Podcast Corner: 'I never washed me jockstrap if we won…' - Top level Premier League podcasts
Chris Kamara cohosts Proper Football with Ben Shepherd
Picture: Phil Griffin
The Premier League is a couple of weekends into its 30th season, and with it comes a deluge of podcast options — our favourites are Second Captains and the Totally Football Show (with James Richardson). One new show that’s started up recently sees former Goals on Sunday co-hosts, Chris Kamara and Ben Shepherd, reunited for a podcast called Proper Football.
Guests on the initial episodes include Neil Warnock, Peter Reid, and Brendan Rodgers. On the initial chat, Warnock offers such gems as: “At Rotherham, I never washed me jockstrap if we won… We went 19 games undefeated.”
Rodgers, meanwhile, has some hindsight of his time at Liverpool: “We went on this great journey for a couple of years and nearly won the league.”
Would he do anything differently? “No,” replies Rodgers, before explaining that maybe he should have framed the emotional side of things differently.
Kamara suffers from apraxia of speech, which he discusses at the start of the first episode: “When you talk natural, it’s easy, isn’t it? But sometimes it gets caught up so I’m thinking those words but they won’t get out my mouth. It’s weird, strange.” While it’s evident in some of the interviews, Kammy doesn’t let it get in the way of the beloved banter.
While Set Piece Menu wrapped up recently after 275 episodes with a two-hour live show, where are you to go for your in-depth, insightful football chat?
Step forward Ringer FC aka Stadio.
It recently celebrated its third birthday: August 13, 2019 — which they say, funnily enough, was actually a day late. Hosts, Musa Okwonga and Ryan Hunn, who are based in Germany, offer takes from around the European leagues, with a focus on the Premier League. Laughs abound at segments such as a managerial Royal Rumble, following the Antonio Conte-Thomas Tuchel tete-a-tete last week. “I think Mikel Arteta is the first one to grab a chair,” mulls Hunn. The winners? Klopp and Hassenhuttl, they deduce. The Ringer FC podcast feed also features Ian Wright’s weekly show, Wrighty’s House.
You wait ages for a new literary show to come and then two arrive at once. After Book Exploder, which we mentioned a few weeks ago — Pachinko’s Min Jin Lee is the guest on the second episode — comes Missing Pages, an investigative podcast that seeks to uncover the “power struggles, mistaken identities, and unfathomably bad behaviours within the secretive world of book publishing”. It sounds almost like a true crime show, the first episode about a startling case of alleged plagiarism, the second on ‘good liar’ Dan Mallory.
