This is the Blood Red Podcast from the Liverpool Echo, giving you the inside track on all the big talking points from Anfield.

Whose game is it anyway a button in question during these COVID times and even beforehand somewhat rhetorical.

I'm Guy Clark, thanks for joining us here on the Blood Red channel for a special podcast as we explore that very question.

I'm joined by our business of football writer

at the Echo Dave Powell, an award-winning sports writer

and Sunday Times best-selling author Michael Calvin,

whose latest book, whose game is it anyway, launches on Monday, the 19th of April,

and explores football's role in our lives and how distant in particular the game

seems to have become during the pandemic to many of us.

Mike, thanks a lot for joining us.

It's an absolute pleasure to have you with us.

Could you just sort of lead us into the book itself and the topics it does explore?

Okay, yeah, great to be here. In essence, I suppose the pandemic has been a time for all of us to self-reflect in a whole range of

areas of our lives. Football has been continuing in a void, an emotional void.

And the game has always spoken to me very emotionally.

It's been something which has enriched my life

emotionally and professionally and it was I suppose the book the genesis of the book was the death of my father-in-law.

Through COVID last May, there was an outbreak in his care home in Devon. Just before he died, he had accelerated

vascular dementia and so the curtains across his mind were being drawn

but in the last couple of days before he passed

he became quite lucid when for my wife talked to him about football and he

recall being 10 11 year old boy walking along the terrorist streets of West Watford where he lived to watch the local club. And football meant a sweet shop on a Saturday, it meant the anticipation of the game, the size of the stadium,

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