The gentleman we have coming on is writer and comedian Charlie Talbot. His article here for Wise Men Say gives a pretty concise outline of the problems inherent in the match, and we particularly like the line from Chief Exec Erik Samuelson when considering the outlook of the neutral who thinks this is clash isn’t an abomination:

”Some people have said that it’s great because there are two clubs now instead of one, but that’s like someone coming and taking everything you own, and when you finally rebuild your life, saying isn’t it wonderful that we are both doing so well.” 

Indeed.

Frankly, we find it hard to look at the pros of the fixture; it’s just plain old weird. If we’re trying to be fair and balanced about this we could say things like ‘but your club was going out of business! ‘Didn’t that Winkleman sort save the club’?

And you know what, we will ask exactly that. Tune in and listen to the resultant fallout on the airwaves when we do so tonight at the unusual time of 8pm on 104.4fm in Central London and www.resonancefm.com/listen  around the world.

Tonight at 7pm on Resonance 104.4 fm we talk to a couple of people whose opinions on the game comes from two entirely separate places, but amount to a similar thing. Indifference.

We’ll be chatting to Emily Dicks, who grew up in Highbury surrounded by all things Arsenal. She had no choice but to live and breathe that familiar fusion of horse dung and fried onions on all too regular an occasion and, let’s face it, she’s not likely to eulogise about the area and the club in quite the same way as Nick Hornby does in Fever Pitch.

Well, we hope not else there was no point in dragging her in!

And also we speak to Maltese Graphic Designer Mark Debono, whose short and simple blog 5 Reasons Why I Hate Football was concise and critical enough to warrant further investigation! We’d best not get him started on wags (alright, we might do anyway).

No David Stubbs tonight; he’s on ‘international duty’, but Chris Roberts returns to the starting line-up with another fine Street Pharmacists guide.

Chris Dixon pulls strings and presses buttons (albeit the wrong ones occasionally), as per.

If you’d like to get involved tonight, please do so – we’re definitely looking for your opinions tonight. Tweet @cafecalcio with your 140 characters as to why exactly football is so awful. Anything goes!

We’re hoping between the three of us (Chris, David and Chris), plus some extra help from a couple of handy web-shaped people, to get the new website finally up and running in the next couple of weeks. Here everything will be a utopian, shiny, new, and easily accessible site with everything you’ve probably wanted from us. It’s coming, we promise. And yeah, we know, it’s been coming a while.

Anyway…

After a week’s hiatus we return with a show that we intended to bring you sometime ago.

Into the Resonance Studios we bring, for your listening pleasure: John Foot, Professor of Modern Italian History at UCL and Author of Calcio: A History of Italian Football, and Simon Martin, Award winning author of Sport Italia: The Italian Love Affair With Sport.

We’ll be focussing on two main areas; we’ll be exploring corruption, patronage and the myriad incarnations of calciopoli, and also, we’ll be examining the cult of Ballotelli.

Not to be cliché about this, he’s blazing a trail for race relations in Italy; it’s more than interesting to see how far one man’s goals can go to change attitudes in a country that struggles to even acknowledge racism as a problem.

No Chris Roberts this week, but he’s recorded this week’s Street Pharmacologist’s guide in advance. Bet you’re all glad of that!

Stand by also for last week’s podcast with Paul Ricketts examining racism at club level to go up in tandem with this.

Presented by: Chris Dixon, David Stubbs and Chris Roberts.

Produced by: Chris Dixon

Listen live, tonight, 7pm BST on Resonance 104.4fm in Central London and on resonacefm.com/listen around the world.

For the podcast of this show and previous episodes visit:

www.soundlcoud.com/café-calcio

For further info, follow us on:

twitter.com/cafecalcio

or

email cafecalcio@gmail.com

 To begin the latest run, we’ve brought back an old favourite Anthony Clavane.

His last book, Promised Land, The Reinvention of Leeds United featured in one of our early editions some two years ago.

Since that time, Promised Land has gone on to win both Football, and Sports Book Of The Year awards, therefore we thought it only fitting to bring him back in to the Resonance FM studios to take us through his latest offering, before it goes platinum, so that we can say we were there first, again.

Does Your Rabbi Know You’re Here: The Story Of English Football’s Forgotten Tribe portrays a community’s process of assimilation through football, on the pitch, at backroom and board level and in the stands themselves.

Often unnoticed and unsung, this book highlights the input of England’s Jewish community on the development of the modern game, and paints a picture of the schism created when on the one hand there is a need to blend in and integrate, and on the other, a need to stay loyal to culture and heritage.

We’re all about displaying football as positive force for social change and cohesion here at Café Calcio, so this show should prove to be a fine example of exactly what we’re trying to do, we look forward to having you along.

Café Calcio will be ably hosted, as usual, by Chris Dixon and equally ably co-presented, as usual, by Chris Roberts and David Stubbs.

Listen live, tonight, 7pm BST on Resonance 104.4fm in Central London and on resonacefm.com/listen around the world.

For the podcast of this show and previous episodes visit:

www.soundlcoud.com/café-calcio

For our blog featuring the writings of our esteemed presenters visit: http://cafecalcio.posterous.com

For further info, follow us on:

twitter.com/cafecalcio

or

email cafecalcio@gmail.com

Stay tuned for our new website, cafecalcio.com coming soon where, one hopes you’ll be able to do all of the above and more besides, coming soon!

So then here’s the podcast. In this episode we welcomed author, journalist and all round pretty useful and dapper chap Paolo Hewitt to Resonance FM to talk about ‘the other half’ of a book which we had featured earlier in the series with its co-author Mark Baxter. The Fashion Of Football: From Best To Beckham.

In the first show (3rd March edition if memory serves) we decided mid way through not to pay lip service to fan fashion and concentrate on the togs of footballers themselves. We just couldn’t fit it all in. So in this episode we explore the links between music, fashion and why the popular press didn’t pick up on the casual movement and generally tie up the ends that we couldn’t in the first show.

Also, it’s been an interesting season for Wealdstone FC (Wealdstone are our only indulgent concession as regards talking about ACTUAL football) so we caught up with Roger Slater who let us know just how nuts it has been.

We also feature the usual action from Chris Roberts and David Stubbs.

Chris Dixon mostly sat there, hungover. Pro.

So, tonight, to finish of our current run we’ll be welcoming Mark’s partner in crime Paolo Hewitt to Resonance to discuss not the fashions of players, but the fashions of fans.

Is he qualified to do this? I detect your suspicions and see you itching your beards, but yes. He is. 

See this? 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Fashion-Football-Beckham-Label/dp/1840188073

He wrote this with the above-mentioned Mark, so who better to get in to discuss the topic? No one, that’s who. Well, other than Mark that is, but he’s busy promoting his new movie Outside Bet (very showbiz) so he sends his apologies, which we convey to you all.

We’ll also be talking to Wealdstone’s Roger Slater about the ebbs and flows of their season. It’s been quite the rollercoaster for them but you don’t need us to tell you about it now – listen in later so that HE can!

There’ll be another Masterclass from Chris Roberts – this time The Charleston and David Stubbs tends to keep the subject matter of his caustic little vignettes a secret so we’ll all find out together if you’re listening live – which you really should be.

We’re live at 7PM (BST) 104.4FM around London – and on resonancefm.com/listen for the rest of this here world.

Tune in!

This is a show containing a subject we had been looking to dip into for some time. We tried to examine the relationship between the children of migrants and the “mother country” specifically through their attachment, or not, to England and their local team. We had comedian Paul Ricketts http://www.paulrickettscomedian.com/ twitter.com/paulricketts10 in the studio relating his own experiences and those of other black Britons he interviewed for his show Kiss The Badge – Fly The Flag.

Chris Roberts takes us through the unlikely correlation between head-banging and Roy Hodgson

David Stubbs ruminates over the orgasmic exaltations of Gary Neville.

Chris Dixon does his best to hold it all together with a voice that has all the tonal qualities of a nail through an exhaust pipe. Apologies.