do a successful show. He worked everyone hard. He shouted a lot. He learned his trade from Chris Evans, and my understanding is Chris used to shout and scream quite a bit. Evans was incredibly successful, that show with Tim was incredibly successful. Quite often Tim would, in a break, get up and go into the gallery and have a scream and shout at people for getting things wrong. I saw him have a scream a few times. But that’s just the way he ran the ship.”
Neil: “Tim was a tough boss. He didn’t take himself too seriously, but he would be a bit more upset if something didn’t work, because he was the producer. I could sometimes see it in his eyes. He was really disappointed if something didn’t work.”
Chris: “I once had to walk down Oxford Street wearing a bikini and carrying a sign saying ‘LOSER’ because I had messed up my words on the show. And it was funny. Imagine putting on a bikini, walking down Oxford Street, saying ‘my name is Chris Nutbeam, I messed up my lines and I’m a loser.’ Looking back, it wasn’t fun all the time, there was a lot of pressure. But when Tim told you you were brilliant, you’d feel ‘this guy loves my stuff.’ That was the mentality he installed.”
Julian: “Tim was just focused, really, more than anything. Because he knew what he wanted. And that’s what’s great about visionaries. They know how it should be.”
Tim: “I’d done 11 years, and I absolutely adored the show. But we were being treated like a production team of any other part of Sky. For a few years I’d been saying: if someone appears on screen can they get a few quid more? It started getting embarrassing in the end. Some of them were getting paid so little money, they were saying to me ‘Tim, I’ve got to leave soon, because I’ve been doing eight years of this.’ I went to see the bosses and said: ‘Look, is there any way that we can pay the guys proper money?’ They just said: ‘No, they’re researchers and assistant producers’.
“I really pleaded with them to pay the team what they deserved. But I understand why the bosses couldn’t do it. They still saw us, understandably, as a load of blokes messing about on TV, even though our ratings were huge. I wanted to keep the team together. I just couldn’t face losing them. Soccer AM wasn’t about Helen and me. It was about Sheephead and Fenners and Robbie and Neil and Rocket and Tubes. It was about all of us. I couldn’t face doing the show with all the big stars leaving.
“An opportunity came along to go and create online content. We went off. I managed to find a way that I could get them all paid more money. I went into bed with Simon Fuller. We created a channel called Channel Bee. As everybody knows and tells me all the time: we were just too ahead of our time, really. Videos were still buffering and we were trying to put out online content. Bizarrely, some of the online content we created is still viral now and doing the rounds. I just thought we were doing so much good material I wanted to try to keep the team together. You can’t blame anyone. The perfect storm had come to an end.”
Helen: “When Tim phoned me and said ‘I’ve gone’, I had that feeling in my stomach like when you break up with someone. Nothing feels right. You just feel a bit… lost. I wandered about for a bit, I didn’t really know what to do.”
Chris: “It was really hard, because Tim was the show. Not only who he was, but his values, the emphasis on creativity, the cult status. Everything was Tim. He takes everyone apart from me, Rocket and Tubes. You think, when you’re that young, Soccer AM was never going to end. Then they all go to 19 Entertainment, Simon Fuller’s place. And then you feel… actually quite lonely. You’re left there going, right, what do we do now?
Helen: “Vic Wakeling rang me and said ‘look, it’s going to be different but let’s crack on’. Because I’d already done the All Sports Show with Andy Goldstein for a few years. They didn’t tell him for a while that they were going to give him the show. We just assumed he would step up to Soccer AM. I thought ‘at least it’s not going to be completely different.’ I was 99 per cent thinking ‘oh my god, this is awful’, and 1 per cent thinking ‘alright — it’s just going to be a bit different.'”
Goldstein replaced Lovejoy in 2007 (Photo: Matthew Ashton, Getty Images)
Andy: “The reason Vic Wakeling started me on the Soccer AM All Sports Show, was because they were looking to get Tim’s replacement ready for whenever he left. I did the All Sports Show with Helen, and we hit it off instantly. When Tim left, I got the call from Vic. Tim took Fenners, Sheephead, Neil, all the brains of the show.”
Rob Wakeling: “I joined the show as Executive Producer when Tim and everyone left in the summer of 2007. It was ridiculously hard. We were really stuck. You didn’t need to make big sweeping changes, but you wanted to make enough changes so people could see it was different. With Soccer AM, everything you change is met with howls of derision. We were really on a hiding to nothing…”
Andy: “Before the first show, we had a meeting, everyone working on the show was there, and there were so many items that were still undecided. It was quite chaotic, quite worrying. One of them was the catwalk. Everyone was coming up with different ideas of how to replace it. We didn’t, so I did it, and I hated doing it. We should have just scrapped it. The right thing to do would have been to rip it up and start again. Get rid of the couches, get rid of the title music, keep the name ‘Soccer AM’ and start again. But we’re all wise after the event…”
Rocket: “Rob Wakeling came in having worked on ‘Dick and Dom in Da Bungalow’, which was a kids’ show, and I sometimes felt like he didn’t really understand what Soccer AM was. It was never really a kids’ show, it was an adults’ show that kids would enjoy. It started to get a little bit silly with some of the sketches. I always felt Soccer AM was funny, not silly. There’s a thin line between the two. It just wasn’t what I thought Soccer AM should be. It was quite hard to still be part of the team and see it all change so much.”
Andy: “It was difficult for Rob, because his dad was the boss, I get that. But his background was kids’ telly. And alarm bells started ringing for me in week one when he wanted to introduce a gunk tank into the show. Helen and I were like: ‘this isn’t kids’ TV’. I’m not sure whether or not it ever happened, I didn’t watch Soccer AM for years after I finished.
“Rob kept using the word ‘fun’. I don’t mind things being funny, but ‘fun’ is something my kids get up to. Also, comedy is very subjective. I would come up with something I thought was funny, and he’d turn round and say ‘that’s not funny’. I wouldn’t say we were at constant loggerheads, but we didn’t get on. The show was too big for him.”
Helen: “It was tough. Really tough. There was that unwritten Soccer AM style that everybody was familiar with. And then somebody comes along and their sense of humour is completely different. Rob thought dressing a man up as a woman was hilarious. So you’d have the pay-off to the gag being one of the crew walking on in a bikini and a wig. And you just had to go with it.”
Andy: “It was quite sad. I remember sitting on the couch numerous times and thinking ‘this isn’t as funny as it used to be’. But the brains had gone, the heart had gone. Helen was still there, I was there, but we would arrive on a Friday afternoon and the whole script had been written. So we would have no input into the show. You’d get there and read bits, ‘that doesn’t work, that’s not right’, it was quite difficult to do.”
Helen: “You have to respect the producer — what they say goes in, goes in. When somebody else came up with an idea that was very Soccer AM and had the rest of us laughing, we’d look up and Rob would be going ‘no, I don’t get it.'”
Rob: “Andy was on a hiding to nothing. He could have been the best presenter ever, and no matter who followed Tim, everyone was going to hate them. He was never going to win that one. He didn’t click and after a year of him doing the show the management decided we wanted to go elsewhere.”
Andy: “I was sad with the way it ended. I got called into Vic Wakeling’s office and I knew things weren’t good. He said ‘next year we are going to try something different — there’s going to be someone new next to Helen’. I knew exactly where he was going but I wanted to make things as difficult as possible for him, so I went ‘ah, there’s going to be three of us?’ He said, ‘no, you’re not doing it, it’s going to be Max Rushden.’
“Then I made a very quick decision in my head: I could either tell him what I thought of his son, and tell him to stick the whole job up his arse. Or, given my wife was pregnant and we had a mortgage, I could thank him very much for everything he’s done, and tell him that if anything was still about I’d be more than happy to work for Sky. I did the latter and he kept me on the Premier League snooker and the Mosconi Cup.”
Max Rushden: “I’d been sacked from the breakfast show on BBC Radio London and then gone to Talksport, where I was doing a current affairs show with Jodie Marsh. Then I got a phone call from Andy Melvin, the number two at Sky Sports. I went in to see him and Vic Wakeling. We just talked about Cambridge United for an hour. A couple of months later Vic called me in again. ‘Would you like to do Soccer AM?’ There was no audition, no screen test, nothing. Thank god, I would have shat myself. I actually then went to do an audition for Blue Peter and got down to the final three, but I didn’t really want it. Sky then put a secretary in a black cab from Isleworth to my house in Clerkenwell with a contract for me to sign and told me not to tell anyone about it. The whole thing was just baffling.”
Helen: “Max is the loveliest guy in the world. You can’t dislike Max.”
Max: “I remember the phone ringing, ‘my name’s Olivia and I’m your stylist, what clothes do you wear?’ I’d probably worn the same blue jumper from 1996 to 2008. We rehearsed a bit, and I was so nervous. They didn’t have a clue who I was. I was nervous to meet Tubes. On the first show I got in so early, I was like a rabbit in the headlights. I was so scared I dropped my phone in the toilet.
“The good thing was that Twitter didn’t exist. I don’t think I’d have kept the job if it had. It took me a year or even two to really relax and be myself. Social media would have been brutal. Andy Goldstein would probably say the same. And he was actually pretty good at it. I don’t give a shit now about getting stick, because I feel like I’m good at what I do. But I wasn’t good to start with. Not being confident meant I didn’t fight for anything. At the start, I literally did whatever I was told. Anything they wanted me to do, I would just do it.”
Rocket: “When Max first came in I wasn’t sure he was right for the job. Lovejoy was very cool, Goldstein was quite a cool guy. Max came in as an Oxford graduate, Cambridge fan, played the clarinet, a bit square. I was thinking ‘this isn’t the kind of guy you want to have a beer with.’ He didn’t have the rapport with the Soccerettes that Tim or Goldstein had. However, Max embraced his geekiness. He never tried to be something he wasn’t. And people loved him for it.”
Rusden and Chamberlain host the show (Photo: Sky Sports)
Max: “I didn’t see eye to eye with the producer about what was funny. And that is quite hard. Rob might get a bit of flak from the others. But I think that is what would have happened with whoever had the final say. You can’t define what’s funny, so if you have your ideas rejected then you take it personally — and I certainly did sometimes. But for some of the team, Tubes, Rocket and Adam, I think it’s important to remember how much screen time he gave them, which I think has helped them going on to do so well either at Sky or elsewhere”
Max: “The Soccerette (a brief section of the show where a young woman was invited to walk up and down a “catwalk” with one of the presenters) was a huge part of the show when I arrived. I didn’t love it. It would be too self-righteous of me to say I found the whole thing misogynistic. I did a bit, but I just wasn’t, and never have been, very good at flirting.
Andy: “I was uncomfortable doing it. I didn’t enjoy doing it, for a number of reasons. It wasn’t my gig, it was Tim’s. At the time, I didn’t really think about the exploitation of women, because no one really thought about it. Because otherwise it wouldn’t have been done. I don’t look back now and squirm, I just didn’t enjoy it.”
Helen: “Soccer AM was laddish, but I don’t like that phrase ‘laddish’. I’ve been accused before of ‘trying to be like one of the lads’. And I just always screw my face up and go ‘this is me’. By trying to say I’m ‘one of the lads’, are you trying to say I should be in a fucking kitchen somewhere? Or shopping? I don’t know what your point is. This is how women are. We do drink, smoke, we do swear. So stop saying ‘you’re laddish’. But I think we’ve now way moved on from those days anyway.”
Max: “I remember being told to be a bit more flirtatious with the Soccerette. I think I probably tried to, rather than just saying ‘no’. Quite soon after Keys and Gray left Sky, it ended.”
Rocket: “We had to change the show quite rapidly after the Keys and Gray incident. A magnifying glass had been put on all the shows. Is this 2011 behaviour? Should we be doing this? It was time to become a little bit more politically correct. Which is right, you’ve got to move with the times.”
Rob: “When Soccer AM first started out it was very much ‘lad culture’ and Loaded, those were the things people were interested in. We always had a lot of female fans. We ummed and ahhed about changing it, male Soccerettes, different ages, and in the end we decided to get rid of it. It wasn’t really needed any more. The Soccerette going was a big thing. You don’t get emails and letters saying ‘well done for getting rid of the Soccerette’, but there were a lot of people unhappy that we got rid of it…
“We became the first live show on Sky to go on a delay. That’s standard on most American TV but not in the UK. We were the exception. Peter Hook from New Order came on. He told us two stories. The first was about someone having a piss in a bucket — he used the word ‘piss’ and we had to apologise — then a minute later he told story about parking his car at the Hacienda, returning to find Ryan Giggs sat on the bonnet, and Peter Hook telling Giggs to ‘fuck off’. The story was very funny, but we had to apologise again.
“Management told us it was happening too often and then we went on a delay. Originally a three-second delay, then 10 seconds. In theory that should have been the end of it but the people operating the button quite often used to miss the swearing. So we’d say ‘Max and Helen, we think we’ve dipped it, but can you please apologise just in case?’ We had this ridiculous scenario. We would get emails ‘what are you talking about, no one swore, all we got is silence.’”
Chris: “I was booking football guests. We wanted Shaun Goater so I just texted a number saved in my phone as ‘Shaun Agent’ saying ‘can Shaun do the show on Saturday?’ The reply came back ‘Yeah, no problem, speak nearer the time.’ On Friday I phoned the agent to ask whether Shaun was looking forward to doing the show. The agent said ‘Yeah, he’s really looking forward to it, he’s been doing loads of stuff and got loads to talk about.’ I asked him what sort of stuff he’d been doing and the agent said ‘He’s been doing a lot of panto.’ In my head, for a split second, I was like ‘Shaun Goater’s been doing panto, that’s unusual.’
“But something didn’t feel right. And as I started talking, it dawned on me this was the agent of Shaun Williamson, Barry from Eastenders. Not Shaun Goater. I will never forget the fear. I walked over to the producers and said, ‘I’ve really fucked up. I’ve booked the wrong Shaun.’”
Max: “We asked him all the Shaun Goater questions, like what it was like to score in the Manchester derby.”
Max: “In 2015 a new boss, Barney Francis, came in and didn’t think I was any good. He was keen to get me out of there, and that’s his prerogative. I was unlucky to lose it, but I was much luckier to get it in the first place. It afforded me all the opportunities I have had now. It was great. The whole thing was just fun.”
Fenners: “I came back to Sky 10 years ago and worked on shows like ‘Take It Like a Fan’ and ‘Fantasy Football Club’, then Soccer AM came back around in 2015. My feeling was the show needed to change and move on. I felt it had lost its way a little bit and had got away from football. Through no one’s fault, it was just the way it panned out. The show had gone a bit down of a more celebrity route. It was getting some great names. They trusted me because I’d worked on it for such a long time before.”
Rocket: “It was good to get Fenners back. What Fenners did, which I think it needed, was to strip it back. Let’s get rid of all the nonsense, all the silliness, and make it a football show again.”
Fenners: “Soccer AM’s the football show that isn’t really a football show, but you can only say that if you have strong elements of football within it. Once the footballers started watching Soccer AM again we knew we were turning the ship round.”
Julian: “For me, getting Fenners back was incredibly important. You want someone that’s bought it, you want someone that’s got a passion. Fenners grew up on the show, he’s funny, he’s talented, he’s witty, he gets the audience.”
Helen: “I left in 2017. I spent nearly half of my life sitting on that sofa. I was there for nearly 23 years. That’s a long time to have any job never mind a job in broadcasting. I had the farm to see to. I wanted to rescue more dogs and breed sheep and chickens. So I didn’t have time for Saturday mornings any more.”
Fenners: “When you lose someone like Helen Chamberlain, it’s a huge void to fill. We didn’t really know what to do. We talked about it and felt that if we just got another girl in there, what’s the point in doing in that? Helen’s amazing and brilliant, it just would have felt strange to me. I’d spoken to Lloyd Griffith, he’s got something about him, he’s our sort of person, he’s got that sense of humour.”
Lloyd Griffith: “I’d been a guest on it and kept in contact with a few of the guys on the show. I really got on with Fenners. I got approached, he said they’re looking to change it up a bit, bring on a couple of other hosts. Would I come on and do it with them? It was a no-brainer really. The show I watched as a kid, the show everyone watched as a kid.”
Fenners: “Then I’d gone to speak to Jimmy Bullard about doing more drills. I loved having Jimmy on, he added something that a lot of people couldn’t do, because he was football-famous, he was a larger than life personality within football. And he was still a brilliant footballer. Jimmy told me he wasn’t managing Leatherhead any more. My brain started going ‘can we get him on board?’ That would be three people, but it was like we needed two people to replace Helen because she was so good. As soon as I saw that opportunity I seized on it. Because I felt, the show will be different, and it has to be different. If Helen’s not going to be there, this is what Soccer AM needs.”
Lloyd: “With Jimmy on the sofa now, there’s genuine insight. When he does tactical analysis, it’s never boring, never inane. And he would often throw a raspberry mousse at my face at 10pm on a Friday evening. For banter. But it was never in malice.”
Fenners: “I get frustrated with people who say it’s not what it used to be, because we’re getting to a stage where I really feel we’ve hit upon something that would make it different. It gave us a new dimension. I think we’ve won a lot of the public over, from the noises that I hear, and I think we’ve won a lot of people within football back as well. I always felt that if we could get the right formula for the show, people would feel like that. I do feel that we’re getting close to it being a very, very good TV show again. ”
Tim: “I stopped watching it when I left, it was too hard to watch it. I tune in every now and then because Fenners is on it and I want to support him. Again, another crap analogy, it’s like watching your old girlfriend with another man. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t watch it. So I stopped watching it totally. And then I started tuning in again to watch Fenners, because obviously I worked with him for years and he’s a top bloke.
“It’s too hard for me because I watch it all and I want to join in with it. I’d really like to input on the show and put stuff on there and I find it too hard.”
Okay...
In typical Athletic fashion it's far too long.
Tim Lovejoy comes out of that sounding quite good. I lolled at Channel Bee being 'too ahead of our time', but it probably was actually. That Joe shit and variousbible are clearly all descendants of it, so maybe Lovejoy has never got the credit he deserves.
I’d need 6 weeks lockdown to get through that.
You're better off not bothering unless you watched the show
I watched it for years in the early days when I was fully into the league, but as that waned I stopped. It had become a complete banter fest anyway. I don’t know what the stupid littleYou're better off not bothering unless you watched the show
'Rocket' comes across as the biggest wrong un.
Who was the dickhead on it in the earlier years too? Another with just a one word name?
This lockdown could go on for 7 years and I wouldn't be bored enough to read that.
Tubes?
That was the clown. I had Tubs in my head.
Yeah, I was going to say Tubs. I ever got Soccer AM, it was just shit.
The showboats wound up on youtube which was the only stuff I needed from that.
It's alright in its new format. Bullard and Fenners are good value and I like watching the odd Facebook video which actually involves football (Rivaldo, Ant Middleton and Serge Pizzorno come to mind), but they've produced A LOT of shit over the years.
In other news, Liverpool the latest to furlough their non playing staff. Lol
It's shambolic isn't it? You would have thought, at the very least, that this pay-cut the players are apparently taking would be put towards all the other (little people) wages. As it stands, the government are now comping the clubs, and will be getting less tax back off the reduced wages at the same time. They really should be told to do one.
At least they appear to be making up the 20% difference.
The McCarthy era ends with a whimper, though it probably would have in Slovakia anyway.
https://www.offtheball.com/sport/the...s-ended-994972
Not everything revolves around your disgusting self. Was just showing my displeasure at having wasted my own time with it.I watched it for years in the early days when I was fully into the league, but as that waned I stopped. It had become a complete banter fest anyway. I don’t know what the stupid little
I had no way of knowing it was going to be your first ever time not being a smart cunt.
I'm picking up a bit of negative energy here lads.
Shut your cunt.
Harsh on Mellin that.
Giggles has lost it based on that post. Bottled it with a shit joke, straight out the Lovejoy textbook.
Which was fitting.
Yeah, call him gay and you might pull it back if we're celebrating a time when Soccer AM was watchable.
I never could quite tell if it was good or not because I outgrew it by 14/15. I suspect it was not.
Looking back it most definitely was not.
Is Helen Chamberlain still fit?
Maybe she became fit? She always had a raw head on her.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/52168692
lol at these fucking wankers. Burn the whole thing down and start again.
It’s got to the stage where it going wallop is the only thing that can save it.
Arseholes. Putting pressure on for money at the expense of lives. Fuck it off.
I don't say this lightly, but I think there's a real case to actually abolish the Premier League at this point and reunite all clubs under the Football League umbrella so as to safeguard the sport in England at large. Will probably need nuclear winter before that happens though.
Now they've been forced to hand over £125 million in solidarity payments, why shouldn't that carry on happening? Rotherham and Wigan and Charlton having viable football clubs is far more in the national interest than Man City and Chelsea being 'competitive at Europe's top table' or whatever guff they would come up with.
Last edited by Jimmy Floyd; 04-04-2020 at 05:29 PM.
The fans are muggy enough to continue to support these cunts, I imagine, but one can only dream.
This could have been a once in a lifetime opportunity to kill off half the teams overnight and go to three fully professional leagues like the Germans.
I've just come across Griezmann's 'Making of a legend' documentary on Netflix, I don't think there is a more detestable modern day player.
Last edited by Bob Sacamano; 04-04-2020 at 06:53 PM.
Why's that? Save us the watch.
German football is worthless, we don't want to be like them. We want to be like us but minus the parasites at the top.
Neymar and it's not even close.
If we're going for long articles. I thought this interview was very funny.
Johnny: “First up, how are you?”
Player X: “I’m fine. We’re all fine, thanks mate. Just trying to keep sharp. Are you two alright?”
J: “Yeah we’re well. The virus doesn’t seem to have reached here yet.”
P: “I suppose that’s the advantage of living somewhere a bit remote.”
J: “So has the club given you a training regime to keep fit?”
P: “Yeah, they have, but I know my own body. I know what I need to do. After all these years, you can feel it when you drop even just 5% of fitness. I’ll be blowing bubbles when we next play though.”
J: “So what are all your teammates doing to pass the time?”
P: (laughs) “The usual shit involving women and computer games!”
J: “OK, let’s get down to business. I want to get your perspective on the debate that’s raging about if players should take a pay cut or not. And Matt Hancock has just said players should be putting their hands in their pockets.”
P: “Him? I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could puke him. He’s just picking on an easy target. Why doesn’t he tell all his rich mates to cough up? All those c**** who fund his party? Fuck off.”
J: “So you don’t think players should donate money to the NHS or help pay the non-playing staff wages?
P: “You know my thoughts on our money. It’s absolutely disgusting the amount players get. It’s ridiculous. We’re just footballers, not brain surgeons. The fact I’m paid more money than an actual brain surgeon is fucking stupid. And all the while millions live in poverty, getting cans of beans from a food bank. How can that be? I couldn’t live with that, which is why I give it all away now.
“But the thing with this current situation is, it shouldn’t be left up to the lads to make individual donations. The non-playing staff wage bill isn’t that big. The club should fork out for that or the fucking owners should; they’re richer than any of us.”
“The FA or Premier League or PFA or whoever should just say ‘no money for three months, we’re putting it all into an account to donate it to the NHS and other charities.’ Make it compulsory and across the board, including directors. So no-one has to make a choice. Because some will give all their money and some only a few quid. There are greedy, selfish bastards in football like in any walk of life and there are lovely lads who’d do anything they can to help.”
J: “Yeah, that’s a good idea, because if you leave it up to players, there’ll be a press witch hunt to find out who has paid the most and who hasn’t paid anything.”
P: “Exactly, yeah. I hear people defending footballers. Saying there are lads who already donate money to various causes and do good work in the local community. And that’s right. But let me tell you, it is by no means everyone. But I’ll tell you this, none of my first team would miss three months’ money.”
J: “People do seem keen to defend footballers from attacks like Hancock’s, though. And you do see people saying footballers are always the target, not other wealthy people.”
P: “Hancock’s just a thicko politician. But we’re an easy target because the money is so stupid, isn’t it? That’s why it happens. And we’re public figures. Owners and directors are more anonymous. But it should be the same rule for everyone. No wages for three months for anyone. It’s embarrassing. You’ve got lads on £80,000 a week who literally have no idea what to do with all the money they’re still racking up, while you’ve got these NHS workers dying on their feet who can’t buy themselves a meal. That’s fucking wrong. If anything good can come out of this lockdown it’ll be that people really properly understand how things are with money in this country.”
J: “But plenty of people say it shouldn’t be down to the players, that the billionaire owners and companies should be forking out the money.”
P: “Well they should as well, obviously. That c*** who runs Spurs, Levy. What a greedy shite. The fact that his first instinct is to shave money off the lowest-paid staff is entirely typical of so many people at that level. Evil little c****. You’ve no idea. They wouldn’t piss on a nurse if they were on fire. They are only bothered about wealthy people. They think the wealthy are better people and more important. Seriously, they do. They wouldn’t understand why people would be disgusted at what he’s done there. But that doesn’t mean players shouldn’t be giving up their money as well. You get this a lot now don’t you?”
J: “What?”
P: “That thing – there’s a word for it – where people say you can’t have a pop at one group unless you have a pop at all the others.”
J: “Oh, whataboutery, you mean?”
P: “Yes. That’s it. Does my head in. So I can’t say footballers should donate their wages without making a fucking long list of all the others in society who also should? Fuck off, mate, eh?”
J: “We get it a lot when writing about almost everything. ‘You’ve written about this but what about that?’ Like I can’t write about anything unless I write about everything.”
P: “I don’t know how you do your job. The ignorant pricks would really wind me up.”
J: “Ha! At least I don’t get 30,000 people telling me to fuck off on a Saturday afternoon. Just to pull this back to the wages situation, why do you think footballers should be giving away all their wages? 100%. A lot of people will think that’s extreme.”
P: (groans) Look, look, players get the majority of money that comes into the club, don’t they? Most of the turnover of every club goes on wages. So if we’re not going to sort it out, who the fuck is? The lad who sells pizza on matchdays? Fuck off. No football fans should be finding excuses for footballers at this level. I don’t understand why they do that. It’s like they’re sticking up for us for some reason. Fuck off you creep, y’know? Eurgh. I hate those people who go on social media and say shit like ‘players have got a right to earn all that money’. Fuck off mate. You know fuck all so shut your fucking yap. I’ve got a ‘right’ have I? Fuck off. I’ve no right to earn more than someone who is caring for the dying. What monster would say that? These people who say things like that have lost perspective.”
J: “That’s an interesting idea. Let’s expand a bit on what you mean by losing perspective.”
P: “They don’t really grasp what big money really means in real life. You know that I’ve not taken a wage for nearly three years now. I used to say I’ve donated it to charity, but someone said I’d just ‘invested it in other people’. I like that better. So that’s about £8million, and I’ll be honest, I’ve still got millions in the bank from my career. I’ve taken no money for three years and I’ve wanted for nothing. Every single player could do the same. Imagine how much good we could do with all that money.”
J: “That’s amazing when you really think about it. Giving money away like that.”
P: “It’s not a big thing. It really isn’t, Johnny. When you’re rich, it’s just numbers. I want your readers to think about this in their own lives. Right? Get a perspective on what sort of income top-flight players earn and what it really, really means. Because it’s just cold numbers otherwise, isn’t it? I want them to imagine that they’ve bought a nice big house that cost £1million and it’s paid for in full. You and your wife have got a BMW series 5 and a Land Rover Sport. Over £100,000 worth of cars. Imagine that. I bought all of that a few years ago when I was on bigger money than I am now with just 20 weeks’ wages and bonuses. OK, I’m not bragging or showing off, you know that, I’m just saying how it is. I get free physio and medical care. Free gym. Even free trackies and trainers.
“So imagine you’re me. What are you going to do with £50,000 every single week of the year once you’ve got all that? Tell me? What? OK, you need clothes, a suit maybe, nice shoes. What’s the cost per year for those? Even if it was £30,000 – and I don’t see how it could be – you’ve still got £170,000 left from your first month’s wages.
“Bills for food and lecky and gas are piddling. What the hell can anyone spend £200,000 a month on? And I’m well below average in my pay. Imagine getting half a million or a million in your account per month? What people don’t seem to understand is that when you’ve loads of money, almost nothing seems expensive. Do you get me, Johnny? Nothing. It’s just a number. Any of your readers who think they could spend £200,000 per month every month for the next three years is kidding themselves. You can’t. Normal people can’t anyway. If you wanted to buy paintings by Warhol or someone you could shell it out, but the lads don’t do that. My wife says footballers are all normal lads with abnormal money. She’s right.
“So there you are with a big nice house, cars, no debts and the money is piling up. Why not give it away? It’s a no-brainer. Why not help people who have nothing or not enough? No-one deserves all this money, and we’re now not even playing football for it. We’re doing fuck all. I just don’t understand why you’d not help less fortunate people. Ask your readers how would they live with themselves having millions in the bank and knowing that millions of people can barely pay their rent or have to use a food bank to feed their kids. You’ve got so much and so many have got so little.”
J: “Well you know what people say, don’t you? We’ve talked about this before. They’d say you’re an elite player who’s paid as such because there are not many really good players. They’ll say you’ve had to be dedicated to the game for most of your life and that it’s a short career, so you have a right to the big money while you can earn it.”
P: “People who say that can fuck right off. Short career? I’ll have done 20 years by the time I pack up. Who has a job for 20 years any more? No-one. Yes, I’ve worked hard, but so has my cousin who works in the NHS. She’s pounding the wards 12 hours a day dealing with people who are dying – actually dying. Try telling her that she’s not dedicated her life to it or hasn’t got a special talent. She’ll fucking chin you. Meanwhile we’re doing sprints or playing crossbar challenge, with some lads earning more in a day than she’ll earn in a year. You get me? It’s wrong and no-one can tell me it’s not wrong. If you’re defending that situation you’re a muppet. This virus thing has just made it all more obvious for people.”
J: “But people can’t all earn the same money. That’s not how society works.”
P: “It’s not a perfect world, I know that. Never will be. But it doesn’t have to be this bad. The virus has shown all of us how important people who do all the dirty jobs for little money are to everyone. They keep it all running. The gap between rich and poor doesn’t have to be so huge. Those with loads should have a lot less and those who have very little should have a lot more. I don’t know how you go about making that happen, but that’s what we should be aiming at. Meanwhile, people like me have to do their bit and give back what we have undeservedly earned to people who need help. It’s not that mad, is it?”
J: “I don’t think so, no. Wouldn’t it help if I could use your name, though? Then you could set an example.”
P: “I’ve thought a lot about that but I’m shit with words. I’m not a talker really. I don’t want to have to go on TV and talk about it. And you know what’d happen. First people would say I was just bigging myself up. Then the papers would be up my arse trying to prove I was a hypocrite or worse. The tabloids would start making shit up about how I wasn’t as good as my word. Then some lads would think I was weird, they’d not understand what I’m on about, so it’d be bad for the dressing room. On top of that I’d get loads of weirdos wanting money off us for mad ideas. I mean, I fear for the kids as well. Some nutter might kidnap them knowing that I’m loaded and giving away money. You don’t know what could happen. It scares me sometimes. But that’s why when I heard about your book last year I wanted the truth of the situation to be out there, without the hassle that would come with going public.”
J: “I’d not thought about it being dangerous for you and your family.”
P: “Why would you? Wealth fucks so many things up. It changes how people treat you. You’re no longer a regular bloke. Being a footballer in the Premier League isn’t a job like any other. If we were paid normal money, life would be much more simple. Better, in fact. Much better.”
J: “OK, so let’s wrap this up with how you think we can go forward with the virus situation suspending…(interrupts)
P: “It’s not complicated, Johnny. Clubs pay non-playing staff wages in full for the duration. The Premier League or whoever has the power, takes the players and directors’ wage bill for three months and donates it to essential workers and the NHS. Six months if it goes on longer. That’s it. Not hard. No fuss and bother. Just do it. The lads will probably be glad to have the pressure taken off them. Then we’ll go round Hancock’s house and get his money off him. The twat.”
That's quite good.
The fact that it'll be some (relatively speaking) complete no mark like Jon Walters probably only makes it all the more telling.
What’s it out of?
I've got a real hard-on for him, whoever it may be.
It's f365. I'm guessing Mark Noble.
https://www.football365.com/news/fea...t-matt-hancock
My first thought was Troy Deeney.
The wage, location, political views and language suggest Noble.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote