Day 2

As the test match hots up so has my working week. This morning started, earlier than yesterday and meaning I looked like a cadaver from Night of the Living dead, with a trip into suburbia. Motspur Park ,home to Fulham's training ground, a tandoori restaurant and a train station, seemed like a difficult place to get to mainly due to "severe delays on the Victoria Line" and the fact that it's in the arse end of no-where. In the end it wasn't that as far flung as I anticipated and Roy Hodgson's press conference was worth the journey.

The conference was to preview tomorrow nights match with United one that given Fulham's ridiculous away record won't be hugely competitive. I was early. Massively early in fact as the "severe delays" promised by Transport for London never materialised and I'd thought I was getting a bus from Kings Cross to Vauxhall. Fulham's staff were welcoming and the training ground was quaint but as much as this was all lovely I ended up in the press conference room purporting to be from the Guardian with 2 camera men from Setanta and Sky News. At this point the fear of prospectively being largely alone in a room with Roy Hodgson, as affable as I'm sure he is, was crippling. In the end the seasoned journalists arrived, ten minutes rather than half an hour early, and I was met by Paul Doyle from the Guardian, and Football weekly podcast fame, which meant I avoided such a press conference faux-pas. Hodgson was incredibly articulate and didn't once pause to "erm" or use the time honoured "well, you know", widely praising Sir Alex as the "greatest manager of the modern era" and generally being a nice person. Later I was told he is fluent in 6 languages and has a penchant for quoting Voltaire and Churchill in press conferences reflecting an intelligence that I had never imagined from his somewhat bumbling image. It was a brilliant experience and although most journalists were at Guus Hiddink's first official "presser" just across West London I'd pick Roy and his renaissance tinged eloquence any day.

I have just come out of a features Editorial meeting about plans for the rest of the week and the champions league next week which was in the room with yellow sofas from yesterday (not as comfortable as they look). It was incredible the amount of depth the paper plans to go into and interesting to see the way angles are worked out from Mourinho and Ferguson's war of words being the centre-piece of the Inter Vs. Utd coverage to an interview with Tiago about locking the Juve president in the toilet being part of Chelsea vs Juve. I am gradually getting some sense of how every thing is planned and executed as a cohesive whole although I still haven't got over how mental it is that so much preparation goes into such a transient format.

I have just also found out how such best laid plans are blown out of the water. A story is emerging about Allen Stanford being done for fraud (I'm sketchy on the details, a quality shared by most people I think) which is making subs around me frantically drop work and wait for new copy to arrive. Editors are running around whilst the carefully mapped out 2.30 running orders are hastily revised or ripped up. This is news at it's most brilliant and terrifying and all that seems certain is that,soon, rather than having the Cricket WAGS on his lap Mr Stanford will have a large convict called Larry.