04 November

By Romily Broad

EA rocked London's Trafalgar Square on Friday 31st October and Saturday 1st November with its annual Be The One games extravaganza. And there we met the UK's No. 1 FIFA player, Chris Bullard, who took to the stage to show off his not inconsiderable skills.

As well as a huge number of PCs and consoles set up to entertain the buzzing crowd all day, Be The One also boasted a large stage hosting live events and music long into the evening on both days. Celebs abounded, rock was rolled, everyone had fun (despite the weather), and it was all quite impressive really.

But Chris, or ChriSSyB as he's known in pro-gaming circles, was there to take part in the IGN Trans-Atlantic Challenge and that's what we went along to check out.

The event, organised by IGN, matched up FIFA 09 supremo Chris with his Madden NFL 09 counterpart from the States, Ryan Glick. Both faced off against each other in games of FIFA and Madden, with Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09 on hand to decide it if there was no clear winner. Which, naturally, there wasn't.

Chris made suitably easy work of his opponent in FIFA, with flowing passing moves and deft skills leading his fun-time-favourite Chelsea to a 2-0 lead - and a win - by half time.

He performed less well at Madden. Glick showed exactly why he's the leading light amongst the massive and rabid community of Madden players in the States. Let's just say it didn't take very long for Glick to notch up the two touchdowns required to take the win, with our man looking slightly bemused at proceedings.

Not that we had any better an idea of what was going than him, to be fair. It's a funny old business, that American handball thing.

So Tiger Woods it was. The two contenders came together on the stage later in evening for the final match-up, after Chris had spent the afternoon taking on all-comers in the BattleDome. We think that fatigue from all that hard work got to Chris, who lost out to Ryan in a tense sudden-death finish and had to watch on as the American lofted a rather striking 16-inch silver trophy for the crowd.

Both pros were suitably impressed with each other's skills though, and Chris was magnanimous in defeat. Read a full report from the day over at IGN HERE.

But just before that disappointing conclusion to the day, we managed to stick a microphone under the big man's nose and ask him some probing questions.

Listen to the interview HERE. (Internet Explorer only. FireFox users, right-click and Save Link As...)

It's worth adding, by the way, that Chris travelled north the next day to take part in a £2,500 FIFA tournament at the i35 LAN event in Coventry. Which he WON.

Trophies schmophies.