📹 Interviewing Willy Kambwala
Preparation, Patrice Evra, allowing curiosity to come through and inspiration | The Academy Briefing: Harry Amass & the U18s' winning run ends | T90s, Clive Tyldesley, and Tiger Eats Pig
If you’re new here: I’m Harry Robinson, a 23-year-old Stretford Ender, freelance football journalist and the author of The Men Who Made Manchester United. I write about things I’m passionate about, mainly MUFC, history, youth football and travel.
What’s inside:
📹 🇫🇷 What was it like to interview Willy Kambwala?
❓ MUFC trivia
⚽ The Academy Briefing (Headline-making Harry Amass, U18s winning streak ends, U21s derby approaches)
👟 🐯 🐷 What I’ve enjoyed recently (T90s, Clive Tyldesley, and Tiger Eats Pig)
1: What was it like to interview Willy Kambwala?
“So, it’s Willy Kams… Willy Kambwala for MUTV, clap!”
Level-headed, enthusiastic and inspirational, Willy Kambwala was a dream interviewee. He was nervous, he said, but you’d never be able to tell. It’s something similar with his performances on the pitch. “Sometimes I’m scared,” he admitted. But he finds serenity in the Bible — “the most important thing in my life” — and his faith.
“I still go to church now, even before games if I have time,” he said.
“It helps me to find peace. When you have peace and you are good outside of football, you can perform as you want on the field because you have peace and can just enjoy the game. This is the way I find my peace.”
I think the role of faith in football is vastly underrated. Journalists can be dismissive of its importance but a huge proportion of players are reliant on their belief in one god or another to maintain focus and composure.
And yet, I came away from our conversation feeling as if there was another guiding light in Kambwala’s life: Manchester United.
THE INTERVIEW PREPARATION & AIMS
Such is the nature of interviews — especially those conducted for a football club’s own media department when the questions and topics are ‘safer’ — that you can leave a sit-down having heard stories, fascinating though they may be, that you have already read. In fact, sometimes that can be the aim. A great story is a great story, and on occasion, you want to draw it out of the interviewee when they are sat down with you, in front of a camera or two.
But with a young player experiencing their first major sit-down interview, that’s less common. My research for this interview involved making sure, first of all, that I knew the key moments in Kambwala’s life and career. Once that’s all established and verified, then I’m looking for little snippets of information that could either make him feel more comfortable or generate a headline-worthy piece of news. His past at Les Ulis, the same club as Patrice Evra, related to both of these goals.
When I knew he was playing for Les Ulis before me, I was like ‘okay, if he did it from here, I can do it as well’. We had a main building with all the shirts on the wall and I could see those shirts and I was like ‘yeah, me too, one day I want my shirt to be on this wall’. So it was really inspirational.
His faith was another. After noticing his regular use of Bible verses on Instagram, we asked him to bring in his Bible. I thought it might help him feel comfortable and I was curious about why it helped him so much. The producer and camera ops on the day, Ryan, Holly & Keith, made the concept come to life by getting him to flick through the pages. The resulting shot was lovely.
ALLOWING CURIOSITY TO COME THROUGH
What makes an interview most exciting, in my opinion, is when you’re thrown off your line of questioning by curiosity. It might sound silly but it’s a real skill - and something I’m trying to improve - to listen properly in interviews. It does sound silly! But it’s hard. First of all, you’ve got an idea in mind before you begin and all the way through of questions you want to ask. Combine this with a ticking clock — the players have to get to training! — and it can be easy to ignore the option of following up on something interesting in favour of trying to recreate the hypothetical interview you conjured up in your mind the night before.
I almost did this with Kambwala. Quite early on he referenced the fact that he didn’t watch a lot of football when he was younger — he preferred playing — but that United was a different matter. He loved Paul Scholes. A couple of questions later, he spoke about how he felt on his first day at the club. He mentioned it being a dream. It wasn’t until another couple of questions that I had to interrupt the flow of the conversation. I finally registered what he was alluding to. And it partly took a while because it was a surprise.
“You said it was a dream,” I began to ask, “Was it your dream to come to England, any big club, or just to United?”
I think that’s an important distinction and he couldn’t have been more emphatic in response.
“No, the dream was about Man United and that’s it. No other club. Even England, I wasn’t thinking about England. I was just thinking about Man United. Why? I don’t know. But since as far back as I can remember it was just Man United. I couldn’t watch [that much] football but it was Man United, Man United all the time. That’s the dream I had. So to be here was just so special to me because it was the thing I wanted.”
This is a kid who told me he learnt English specifically because he knew if he wanted to play for United, he’d have to speak English. He was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo and grew up in France. It’s an extraordinary story.
KAMBWALA’S MOTIVATION
He spoke with incredible eloquence in his second language and, honestly, I sat there a little transfixed by the end. He’s inspiring. Whether he goes on to add another 100 appearances to his four for United thus far, I don’t know. But his mentality is spot on and I’ll never forget that feeling I had watching him speak these closing words with such endearing passion:
To do something in your life, you have to dream. You need goals, things you’re fixed on. That’s the first step. Then you have to fight for it. It’s easy to dream because it’s free. But to fight for it, that’s when it becomes more complicated because you don’t know what you’re gonna have on your journey. Every journey is different. Don’t watch others because you don’t know what will happen. One day you’re on the top, another you’re down. So fight for your dream and don’t let people say you can’t do it. If you want to do it, you can do it. It’s possible. So fight for it. Be confident in yourself. Keep your feet on the floor as well. Don’t fly. Don’t thing you are too big or too good because there are a lot of people with the same dream as you and they can take your place. So keep your feet on the floor and say ‘this is the level I’m at now but I know where I want to go’. There’s a lot of up and down but that’s the thing that’s gonna make you stronger, more resilient and more mature as a player or just as a human. I think that’s the best thing I can say.
You can watch the full interview here…
2: MUFC trivia
On the subject of France, who was/is:
United’s first French player?
The three French players with the most United appearances?
3: The Academy Briefing
Under-18s
The U18s’ 14-match winning run in the U18 Premier League ended with a 2-2 draw at Derby County on Saturday.
Although the U21s match at Southampton, scheduled for the previous night, had been postponed due to a waterlogged pitch, there were seven changes to the U18s line-up. It was a young side without some of its star names.
In the end, an excellent weaker-foot strike from 16-year-old substitute Jim Thwaites — who also scored for the U16s that same morning — maintained at least United’s unbeaten run, if not the winning streak.
The record-breaking run was made more remarkable by the consistency of results which five or six changes were made every game. A total of 32 players were used across the 14 games. That’s a sign of United’s commitment to offering equal-ish game time to all scholars, not just the most talented ones.
That’s not the case in the FA Youth Cup or UEFA Youth League, where United prioritise the Academy’s most talented prospects.
United still showed admirable work ethic to come from behind at Derby, where the young Reds have a torrid record of late, and they remain well clear at the top of the league.
You can expect to see more of Thwaites this season in the U18s. The second-half-of-the-season process where U16s get U18s minutes and the U18s go up into the U21s has begun already. So you’ll see Thwaites, Bendito Mantato, Amir Ibragimov and others getting U18s minutes. They’re all talented players but with a long way to go. Don’t buy into the clickbait madness of YouTubers like Stephen Howson declaring them once-in-a-lifetime talents.
Harry Amass
Harry Amass trained with the first team this week and made headlines. He’s a talented left-back who really can make it at United if he keeps playing like this and improving at this rate.
United worked very hard to sign him from Watford last summer.
He has some similarities to Shaw. A lovely clipped ball over top, some amazing through balls that attackers sometimes aren’t on the wavelength of, great close control and confident dribbling out. He doesn’t just pass for the sake of it and is good defensively. I always think you need to be a bit scrappy as a full-back. He can be. He can improve in the areas young players can always improve: his weaker foot (right), his physicality and his positioning. But right now he is progressing well and is highly rated.
This week
The U21s play Manchester City on Monday 19 February in a 7pm kick-off at Leigh Sports Village.
The U18s, meanwhile, travel to Nottingham Forest for a Saturday 12:30pm kick-off. This game is on MUTV.
4: What I’ve enjoyed recently
🎙️ Clive Tyldesley’s commentary on commentary on Football365, here.
🐯 Tiger Eats Pig, a little Japanese food place next to Birmingham New Street station. If you ever need something quick there between trains, it’s a good spot.
📸 The concept of these pictures. Very cool.
🥾 A reminder of these boots ⬇️ I loved these and scored a great free-kick in the playground wearing them. Like a saddo, I kept the right boot on display in my room after growing out of them.
That’s all for today. Thanks for reading. If you’ve enjoyed this, feel free to share it with a mate. Have a great rest of your week!
5: MUFC trivia answers
On the subject of France, who was/is:
United’s first French player? Eric Cantona
The three French players with the most United appearances? Patrice Evra (379), Mikael Silvestre (361) and Anthony Martial (317).