During Covid, when sport was back but behind closed doors, I hosted a number of strange online shows to fill the void of real life. The highlight was chatting to Darren Gough about a lifesize bronze rhinoceros for 45 minutes to 15 small boxes on a Zoom call. I don’t recall who it was for and where the rhinoceros came from – but it might be in his garden.
I ended up doing virtual pre-match corporate Zoom calls for Heineken before Europa League games. It was the wifi version of Club Wembley: a Q&A happening on stage between a generic host and some random ex-pro while you’re trying to chat to your mate and eat an unidentified square of meat with some dauphinoise potatoes. I’d be in my little square talking to Luis García in his little square about the ghost goal while an assorted group of faces and living rooms or kitchen tables would stare at you, perhaps interested, perhaps not.
Did they even want to be there? Were we on mute while someone from marketing was filling a spare box on my laptop watching Death In Paradise on the TV behind me? Certainly it was hard to create an amazing vibe with Mark van Bommel while his internet connection crashed and a little note on a Google doc appeared telling me to fill for 25 minutes with my favourite memories of the Europa League.
Did these disembodied heads in front of me want the deep dive they got on Tony Parks’ heroics in 1984? How many of them knew about Gary Mabbutt playing centre mid and marking Enzo Scifo out of the game? One of the guests was Dimitar Berbatov.
You’d log on half an hour before the show and say hello, try to build some kind of electric rapport with a man in Bulgaria (I think) presumably looking to get in and get out and get back on with whatever social distancing life in Sofia had to offer. He may have not had Akabusi levels of energy, and his economy of language was not unlike his playing style – why use a hundred words when one will do? But he was into it and did the job perfectly.
I absolutely loved Berbatov as a player. Watching him pluck a goalkick out of the sky was more beautiful than watching a lot of other players banging one in from 25 yards. There’s a YouTube video called Dimitar Berbatov – the most underrated first touch ever?
Extract — continue reading at the source.
