The Last Hurrah

Monday 28th June

I had the great pleasure, courtesy of having worked on the post match “analysis” last night, of not getting up before dawns fiery crack this morning.

Nick and Richard were down on the Bloemfontein Waterfront doing the last live broadcasts for GMTV on the World Cup in South Africa.

Nick and Richard beside a very big ball.

After breakfast in a cafe that was showing a rerun of last night’s game we set off on the long road back to Johannesburg.

The boring journey was broken up by a stop at a service area for a cup of vending machine coffee and to do a few interviews with England fans on their way home a little earlier than planned.

Fans interview.

Why can interviewees not all be cameraman's lens height?

What we hoped would be our last sunset was as the van trundled up to Jo’burg past a typical township with it’s corrugated iron shacks.

Our last? moving sunset.

We were getting demob happy until we got two sets of phone calls.

The first was to say that there were no flights for at least a day or two. The second was to say that the programme needed a football pundit live on tomorrow’s programme.

So, when we got back to our little pied a terre in Johannesburg after more than six hours on the road we were faced not with a relaxing post job meal and proper sleep. The spectre of many phone calls and another early morning reared up.

Mark made a number of calls the likes of John Barnes to see if they would be available in the morning.

They could not get back to us straight away because they were doing what they had come to South Africa to do, broadcast on various networks about the games that were being played.

In the end for a number of reasons including a rousing silence from the football experts and the non availability of a cheap enough satellite dish the idea was abandoned.

We ended the day in a curry house near our apartment.