A chat with Owen Bradley

In my recent interview with Derby County Blog, they mentioned the freedom that bloggers have compared to journalists when commenting on footballing matters. So I decided to cross the divide and see if that viewpoint is shared by journalists.

Owen Bradley is well-known to Derby fans. As the host of Sportscene on BBC Radio Derby, his voice is first many hear on their way to and from matches. He very kindly took some time out of his busy schedule over the Christmas period to talk to me.

As a fan it can sometimes be difficult to step back and look at things objectively. Poor performances and bad results can ruin days and sometimes entire weekends. These days people can vent their frustration online, on social media and blogs, before calming down and looking at things in the cold light of day. Journalists however, have to go and interview managers and players minutes after the game is over. Objectivity, Bradley says, should not go out the window after a bad result.

“I acknowledge that I’m not there to give my opinion; I am not the expert. There is a bit of holding people to account, but you’ll never hear me say ‘I think you should have done this’ or ‘I thought you did this today.’ It’s a difficult job in the sense that you can never make everybody happy. The club will always think you’re too negative and you should be more supportive, whereas other people will think you should be giving the club a harder time. You just have to acknowledge that’s the job and it’s the same for however many local radio stations and however many commentary teams there are.”

Bradley likes to be the calm, collected voice you hear on the radio before, during and after matches. Despite being a season ticket holder when he was younger – his first season was the ’96 promotion season under Jim Smith – he was unable to make every game due to other commitments. This, he says, prepared him well for a career covering the Rams.

“I wasn’t a die-hard, never miss a game fan. I am a Derby fan and it’s great to cover them, but I don’t really like to talk about it. I actually think it’s helpful if you don’t support the team you’re covering, which is something Colin Bloomfield did very well. I like it when people say ‘Oh, I didn’t know you were a Derby fan’ because that shows that I’m not being overtly partisan.”

It’s not just fans who get emotional after poor performances though. Managers and players, despite what some people may say, don’t like losing. Emotions can get the better of them, even if the result goes their way, as seen by Pep Guardiola’s tense interview with Damien Johnson following Manchester City’s 2-1 victory over Burnley. For Bradley, an awkward interview doesn’t arise because of a bad result, but due to the circumstances surrounding it.

“A recent one would be Chris Powell after the Cardiff game. Derby won the game 2-0 and you think ‘Derby have won, that’s an easy interview,’ but Nigel Pearson had been suspended earlier in the day. Powell was Pearson’s number two; he owed him a lot and he was very emotional. It was a tough interview because you want to look after the person you’re interviewing, especially if it’s someone you have a relationship with, but at the same time you want to make sure you get the right stuff out of them.

Bradley also covers the Nottingham Panthers for BBC Radio Nottingham (he’s actually covering the Panthers european exploits in Italy at the time of publishing this article). An Ice Hockey fan from a young age, he smiles as he reminisces about an interview with Panthers’ coach Corey Neilson. It makes for surreal listening and you get a real sense of frustration from the Panthers’ boss. Bradley doesn’t hold a grudge.

“Lots of people heard it and said it was really disrespectful, but the disrespectful thing would have been him saying ‘No, I’m not going to talk to you.’ I knew he wasn’t annoyed at me, he was annoyed at his players and was trying to use me to make the point, so I didn’t mind it too much.”

That interview proved to be really popular on social media in following days and weeks. While social media and in particular Facebook and Twitter has become more influential in shaping political discourse, it has also done the same for football. Football phone-ins have felt the full force of this. There is an echo chamber effect, Bradley acknowledges, which means you sometimes only ever hear from the same people.

“I have conversations with people where they say, ‘Oh social media, you only ever hear from certain people.’ Yes, but you only ever heard from certain people before. It used to be the radio phone-in and those were the only fans you would hear from. I think now with Twitter, Facebook,  still the phone-in and going on the forums we get a broader sense of how supporters are feeling than ever before.”

Bradley like to keep a tab on forums and message boards to get another perspective. Journalists cannot be everywhere at once and sometimes supporters may have a bit of insight that can lead to a change in opinion. That, as well as the fact that there are some genuinely funny people in the world of social media; one only has to look at the comments underneath some of Radio Derby’s post-match Facebook videos to find some laugh out loud material. What informs Bradley’s decision to actually post on forums though?

“Occasionally I’ll do it to promote things that I think people might be interested in. For example, I did a documentary about Reg Harrison and I posted about that on one of the forums. I don’t want to get into discussions about – although I have – the coverage, the balance of coverage and why we do things the way we do. I will usually only ever comment to correct a point of fact.

“There was a classic one, I think last January. Someone claimed I’d had a conversation with a player and that we (Bradley and the studio) were colluding with the club to keep it secret, which was completely wrong. I can’t even say it was a misunderstanding because it wasn’t, it was factually wrong. So I had to go on there and correct it. This often doesn’t help because when you say that the response is, ‘well you’re lying’ anyway. But I’ll go on there and do that because I don’t want to let stuff like that develop and run.”

You get the sense that despite these ‘incidents’, he loves his job. A boyhood Derby fan, following the team around the country, interviewing the players and managers. What’s not to love about that?

A chat with Ollie Wright (Derby County Blog)

It seems that these days every man and his dog has a football blog. There are thousands of them. Some cover their club, some cover entire leagues while others are just brain-to-keyboard streams of whatever is going through the author’s head.

Derby County Blog is not one of the latter. Since being set up by Ollie Wright in June 2010, the site has gained a large following on social media and this increased profile has led to Ollie being contributing to several podcasts and “Monday Night Moan-In” on BBC Radio Derby.

I spoke to Ollie just before Christmas about football blogging and Derby County, in an interview that probably went on a bit too long. He was too polite to tell me to go away and that at a certain point I was just wasting his time!

The decision to set up the blog was, Ollie says, motivated by the idea that Nigel Clough wasn’t being given a fair shake by fans and trying to get his view across by the (fairly recent) tradition of using message boards was never his cup of tea.

“I can’t stand message boards really. I used to read them and it wasn’t good for my health. At the time there was very little quality content on them; someone would say something that would make you think ‘this guy has a point’, but the thread would quickly just descend into people make jokes and puns.”

If you haven’t read Derby County Blog it’s well worth a look. His prodigious use of statistics, well thought out arguments and his love of Chris Martin (the last point can be a deal-breaker for some people) all make for interesting reading.

“Back when I started it seemed like it was all about doing essays. I saw what other blogs were doing and wanted to do something a bit different. What’s the point of offering the same thing everybody else does?”

Nigel Pearson’s suspension led to a memorable ‘live blog’ on Ollie’s site. (Photograph: Andy Clarke)

One  post in particular stays in the memory. Derby were due to play Cardiff City away and hours before the match Nigel Pearson was suspended by Mel Morris. Ollie had just published a lengthy post about why Derby were struggling up front and decided to do something novel.

“You aren’t supposed to be relieved when a manager is suspended but counterintuitively I was. I was so happy to find Pearson was gone and everyone else seemed to feel like that too, so I did a ‘live blog’ of the match using Radio Derby’s commentary.”

It was a funny look at what a pretty mundane match played in bizarre circumstances. There are moments in there where you can see his sanity on the verge of collapse, but it makes for a captivating read.

Ollie, however is more proud of a post made days before. His match report after Derby’s 2-1 loss to Blackburn in what would turn out to be Pearson’s last game in charge.

“In the games before hand you could see positive signs. Reasons to be hopeful, but that Blackburn match was dreadful. It was awful, I felt sick writing the article on it. But in the end, it felt like an important moment.”

Pearson’s suspension led to a lot of speculation around the club and Ollie, who is an accredited journalist, is grateful of his position as a blogger and not a sports reporter.

“When you’re a journalist you have to walk the line between asking questions the fans want asked and cozying up to the club. Bloggers don’t have to do that. The club doesn’t talk to us. We can criticise the club if it’s warranted because we don’t have that working relationship with them.”

As I alluded to earlier, Ollie is a big fan of Chris Martin. The big Scottish striker is (at the time of publication) on loan at Fulham and demanding a return to Derby. Our interviewee was not impressed with the decision to send him on loan in the first place.

“I thought the Martin decision was stupid. An appalling decision. Pearson deserved the sack for that alone. His goal record is outstanding; the only players to have scored more than him in the past three seasons were Ross McCormack and Jordan Rhodes.”

Like many fans, Ollie was happy to see Steve McClaren reappointed as Derby manager. (Photograph: Andy Clarke)

However, it hasn’t all been doom and gloom this season in his eyes. The reappointment of Steve McClaren and the good form of Bradley Johnson have both been reasons to be positive for the future.

“When Pearson was sacked I thought ‘Who would I want to manage to club? Someone like Steve McClaren,’ but I was really surprised he actually came back. I wasn’t sure him and Mel would kiss and make up. To be fair to him, he has been very humble and professional since his return; he has realised he burnt a lot of bridges last time.”

“Johnson has been my surprise of the season even though he does my head in sometimes; every game he will give the ball away in a crazy position. He has added some steel and done a good job at a time when we were seemingly out of options in that holding midfield role.”

To Ollie, it feels like the club is back and moving in the right direction. However, there are still lots of areas where we the team can improve.

“I don’t know what will happen in January; we could do with more quality up front. It would help a lot if we had George Thorne and Martin back.”

With no return date in the works for Thorne, McClaren has decided to bring in Julien De Sart on loan from Middlesbrough. The young Belgian midfielder has an eye for a pass and is similar in stature to Thorne so might be an adequate replacement.

The Chris Martin saga on the other hand looks like it rumble on for another couple of weeks as Fulham dig their heels in over his return. Still, given the fact Martin is currently on strike and refusing to play, his return to the club is definitely on the cards. Ollie might yet get his wish.

• Check out Ollie’s site at http://www.derbycountyblog.com/