Apparently, he is difficult to understand. The column's resident psychiatrist says I am impossible to understand. Carra's Scouse words have to be rendered in English sub-titles for an English-speaking audience in the Liverpool documentary being transmitted on the telly.
And I know how it feels not only to be misunderstood but to be unintelligible. I come from an area that demands public speaking should only be done by a lawyer and must include the words "vigorously" and "defend". My accent is of the Glesca variety. It is thick and heavy. Insert personal insult here.
This propensity to come to a glottal full stop does not impair my work in football. Basically, I am not allowed by the press pack to ask questions at interviews. This follows the awkward occasion at Glasgow Airport en route to a European tie when I inquired of Kirk Broadfoot whether he had ever noticed that Scotland's non-qualification for international tournaments coincided with the rise of post-modernism and if he felt that was significant as, ironically, his native land was said to have invented the modern novel.
Predictably, Mr Broadfoot's exposition on this subject was so all-encompassing that press pack and player almost missed the flight.
Andy Devilish, of the Soaraway Sun, was forced to write a back-page lead entitled: "Magic! Kirk raps realism in modern novel."
Mr Devilish subsequently took me outside and, disdaining the chill, the noise of a jet engine and the discomfort of standing on a wing, informed me gently: "The next time I want to see you open your mouth at a press conference is to draw your last breath."
My silence at these affairs is such that Devilish now remarks that I am as dumb as I look. I do not reply out of a sense of dignity, propriety and deep-seated fear.
This silence allows me to appreciate fully the gems that are mined from said interviews. There are the managers who insist that their teams lacked impotence in the first half, who insist the ideal is to speculate to acclimatise and that he is a proponent of blue pie thinking.
There was also one player who looked at a steamed-up window and informed the throng that "the conversation is running doon the windaes". Of course, the conversation was of such a quality that it should have been running down a lavvy pan. But I digress.
My problem is that I have to speak at tennis press conferences which are a more cosmopolitan affair. My job is to drag the local angle from Andy Murray. Thus my searing inquiries have been along the lines of "Did you have your porridge this morning?", "Would you consider wearing a kilt at Wimbledon?" and the clincher: "So, Andy, Oor Wullie or the Broons, whit's yir favourite cludgie reading?"
Mr Murray answers these inquiries with a patience that includes tapping a tennis racket affectionately on my napper.
The problem arises when the stenographers try to make sense of my questions for the transcript that is consulted by the world press. They convene with some of my English colleagues and try to come up with an acceptable version of my mutterings. They cannot, however, intervene when I address those who find the Glesca accent as impenetrable as the deeper recesses of the Amazon jungle to a downhill skier.
Once I was squeezed into a small room in New York where Stanislas Wawrinka, the Swiss tennis player, was talking to journalists about his forthcoming match with Murray, the object of so much of my attention that I was in danger of attracting a court order. Anyway, questions continued in Polish, French, Swiss-German and English. Wawrinka dealt with these with an enviable ease, replying to each question in the language in which it was asked. Then I intervened. I can't remember my question. It would be parochial in tone. Something along the line of: "Stan, are you one of the Milton Wawrinkas?"
There was the barest hesitation before Stan exploded with the Swiss-German variant of "whit?"
The room collapsed in laughter. After I was dug out, I trooped back to the press centre with a colleague advising me that I should be sub-titled.
"Sub-titled?," opined Devilish some time later. "Only if that entails removing your tongue and using it as a bookmark."
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