Graham Smyth pays tribute to departing Leeds reporter Phil Hay

Graham Smyth pays tribute to Phil Hay after calling time on his 18-year stint reporting on Leeds

Transcript

00:00One of the things that I've realized about this job over the last five years is coming up to five

00:05years next month, and I realized quite early on that you cannot do this job in a vacuum. You can't

00:14do it as some sort of lone wolf. You need colleagues, you know, which I've got, but you

00:20also need people who do your job but for someone else. And we are absolutely blessed to have a

00:27press pack full of people who know kind of the pressures of the job, but they also know

00:33the audience and some of the demands and some of the pressures and some of the

00:39feedback that might come with it. And also the club, you know, dealing with the club,

00:42what that's like. I think my main concern with Phil going is how much harder it might be to

00:50keep Popey on a leash as the group's resident liability. So I don't thank Phil for leaving us

00:58a man short with that task. But it's the company, like, you know, quite often you'll end up on a

01:05train together or on a tube together, coming out of a game. You spend a lot of time together in

01:10the press rooms and the press boxes, and there's a lot of kind of dark humor that goes with it

01:17that feels necessary at times, because if you didn't laugh, you would definitely cry. And

01:22football is just so ludicrous that you absolutely have to laugh and poke fun, because otherwise

01:29you'd go mad. And Phil Hay could laugh at people and football with the absolute best of them,

01:37is all I'll say on that matter. Very good company, good company for a beer. Yeah, sad to see him go.