“FOUR hours! You think you can do four hours of speech radio?” Asked Steve Hothersall. Perfectly reasonably.

The unspoken answer to that is that my life is 17 hours of speech radio interspersed with, at the very least, the attempt to sleep. My spoken answer was that we did two and a half hours on stage in Melbourne in front of 900.

And so tonight we do four hours of speech radio. Transfer deadline day speech radio.

Now I could try and explain what we are going to do. In fact I will – the intention is the following – to get a load of good people in to talk about football, about their hopes and dreams for the season to come, to invite tweets and phone calls and just generally turn something which seems a bit over the top into a massive conversation.

But I’m excitable. And Dave Downie is excitable. And John Gibbons is very, very excitable. He’s hoping for chaos. He’s currently doing the transfer equivalent of a rain dance in South Liverpool, a-humming and a-harring in Calderstones Park. Hoping for Mata to do this, Torres to do that and Arsenal buy everybody.

I could do without that. The current plan is this:

We talk about Everton with Dave Downie and Greg O’Keeffe, United with Steve Armstrong, Norwich with Juliet Jacques, North London with Amy Lawrence and Catherine Stewart and slag off some lads from Sunderland – it is the done thing – with Steve Goldsmith.

We get a broad overview from Andi Thomas and Rory Smith full of the wit which has made them my favourite football writers not working for a paper and working for a paper respectively.

Except we might not. Rory’s already touch and go, he’s been sent to Madrid to cover Bale. He’ll do everything he can to get on but can’t be sure. Gibbons’ chaos strategy already bearing fruit.

So on Citytalk at 6pm something will happen. It will last for four hours. It will be fast paced, hopefully interesting, optimistically smart. It will be fun.

You can hear in on the radio if in Liverpool or via this link http://radioplayer.citytalk.fm/ if in the UK and I hope, trust and pray lots of clever people in the comments below will tell you about how to get it outside the UK.

You have a role. A dual role:

a) To listen and tweet and call – @citytalk1059 // #2ndseptonfire // 01517081059

b) To tell your mates.

This isn’t Merseyside specific. It just comes from here. The aim is what it is always is – to do the best thing in the country about the football just this time between the hours of 6pm and 10pm. Join us, join in and act as missionaries.

Four hours in the greatest playground in the world. Good lord. See you later.