Gold

Over the years of interviewing players and managers at Arsenal Women, I think my favourite thing is when you get an answer you don’t expect. Many interviews can be formulaic, especially in the immediate throng of post-match when players are tired and coaches can be pensive or even tetchy depending on how the game has gone.

It is both the best and worst time to speak to a player or manager. The best because brains are ticking over, actions are fresh in the mind and you can extract some really great insights. The worst because, well, if you had a microphone pushed under your nose after close to two hours of running around you probably wouldn’t be at your most articulate.

Thanks for reading Arseblog News - Arsenal Women Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

For that reason, post-match interviews (with players, anyway) can often adhere to a script. In times of fatigue, it is easier for players to lapse into cliché. Some players also just plain don’t want to speak to media, which is entirely understandable, it’s not their job after all.

One of the reasons I like to really think about the questions I am going to ask is because it can be a tough time to get the information that you are looking for and I think you have to respect the situation- that quite often people don’t really want to talk to you, given the choice. I think that means you have a duty not to be banal and show you are invested in their work, not just yours.

I am serving a very specific audience and I am also under no pressure to file a report immediately after the match (I don’t write about the match until I get home) so I have the opportunity to think about it. My favourite thing is when you get an answer that you don’t expect or that catches you a little off-guard, that might redirect the interview a little or change your next question.

This has happened to me a few times and sometimes it has really helped an interview along. Sometimes it really doesn’t. Let me start with the latter scenario. I interviewed Arsenal’s Swedish full-back Jess Samuelsson back in 2017, who endured a torrid time at the club with injury. I teed up a big question, which I built to a crescendo, about how difficult it must have been for her to move to a new country and a big club like Arsenal and constantly have to deal with injuries. It was a big question, it deserved a big answer and, to be fair, it got one.

“Yeah, it was pretty shit.”

It was succinct and a pretty good pay-off line, but it didn’t help me to write the 1,000 word feature interview I was hoping for. Jess wasn’t rude or unfair, just more succinct than I was expecting. It meant I had to devote 2-3 questions trying to wrench out the big emotional opera I had been fishing for. The interview came out fine in the end, I just had to react in real-time in a way I wasn’t anticipating, which is all part of the skill of the job.

I’m also minded of the first time that I interviewed Vivianne Miedema, shortly after she signed for the club in the summer of 2017. I knew all about Viv the player but, at that point, nothing about Viv the person. I wasn’t aware of her raw honesty. At the time that she signed for the club, her international teammates Sari van Veenendaal, Dominique Janssen and Danielle van de Donk were at the club.

I asked a pretty regulation question about how much Arsenal’s already strong Dutch contingent influenced her to sign for the club. “Not at all,” she answered without missing a beat. “I moved to Bayern when I was 18 and there were no Dutch players there. It didn’t factor in my thinking at all.” I loved, and still love, that answer. It was a great early insight into the single minded, sometimes laconic, character Viv is.

I felt like I learned a lot more about her from that pretty short and unexpected answer than I would have with a much longer answer containing platitudes. Miedema has a gift for this sort of thing in interviews. Until recently, the most viewed Arsenal Women interview on Arseblog News was a post-match chat I had with her following a 4-0 win over Brighton in September 2019. It was absolutely pouring with rain as the players headed for the dressing rooms.

None of the other journalists at the match braved the uncovered mixed zone except for me, hopefully clutching my umbrella. The mixed zone at Meadow Park is next to the home dressing room and I really ought to have realised that Miedema reached the mixed zone first because she was the player most desperate to shelter from the elements. I had interviewed her a few times by this point and I knew that she knew who I was, so I tried to leverage that.

“Viv!” I shouted clutching my umbrella and thrusting it towards her. “Can you talk to me for just two minutes?”

“I’d much rather go inside, actually.”

I am guessing she saw my face drop and took pity on me, sheltering under my umbrella for, in all honesty, one of the most ‘phoned in’ interviews I had ever done. (It didn’t matter, I was still stupidly grateful that she stopped at all). Honestly, it was a little bit painful, she so blatantly would have rather been anywhere else in the world.

However, that week, Miedema had, incredibly, not featured in the FIFPRO World XI. I honestly could not care less about awards in football but a lot of our audience does, so I had to ask the question. If I am honest, the answers to the other questions were short and perfunctory so I was just fishing to extend the length of the article. It was my turn to phone it in a little. “I know you don’t really care about awards but what was your reaction to not being included?”

“I think we all know it’s all about popularity and I don’t post much on Instagram or twitter, so that’s probably what went wrong. I don’t really care about individual awards to be honest, but I think it’s a joke.”

With that, she walked off, a mic drop moment if ever I had witnessed one. The interview, and the quote, went viral. What had, before that question, been possibly one of the worst interviews I had done became our most read because of one line in response to a question that I really wasn’t personally invested in at all.

It taught me a valuable lesson though. I got the interview because I was willing to stand in the pouring rain and be a little bit persistent and I asked a question which solely had the audience in mind. Like the striker that makes a hundred unrewarded runs before getting that last minute diving header at the back post, I stuck at it in unfavourable circumstances. Those are the nuggets of gold you absolutely live for.

Thanks for reading Arseblog News - Arsenal Women Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.