John Greene

Another crowd delighted to see the back of me.

And then you'd start doing little bits and pieces of commentary and then kind of TV commentary.

broadcasters start getting in touch saying would you do just a game here or a game there and then that builds and kind of just snowballs that was 18 years ago so I'm thankful that I've been able to kind of flag my way through to where I am today and it's been an unbelievable journey it's still the best job in the world and I would recommend it to anybody but obviously there are

there's intense competition out there and as soon as you, and I would semi-regularly be contacted by people on LinkedIn in particular, journalism students or young men and women who are considering getting into the media landscape when it's obviously a far more different environment

landscape today than it was when I was getting into it but as soon as you start telling people that they're probably going to have to work for free for a while tends to turn them off a little bit that you I mean I would have spent two or three years working on Polish football Belgian football like games that literally nobody's watching getting reps

that was all it was it allows you you're obviously fulfilling a role for somebody but from a selfish point of view you're just getting before you know it you have 100 150 200 games done there's an awful lot of mistakes to make that you can then hopefully eradicate moving forward and eventually the quality and the stakes involved will increase and then that culminates with like something like what's going to happen next Thursday night for example or a World Cup final or something but there I tried to shorten the story as much as possible for you there Lester your listeners turn off

It's far easier for a young person to...

begin the building of a brand now.

There's so many avenues that they can put themselves out there, be it social media, be it putting their own podcast together, setting up their own YouTube channel, just chatting to people.

And then it's a lot easier, I think, to build a portfolio now that you can then take snippets from and send to somebody like John or like yourself or like, you know, the head of news and sport and Virgin or to Jerry Gilroy off the ball.

It's an awful lot easier to do that than maybe it would have been when I was starting out where you needed

to try and put together.

Back then it was just, can you put a sports bulletin together?

Like 17, 18 years ago.

It's a lot easier for people to do it now.

And the really talented people have a great opportunity now to kind of get themselves out in front.

Maybe even more so than they might used to be able to do.

You were obviously always willing to evolve and you probably felt it was compulsory that you would do so as the years went by.

Can you remember, going all the way back to 08, any element of the modern day media landscape where you scoffed at it at the time when it was starting just to creep through and just thought, there's absolutely no way that is ever going to gain any traction?

Rudd is still expected to do the job he was hired to do.