Shiny, happy Gabby winkles home truths out of Terry

TV View: The trailer for the BBC's spanking-new magazine-type show Inside Sportpromised plenty, not least through its boast that it would be "as big as an Olympic budget", although whether that was the budget for, say, the 1896 Games in Athens or the ones scheduled for London in 2012 wasn't made clear.

We weren't fussed, though, because another show devoted to chatting solely about sport is fine by us. Sure, what else is there to talk about?

"It's new, it's now," said our presenter, Gabby Logan, when she welcomed us into her Inside Sportparlour. Gabby herself mightn't be entirely new, but she's certainly now, in that supercharged, enthusiastic, smiley way of so many telly presenters these days. Honest, if Gabby was telling you about a 0-0 draw between Dagenham and Redbridge and Gravesend and Northfleet you'd wish you'd been there.

We had, though, some concerns about the direction Inside Sportmight take when we heard Tony Livesey would be a guest panellist. Not that we have anything against Tony; he seems a positively grand chap. It's just that much of his career has been spent as either editor-in-chief or managing director of the Daily Sport and Sunday Sport, the papers whose coverage of, say, the Olympic Games, is reduced to a quarter of a paragraph to make room for their latest exclusive: (for example) "Extraterrestrial Ate My Melons - Porn Star Tells All."

Granted, if your melons were devoured by a little green man you'd want to talk about it, but we just never really understood what it had to do with sport.

But we were happy to reserve judgment and give Inside Sport a chance - especially when the central plank to show number one was an exclusive interview with John Terry, who, to his credit, talks exclusively to dozens of media outlets every week in his role as Chelsea and England captain.

"Are you always up at home?" asked Gabby.

"I am, I'm always sort of upbeat and don't go to bed till late and things like this, you know," said Terry.

Far be it for us to attempt to define "scoop", when the closest we've come to one was a vanilla ice cream, but at this point of the interview we reckoned divil a back page was being held.

There was, though, more interest in Terry's admission he wanted a nine-year contract with Chelsea and, if at all possible, an option to manage the club at the end of it. Modest demands by today's standards.

By then, of course, Roman Abramovich will have moved on, possibly buying out the eight-time Champions League winners Sunderland, and Terry will be managing Chelsea in the Nationwide Conference, where they'll be sent by the footballing authorities until they sort out their £6.4-billion debt. So, in that sense, Terry's desire to manage the club demonstrates his commitment to the cause. He has blue blood, that boy.

That revelation hogged the headlines last week (though we're sure we read the very same news months ago) overshadowing what we felt was the real story from the interview, that Terry's girlfriend filmed the birth of her twins with her mobile phone so he could "be there" even though he wasn't.

"She videoed it on her phone?" asked Gabby, just checking.

"Yes, she videoed it," confirmed Terry, "she was having a Caesarean so managed to video it herself. We watched it again this morning - it's just unreal".

"Unreal is the word for it all right," smiled Gabby to herself, while Terry beamed.

It was only a few weeks ago that we read Los Angeles Dodgers first baseman Nomar Garciaparra, husband of footballing legend Mia Hamm, "attended" the birth of his twins by speaker phone, so while Terry had a video, Nomar had to make do with the sound of Mia cursing the day she met him, followed by two sets of loud wailing noises.

As it proved, Terry's week was packed with wailing noises, as Chelsea bade adieu to Champions League and Premiership.

"What a waste of money," Arsenal fans sang as Terry and his team-mates left the pitch at the Emirates yesterday, which we thought was a lovely gesture.

Next season, of course, Chelsea will be joined by Sunderland in the Premiership, so, as we speak, Jose Mourinho is preparing to relinquish his crown as the coolest managerial dude in the top flight.

"Roy probably thinks management is a doddle," said the Birmingham manager Steve Bruce on Sky Sports after losing to Sunderland in the race for the Championship title, "but in 10 years' time he'll look like me," he said, pointing to his silver hair and forest of stress lines. Perhaps, but we have our doubts.