Joey:
The trouble with Alan Pardew was that he interfered in everything. He was the manager of the football club, but he wanted to poke his nose into everything else, all the non-football bits. He wanted input into the look of the programme, the merchandise and from my point of view he wanted to pick the music we’d play in the ground. Once before a game, the manager said he needed a few words about an important matter. He took Sue the marketing manager and me into a small room just off the tunnel. It’s the room the broadcasters use for their TV interviews. To a backdrop of sponsors’ logos, he outlined his latest idea to raise the atmosphere at the ground. Pards had been to Sea World in Florida with his family. He’d seen the announcer at the dolphin pool conduct an interactive crowd-pleaser of a quiz. Everyone got involved and it was brilliant, he told me. The TV camera at the pool homes in on someone in the crowd and they are asked some trivia questions to try and win prizes. If it’s an adult the questions are hard, if it’s a kid, the questions are easy. To keep it simple, they don’t bother with microphones going into the crowd. Instead the answers are all multiple choice, with three possible answers. You held up one, two or three fingers to indicate your answer. Alan loved this simple digital technology and gave the whole idea a big thumbs-up. The look of excitement on his face suggested he was reliving the excitement as he held up his fingers, in case I hadn’t grasped the complexity of the format. I agreed it sounded great, but our game was kicking off in fifteen minutes’ time. I was wondering if I wouldn’t be better occupied building up the atmosphere in our own ground, rather than reminiscing about Alan’s holiday. Especially as the interview room is a very small room, with bright lights and no windows, and I was wearing a thick fleece and coat. I was dressed for sitting outdoors for a few hours, not standing in a windowless bunker discussing Sea World. I believe Pards is a big fan of Free Willy, but I am not.
I may have momentarily lost consciousness due to the heat and accompanying dehydration, but when I came to Pards was still banging on about the Florida crowd-pleaser. ‘So the kids hold up one, two or three fingers, depending on the correct answer.’ It’s brilliant, he said, we should do it here at the next game. It works because the kids always win. Their questions are much easier, Alan explained, just in case I thought Florida children are much brighter than their parents. I’ve no knowledge of the Miami schools system, but I’d already guessed that, with no need for any fingers. The more excited Alan became about the brilliant Sea World quiz, the closer he got. He was dribbling with excitement. I hadn’t seen dribbling like it since the days of Eyal Berkovic. My face often gives me away and although I was trying my best to look just as excited as he was, my beaming smile may have wilted slightly in the heat. He was obviously expecting a better reaction to his brilliant idea, because he looked slightly disappointed. Pards is a bit of a spin doctor. In his mind as long as you are enthusiastic about a plan, it will work. It doesn’t matter if the plan is flawed and ill thought out, as long as you are positive it will surely work. If it doesn’t work, it’s because other people weren’t enthusiastic about it. They let you down. It wasn’t because your plan was a pile of crap in the first place.
By the way, I’m still talking about the Sea World idea, and in no way am I suggesting that Alan Pardew’s team tactics were ill thought out. How could I possibly suggest that? He took us to consecutive play-off finals and won us promotion. Without a brilliant plan we never would have finished in the play-off positions. Critics will say that he led the best squad in the division to fourth place and then sixth place in the table. Maybe we should have finished higher, but that was nothing to do with Pards’ tactics, that was because some critics didn’t believe in the plan. His game plans were spot on. The players gave their all. It was just that sometimes the supporters who should have been cheering their hearts out decided not to. For some reason fans thought that having paid for their tickets they were entitled to a view, and chose not to behave like lemmings. This saddened Alan. Anyway, back to that night against QPR in the cup. I tried not to sound too discouraging about the brilliant Sea World idea, but pointed out that our cousins from across the pond are very different to us.
My worry with the Sea World quiz would be to do with hand gestures, or to be more specific, fingers. If the answer is one, an American child would hold up one finger. A London child is more likely to hold up the middle finger and a cheeky grin. If the answer is two you can pretty much rely on the Little Hammer to hold up the same two fingers that his Dad might use to wave goodbye to the foreman at work. We can only pray the answer is three. Even then, there’s no telling what the surrounding fans will be doing in the background. I pointed out the differences in behaviour on the other side of the pond to Alan, but he said it wouldn’t be a problem. People are the same the world over, he claimed. I hadn’t realised he’d studied human behaviour to that extent. It almost sounded as if he didn’t want his word to be questioned.
I badly needed to take onboard some liquid and besides there was a match about to start, so I made my excuses about going out to talk to the crowd and left. Alan shouted after me that he wanted to try the Sea World quiz at the next home game. It was good to see he hadn’t let the small matter of a last-minute team talk get in the way of his mission to bring entertainment to the Boleyn. I would have preferred entertaining football and decided this dolphin-inspired quiz could not happen. Fortunately after consulting with the camera operators at the ground, it emerged that we don’t have the ability to zoom in tighter than a section of the crowd four seats wide by three seats high. So twelve people in shot, it just wouldn’t work. I broke the news to Alan, who looked crestfallen. What about the Sky cameras which zoom right in on the players, he asked, with his bottom lip rolling out to full Thunderbird villain mode. Sadly we don’t have control of them, I replied. We have our own cameras high in the gantry, but they are no use for a fish quiz.
