Paul Balm with a quick summary of what you can expect from TCW this coming season
The photo above is a lie. Very little of last night’s Cats Whiskers’ pre-season meeting was as orderly or as organised as this picture makes it look. Most of the time it was more like a William Hogarth engraving, a chaotic cacophony of multiple conversations and actions with one end of the table rarely in sync or even aware of what the other was doing or saying.
I shouldn’t have been surprised, Cats Whiskers meetings are always like this and in a way that’s not a bad thing. It might have been like herding cats at most of the time and we might not have been anywhere near the matters in hand for most of the two and a half hours it took us but that’s what you get when we all come together to get round a table to try and plan where the various strands of TCW will be going over the next few months. There was plenty of debate, more Phoenix Nights references than some could handle and at least two (temporary) walk outs but we got there in the end.
So what can you expect from The Cats Whiskers this season?
Put simply you’re going to get more of the same and more. We’re still going to be doing two shows a week with the normal Cats Whiskers show on a Monday night and Ask TCW on a Wednesday (unless there’s a game) so you always know that you can get your fix of Panthers’ & EIHL oriented chat twice a week at 8:45 p.m.
When we ran The Cats Whiskers Panthers fan survey back in April and May this year one of the things that you, the fans, said you wanted was fan interaction. Now I know when you made that request you were wanting it from the club but it got us thinking about what we can do.
With that in mind we’ll be trialling a few new ideas over the coming weeks and months. The first of these is a re-vamped version of our Twitter Man of the Match polls. These will now be a player of the week poll giving you all the chance to rate every Panthers player rather than you simply picking from a list of four chosen by us. Voting will close on the Monday and that week’s winner will be announced on that night’s show. This will be up and running for the Krefeld and Braehead game this coming weekend and we’ll publishing the link and how to vote over the weekend.
We’re also looking at introducing a prediction league that will see you pit your wits every week against the TCW team in trying to guess (I mean predict after a great deal of thought) the result of selected games.
One more thing we can reveal we will be trialling is short episodes before and after every Panthers home game to preview what’s coming up and then get some instant reaction to the games. We’ve done something similar in the past using Periscope which proved pretty popular and we’ll be sticking to that formula with the only difference being that they’ll be audio only so people can listen to them when driving etc. We’re currently working to finalise the times and the last few details for these but there’ll be more news when we have some.
All these new features are subject to demand and we’ll be reviewing their popularity of the coming weeks and we’ll make any changes as required.
There are more ideas in the pipeline but there is one final thing we can reveal. This September marks the fifth anniversary of the first Cats Whiskers TV show. That first episode can be seen here in all it’s fresh-faced slightly less cynical glory and we’ll be doing something to commemorate the event sometime soon (rumours that we’ll be granting Jono a testimonial year are not true although we may try and find a way to bring back the news).
All in all there’s plenty to look forward to this season with the Cats Whiskers I just hope we don’t need another meeting to sort it all out!
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