Paul Golder writes for the Brentwood Gazette

The football season is pretty much back up and running again with all of our local teams already back in competitive action.

John Chubb has been part of the Phoenix FM team for three years, covering our local teams with match reports before taking over the role of main anchor for Phoenix FM’s Sport show.

Andy Gardener has been covering Brentwood Town’s pre-season matches and we’ve been regularly chatting to new owner Jez Dickinson and commercial consultant John Schultz. Brentwood are on a mission to increase their average gate and win two promotions over the next three years, and we’re supporting them on air to make sure the message gets out.

Billericay Town are about to start playing league games soon and our New Lodge correspondent Leigh Bailey will be giving the club major coverage again this season, with some of the most detailed football reports ever appearing regularly on our website. Leigh has already spoken to Billericay Town manager and ex-Tottenham player Jamie O’Hara about their prospects for the new season.

And Scott Lanza, Publicity Officer for the Essex Senior League, will also be covering some of our local teams including Pitsea-based Hashtag United, who have 212,000 followers on Twitter – more than many Championship teams, including Bristol City and Millwall, despite playing their football seven divisions lower!

Andy, Leigh and Scott will be ringing in every Saturday to update listeners – and in addition, of course, we have our long-running Leyton Orient show The Orient Hour every Wednesday evening at 6pm. They’re not non-league at the moment, and fingers crossed it stays that way …

Personally, as a West Ham United supporter, it’s likely that most Saturdays will just have bad news for me, so it’s good to focus on successes from our local teams instead.

In all seriousness, it’s great to cover football at this level, as many other media outlets just want to go for the big games and ignore the grass-roots support that football has at so many levels in the community.

You can hear Phoenix Sport every Saturday at 3pm and interviews regularly appear on the Phoenix FM website at phoenixfm.com. And it’s not just about football – we cover a wide variety of other sports on the station too, with regular weekly shows devoted to cricket and boxing too.