Radio is a curious medium. So retro yet so oddly compelling, if you can be troubled to turn off the TV and shut down the laptop and just let the words wash over your brain.

My grandmother was a huge fan of the radio. Whenever I visited her home, she would be puttering around in the kitchen with the radio on. One of my inlaws is a fan of National Public Radio, in the U.S., and it seems to be the background “music” of her typical day in SoCal.

The gold standard for radio, however, probably remains the BBC, and had I grown up in Britain I probably would have been agog at the idea that my voice might be heard on it.

But now it has, and I find it to be suprisingly cool.

This is the session of the BBCs’ World Football programme (going all British on you) which leads off with a segment on Diego Maradona and his arrival at the Dubai club Al Wasl, and I have my 20 seconds of air time a few minutes in.

Nothing profound, really, but I’m glad I was able to size up the Wasl squad in a few sentences without too many verbal ticks, pregnant pauses or backtracks.

A bit about the radio journalist, Mani Djazmi. He is one of the most remarkable guys I have run into while covering soccer in the region.

He is an Iranian expat who works as a freelancer for the BBC and has carved out a niche for himself as their Middle East/Asia football correspondent.

I first encountered him at the Asian Cup in Qatar back in January, and he was back in the region (traveling from London) after the Maradona story broke.

What you won’t know about him from listening to his work is that he is blind.

He seems to approach his work as if blindness were the sort of issue anyone could work around if they put their mind to it. And perhaps it is.

When he arrived at the offices of The National to interview me, he was accompanied by a young British man who helps Mani negotiate the world of travel. Planes, trains, automobiles, all that.

But once onsite, Mani is a one-man show, and his helper stands quietly off to the side.

He liked the idea of talking to me outside in what I think of as the Smoker’s Courtyard of The National, and he was chatting comfortably as he extracted his recording equipment from a bag, and plugged in this or that and had me do a sound check … and then off we went.

We talked for maybe seven minutes, and he used only the one “actuality” from me, which is fine, and what I expected.

This kind of radio remains very labor intensive, very sophisticated, the antithesis of “sportstalk” where a couple of guys sit in a room and just blather on for hours at a time and wait for dopes to call in and say something provocative.

For his eight-minute piece, Mani traveled from London to Dubai, attended Al Wasl’s last match of the season, showed up at Maradona’s introductory press conference, took a 90-minute cab ride down to Abu Dhabi, interviewed me, then went over to Al Wahda to talk to Josef Hickersberger, the Austrian who coaches the team there.

All that … for eight minutes of air time. It is a very good piece, wide-ranging, dense with information, with sophisticated audio that includes the voice of Hickersberger speaking over the sound of an Al Wasl game the coach didn’t attend.

Give it a listen. And if you like, listen to the whole of the show. It includes a segment on Ruud Gullit and his time coaching the Russian Premier League side in Grozny, Chechnya (the BBC says he eventually was fired “by the warlord who owns the club”) … and also has a bit on Charlie Davies, the American forward who was nearly killed in a car crash two years ago and is now playing well.

And to keep track of Mani Djazmi’s tweets, you can follow him at @mani2911 … and you can follow me at @PaulOberjuerge