An Interview With Patrick Kendrick: Dimaro, interpreting Kevin De Bruyne & Noa Lang and the passion of Napoli fans.

Henry returns earlier than usual having stolen some of Patrick's time to find out the inside scoop on the Dimaro press conferences with KDB and Noa Lang.

Napoli are champions again! The season began with the slogan Amm’ Fatica, ‘let’s get grafting’, it finishes with Amm’ Vinciut, ‘we’ve won!’

So said Patrick Kendrick on the Serie A World Feed as Napoli clinched their fourth Scudetto on that unforgettable night on 23^rd May, 2025. In doing so, he rapidly went viral with Neapolitans excitedly enjoying this piece of cultural and linguistic know-how from an English born and English-speaking commentator.

To us English speaking Napoli fans, this was no surprise. Patrick’s commentaries across all teams in Italy are sprinkled with bespoke cultural and linguistic references that only an Italo-phile with a lived understanding of the peninsula could pull-off.

Last year, we loved speaking to Patrick on our 50^th episode, recorded shortly after the disastrous 10^th place finish, and his football knowledge was matched with his love for Neapolitan food, language and the streets of Naples themselves. As he told us, he married a Neapolitan in Naples a few years back and his now legendary piece of commentary on the last day of the season was partly set up by his mother-in-law in Vomero as he explained to Radio Kiss Kiss earlier in the summer.

Henry caught up with Patrick this week to talk about his experiences interpreting Kevin De Bruyne and Noa Lang’s first Napoli press conferences at Dimaro. As well as being the lead commentator on the world feed for Serie A and the Coppa Italia and covering UEFA international matches, Patrick is a freelance EU-accredited conference interpreter and has worked with some of the game's leading governing bodies on major international tournaments. You’ll often hear Patrick interpreting English to Italian or French (and visa versa) for players and coaches in Italian and during European games so we couldn’t resist the opportunity to get the ‘inside scoop’ on his impressions of Dimaro and two of our latest signings.

Dimaro First Impressions

Henry: So you’ve been very lucky, Patrick, you’ve managed to visit the place where most Napoli fans want to head to around this time of year, the wonderful Dimaro. A lot of us have been impressed at the increasing level of professionalism and swagger about the club. I don’t know if you’ve been to Dimaro before, if you have, did it feel a bit different? Did it have the feel of Scudetto favourites about it?

PK: It is the first time I have experienced it. I’d always wanted to go to a summer training camp, whether it be Napoli or otherwise. What I find quite interesting is the sheer number of people that were there - before I set off, I read reports of about 1400 people and by the end of the weekend it was between four and five thousand. There were a lot of Napoli fans there – a wonderful atmosphere.

At this time of year in most parts of Italy, it’s insufferably hot (including in Naples, obviously) and so a lot of Italians decide to shun the beach at some point. Most of the time this happens a bit later in the summer, closer to Ferragosto after they’ve had a beach holiday but this is people seeking out the mountains so they can base their holiday, maybe their only holiday of the year around seeing their football team. For me it only goes to show the fervour and passion that there is with Italian football fans.

In terms of the professionalism, I don’t have anything to compare it to, so I’m just going on anecdotal evidence and what people are saying but it’s all been very well organised. I’ve seen the fans queue well in advanced to get into open training. It’s a nice way for the new signings to get integrated and it is also the closest contact that fans have with the team all season long, really. It’s a concentrated, small town, the players are less guarded and feeling more relaxed because they’re going through their paces. I was very impressed with the whole set up.

Kevin De Bruyne: Steely, humble and talented.

HB: Right, lets talk about these press conferences. This is your bread and butter, or your meat and potatoes, you’ve done a lot of these… what we all want to know is what did you learn about Kevin De Bruyne and Noa Lang by the way that they spoke and your interaction with them?

PK: They were hugely different personalities. First of all I need to thank both players because they spoke English even though De Bruyne is a native Flemish speaking and Lang speaks Dutch. They are speaking in a second language, although KDB spent nearly a decade in England he speaks English better than me! Two very different people.

I’ll start with De Bruyne who spoke on the Saturday. For me it was the focus, the steely determination. The fact that he’s there to do a job. He’s well aware of what Neapolitan culture entails, of how warm the people are but he wasn’t going to make any concession to them which I was amazed by, to be honest. Ordinarily you’d see a footballer who is keen to impress, they get a little feel for it, they are talking to people from the club or they’ve seen from other players in the past. We’ve seen it with Head Coaches like Spalletti or Conte by sprinkling in Neapolitan – I’m guilty of this myself – playing to the gallery-

HB: Guilty or… very professional and now viral and you are immortalised on the walls of Naples!

PK: [laughs] Thank you very much… But there was none of that from De Bruyne at all. I was amazed by that, to be honest. That really strikes me as someone who is utterly convinced of their ability and of what they can offer as a player and a footballer.

I think he knows that he’s been recruited to perform on the pitch first and foremost and as long as he’s doing that, the fans will forgive him any desire for a quiet life. I actually think the fans might even afford him a bit more privacy if he is performing. They’re not stupid, they’re going to see that the best way to get the best out of De Bruyne is to leave him well alone. Show support, show passion for him but also stay at arm’s length and that might play into it.

There was a contrast of that with his humility. He was pointing out that there are younger guys who will be at the club for longer and he doesn’t think the team is being built around him, and how he he’ll have to get used to Conte’s system after so many years of Guardiola. He said he was there to lend his experience and hopefully take the club to the next level, whilst, at the same time, performing at the highest level in the Champions League and learning about Serie A.

He’s quite intimidating to be honest. I met him very briefly backstage because we were in a theatre, Henry, which you’ll be pleased to know, I shook his hand and explained to him it was all going to work. He was very cordial but serious, shook my hand and said that was all fine and made sense. For me, I’m very happy with that!

Noa Lang: A Showman Ready For His Napoli Stage

As for Noa Lang, very different. As I’m sure you’ve seen from some of the things he’s said since signing, very different. I do like that. On the one hand you could say ‘you’re setting yourself up to fail’ because you’re setting the bar very high. On the other, I’m a big believer in the maxim: back yourself. Self confidence is huge in life, especially if you’re a footballer trying to play in front of 50,000 fans for the defending champions. Even more so when people are saying you are the successor to Khvicha Kvaratskhelia and whether you can pick up his legacy.

What I liked about him was that the first thing he did, backstage, was talk to some of the guys from social media, and said ‘What if I went out there and say, ‘ciao ragazzi’ when I get out there?’ And they thought that was great. Immediately when he sits down he just very casually says, ‘Ciao ragazzi’ and he’s immediately got the entire media onside. Plus he’s a slightly more colourful character, they loved delving into his musical alias Noano, which unfortunately was news to me!

Unlike me, he understood what he was being asked, when they said, ‘Do you feel more spiritually like Noano?’ [which is his stage-name for his platinum/gold rapping career] Now, that’s a side hustle. I like to think that have two parallel careers going on.

HB: Are you going to develop a side-hustle in rapping?

PK: Perhaps I should! I should definitely get a nom-de-plume.

HB: I think your commentary will absolutely at some point find its way into a Neapolitan rap track. At that moment you can say, ‘My work here is done’.

PK: Maybe I should have asked Noa Lang to put a word in to Geolier… But no, at the conference Lang was great with all that and it made me laugh.

De Bruyne and Lang seemed like very different people but I’m particularly excited by Lang. I know what to expect from De Bruyne, particularly if he plays anything like he did at Manchester City. I broke my own rule which is never watch any YouTube clips but I tweeted the other day that I thought I saw some similarities in the way he moves with Eden Hazard but then a Belgian friend of mine (who is a big Romanista) replied and said he’s not fit to lace his boots.

To hear the rest of Patrick’s interview, where he tells us where to get excellent pizza in Naples and how to pronounce Dimaro properly, listen to the next In The Shadow of Vesuvio. Subscribe to our show on Apple, Spotify or Acast.