How do you go about approaching guests... And do you take suggestions? Gary borrowdale should surely come on and explain his incredible corner technique!
Getting guests is a consistently difficult task, for any interviews with current players we liaise with the clubs media team, as most of us have regular jobs we can only carry these out on match days, so we are then limited to injured or suspended players, or when we were playing JPT or Carling Cup games we could have access to first team players not in that match day squad, for a league game its not really possible to get players who have just been told they are not in the squad for that day. We do take time off from work and go and meet players/coaches at the training ground, but we are limited in the amount of time we can do that. Footballers in general are a little dubious about exposing themselves to the media for fear of being misquoted or dropping themselves or team mates in to trouble, so we have had to work hard to gain the trust of the players and coaching staff, players do seem to be happy to come and talk to us, as word has got round that we are not there to stitch them up.
Former players and well known fans are a little easier, the media team have a good idea of who is at any given game and they then arrange interviews, Matt Holland was at the last home league game presenting fro Talksport so we were able to arrange to interview him, I know that for this Saturdays game we have a well known fan attending who we will interview and possibly a first team player, that is all thanks to the media team. Other former players we have built up good relationships with, Garry Nelson is always easy to get hold of, we also have a supporter who is in contact with most of our former players, and he regularly brings in some of the older players for us to talk to. We also try and get live studio guests for the Sunday show, for this we deal directly with the guest.
We meet allthe journalists that cover games and have built up good relationships with them, and we are able to get them into the studio on a Sunday night, they are usually very good as they offer an independent view of whats going on at the club. The former players that come in have been very popular, Mickey Bennett was the most recent one, and he proved to be very entertaining.
We do spend a lot of time trying to think of who else we can talk to and we are open to ideas, I think without a doubt the dream interview would be with Clive Mendonca, we will get him one day!