Another Bloody Saturday E-Book

Mat Guy

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 491

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Another Bloody Saturday is a book celebrating all that makes football the sport that it is. It explores the passions and devotion of those that support a team, a nation, a dream. By exploring football in the lower leagues and non-league, as well as lesser known clubs and nations abroad, the book attempts to reveal the true soul of football that is often lost among the glitz and glamour of the premier League and the Champions League. Ultimately, Another Bloody Saturday is about all that makes football so captivating and all-encompassing to so many, making a supporter's team and club a near religion. A small selection of clubs featured include: Accrington Stanley, Bangor City, Partick Thistle, Tibetan National Team, Bhutan National Team, Bristol Rovers and Arsenal Ladies.

Leseprobe

MAT GUY lives in Southampton with his wife and, if he were allowed, a cat that would probably be called Stanley. He has supported Southampton and Salisbury since he was a young boy and has written about football for The Football Pink and Stand, as well as on his own blog Dreams of Victoria Park. When not fretting about promotion and relegation in the Faroe Islands Football League, Mat enjoys open water swimming and taking part in endurance swims across the country.

First published 2015

New edition 2016

Reprinted 2017, 2019, 2020, 2024

ISBN: 978-1-910324-63-9

The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

Typeset in 10 point Sabon by Main Point Books, Edinburgh

© Mat Guy 2015, 2016

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Bangor City v UMF Stjarnan

2 Swindon Town v Southampton

3HB Tórshavn v Skála

4 Wales Women v England Women

5 Cowes Sports v Yate Town

6 Accrington Stanley v Tranmere Rovers

7 Northampton Town v Accrington Stanley

8 Aldershot Town v Bristol Rovers

9 Manchester City Ladies v Arsenal Ladies

10 Partick Thistle v St Johnstone

11 Tibet v North Cyprus

12 Wimbledon v Dagenham & Redbridge

13 England Women v Germany Women

14 Portsmouth v Accrington Stanley

15 Yeovil Town v Accrington Stanley

16 Lymington Town v Brockenhurst

17 Downton v Amesbury Town

18 Corinthian v Beckenham Town

19 Eastleigh v Torquay United

20 Plymouth Argyle v Bury

21 Sri Lanka v Bhutan

22 Accrington Stanley v York City

23 Lydd Town v Lewisham Borough

24 Accrington Stanley v Carlisle United

25 Dagenham & Redbridge v Accrington Stanley

26 The End of the Road

Postscript

Acknowledgements

THIS BOOK WOULD not exist without the faith and vision of Gavin MacDougall at Luath Press, nor without the support of my long-suffering wife Deb (I mean seriously, who takes a beautiful woman on a second date to see Shrewsbury play Brighton in the Fourth Division!).

Without the painstaking dedication, passion and talent of my editor Juliette King this book would be nothing. Thank you for everything and for putting up with my errant grammar!

My sister Nicky, her husband Nick, their two sons Sam and George, and their dog Reggie have been vital lifelines on a collective journey through traumatic times. They have also been great companions on football adventures far and wide.

Thank you also to Mum for standing in the freezing cold every Sunday morning, having driven me all over the county to play football. Thanks are also in order for patiently waiting for me to finish staring dreamily at empty stadiums, or in club shops wherever we went on holiday.

I am indebted to Kalsang Dhondup, Lobsang Wangyal, Tenzin Dhondup and Jigme Dorjee of the Tibetan National Football Team for their friendship, inspiration and insight, and I am equally thankful to Marni Mortensen, Hannis Egholm and his friend Jacob for their hospitality and expertise on all things football in the Faroe Islands.

To Karma Dorji, Karun Gurung, Chokey Nima and all the other wonderful people from Druk United in Bhutan, I thank you for taking me on an adventure of a lifetime.

Thanks also must go to Dan Seaborne for his friendship, inspiration and honesty. While there are pros like him in the game then we truly have a very special game indeed.

To Keil Clitheroe, Mark Turner, Nick Westwell and everyone else that makes up the Accrington Stanley Family, thank you for your time, friendship, humility and humour. You are what makes football so special.

Thank you to Mark Godfrey from The Football Pink and Bill Biss from Stand for your support and for publishing a number of articles that I have written. And to everyone that reads the blog Dreams of Victoria Park, your interest and support has been the catalyst for this book, and for that I am eternally grateful.

Football wouldn’t mean quite as much if it wasn’t experienced with friends, so to Emma Townley, who provided a great number of pictures, and even more ludicrous comments, to Greg Joyce, Effie Woods, Will Taylor, Emma Harvey, Russell Guiver, Jennifer Hosking, Tash Davies, Sarah Bourne, Jamie Burton, Rich Aston and Kieran Rogers, thank you for making life watching football so much fun. Thank you too Margaret King, for your invaluable insights on life, writing and everything in between!

When I was a young boy, Grandad bought me an Airfix kit of a Triceratops for me to do while I stayed with them over the summer. I tried and tried, but got really frustrated at how fiddly it was and pushed it away, saying it was impossible. The only time I ever heard him raise his voice was as I pushed the kit away; his raised voice not necessarily aimed at me directly, but at the thought that I could think things were impossible.

‘No, nothing is impossible. Nothing.’

I got up and walked out and sat in the garden in a huff. An hour or two later, when I had gotten bored, I came back inside to find a completed Triceratops waiting for me in the front room. I’m not sure if I got the meaning right away, but it affected me enough to keep that fragile model for a couple of decades, until it fell apart, knowing that it was an important symbol of an important moment.

Now, finally, as I write these words to this book I think I really get what he meant.

So to the man who inspired me and this entire book; a man with an infectious smile, who told tall tales and terrible jokes on long walks and had a positive mentality that taught me so much, to the man who is, was and always will be my hero: this is for you, Grandad.

The original blog which inspired this book can be found at:

dreamsofvictoriapark.wordpress.com

Introduction

THE TWO REASONS I started to write this book remain just as valid now as they did on its initial publication: one was my reaction to the demise of Salisbury City, one of the two football clubs closest to my heart; and two, the sadness that so many other clubs are struggling to keep afloat on dwindling crowds.

Satellite sports packages continue to lure fans away from the terraces. Signing up for a satellite season ticket to watch the world’s best players from the comfort and warmth of your front room, rather than standing under windswept skies at places like Hartlepool on a bitter Tuesday night in February, is very tempting.

However, there is so much more to football than what we see on glossy television programmes, so much more to it that the cameras can never capture. This book is a celebration of what it actually means and feels to be part of a crowd, no matter how small, no matter where. It is a celebration of the sights and sounds that watching football at all levels can offer – and that the sofa season ticket holders, and more importantly, their children, are missing out on. And that makes me sad, because my experiences of going to see Southampton (the other love affair) and Salisbury when I was young are some of the most vivid and exciting of my childhood. I was never happier than when sat next to my grandfather watching Salisbury play at the beautifully dilapidated (even back then), long since gone, Victoria Park.

Those experiences are still so real to me now, 30 years on, that I can close my eyes and reach out and touch them: the sound of horns from cars parked precariously behind one goal at Victoria Park, honking every time Salisbury scored; the rallying cry of ‘Tally Ho’ from an old-timer sat further along the stand we used to sit in; the rich aroma of roll-ups and cigars drifting on the air; the swearing, the humour, the exhilarating play (I’ve probably over-egged that in my mind); the awful shanked shots that would trouble the corner flag and make my grandfather chuckle (probably far more frequent than my rose tinted non-league glasses recall); the amazing chats with a lovely man who used to work with Grandad called Cyril Smith, who was Salisbury through and through and used to take our admission money on the gate and sell us a programme (one each, carefully stashed under our legs when we sat down, to keep them flat for later reading).

Cyril would always ask how I was getting on playing in my boys team, but he was very self-deprecating and never mentioned that he’d played for Southampton and Arsenal during the war, and later, for Salisbury. Grandad told me. And then Cyril photocopied some programmes from his wartime footballing exploits when he learned from Grandad that I loved collecting them. I’ve spent years trying to find originals, with some success, and I still have Cyril’s photocopies stashed away, like the treasure they are, in programme collection.

Cyril’s Southampton career was cut short when his house was bombed during the Blitz. Among the programmes he copied for me was an away match with Brighton that only lasted five minutes – an air-raid siren not long after kick off had players and fans running for cover as German bombers droned over head. The match never got restarted. The coach taking them back home had to inch its way along, unable to use its headlights in the blackout, finally arriving in the early hours of the morning.

Hearing about those experiences really helped me get football, all levels of it, under my skin. The drive to reconnect with those halcyon times took on an extra urgency after it became apparent that Salisbury – the Salisbury that my grandfather and I knew – had disappeared for good.

Ever since my grandfather’s passing in 2011, a trip to a Salisbury match, or even knowing that such a trip was possible, would bring moments when the ghosts of a happy past met the present, allowing us to share a terrace once more, the ghosts of Victoria Park, its people, sights and sounds mingling with younger supporters who hadn’t even been born when the club left that beautiful old ground for pastures new.

Our last ever game together (though we didn’t openly acknowledge it at the time, even though his extremely frail state made getting to the ground, and a seat, very difficult for him), was against York on the final day of the 2007/08 season.

As we sat in the warmth of a late spring afternoon, we talked about the next season and games we wanted to see, even though I think we both knew that it was unlikely we would ever return there together.

But even though that was our last visit to Victoria Park, we still had match reports in the paper to talk about. We had the club. We had something. Even in the dark days of his dementia, we would share lucid moments, looking at the league table, at old programmes.

Maybe it made him feel like he was back to normal for a time.

I know I found value in it, and when he passed away I took comfort looking through those old programmes; the sights and sounds, smells coming back to life of those happy days.

The same thing would happen when I went to a game; that feeling of reconnecting with him once more, with Cyril, the old ground, the ghosts of the past mingling with the present.

And it was that connection, or the loss of having that connection that hit me hardest when Salisbury disappeared and the ground fell into silence.

Not only had I been robbed of a club that meant so much to me and my grandfather, but I’d also lost a way of connecting to those happier times, to him. There was no natural home for these memories anymore.

It didn’t hit me just how important that link through time, that connection that our football club had been, was until it was gone. It was as if a door had been slammed shut on those memories, memories that had helped me cope with Grandad’s passing, and with other trauma in my personal life, it felt like a kind of bereavement all over again. The only way to regain that precious connection would be to open some new doors and see what could be seen.

On my travels around the country I found myself in some very strange and exhilarating places, visiting old and run-down grounds full of character where I experienced the eccentricities of the people and communities that make up the footballing diaspora. I encountered the amazing characters that keep the true identity of football alive, far from the fame and the millions of the Premier League; the volunteers that have devoted their lives to the cause, the long-time fans providing wit and humour from their usual spot on the terrace; the players, some of whom have amazing stories to tell; . these institutions are struggling to survive.

This book is an attempt to reveal the real love story these people have with real football; a football that exists beyond the television screen.

It is a book celebrating all that is great with the game of football as seen through the eyes of clubs and fans rarely bothered by satellite television cameras and the riches of the elite game. Theirs is a vibrant world of humour, warmth and friendship that has a value beyond price.

These are the clubs struggling to stay afloat in a world where new generations of football fans aren’t getting to experience anything other than television punditry, who may never get to witness a non-league manager climb into a stand and offer a supporter who had been haranguing him his money back, on the promise that he ‘f*ck off’.

This is why I felt compelled to write a diary of a season travelling around the backwaters of football – to find a way of reconnecting with the ghosts of Victoria Park and my grandfather, and also to inspire others to turn off their remotes every now and then, and give a random game a go. You never know what you may see and find.

This may be a book describing my adventures during the 2014/15 season, but in the characters it describes, the love and devotion it discovers, the rich wealth of warmth, passion, history, and community that it uncovers, it could be any season, past or present. And let’s hope, through the singular dedication of a small band of fans, volunteers, and underpaid and overworked staff, these wonderful institutions remain vibrant for many more seasons to come.

It is a great place to find friendship, humour, captivating sport and the true soul of football; and with our support, long may it continue.

Mat Guy, September 2016

1

13 July 2014. Bangor City v UMF Stjarnan Europa League First Qualifying Round Second Leg

NIGHT GAMES ARE always special. I’ll never forget my first night match: Southampton v Hull in a Milk Cup match in September 1984. The clack and clatter of the turnstiles, programme sellers barking ‘’ogrammes, come and get you ’ogrammes’ into the darkening skies, the glow of the floodlights visible from far away like a call to prayer. I remember heading up the old wooden steps of The Dell, pausing at the top in awe at the pristine playing surface below, shimmering a perfect emerald green beneath the lights, at the stands, slowly filling, rising up on each side, at a marching band playing in one corner while the players warmed up. The atmosphere, to an 11-year-old boy, was intoxicating and thrilling beyond words.

Night games are special. I go to as many as I can, especially towards the start of any season, like that first match against Hull. This is why I found myself driving to Bangor to watch a Europa League first qualifying round second leg match between Bangor City and Stjarnan of Iceland. I was wondering if the mid-July fixture, combined with the early kick-off time of 6.45pm, would have any effect on the night game feeling, not, as possibly more rational people might, questioning why I was driving from Southampton to Bangor and back on a Thursday night to see a second leg match of a game already out of Bangor’s grasp?

I was thinking about this to distract myself from the fear that was creeping up on me in two waves. The first was that I’d eaten too many Skittles and Starburst for any one human being, the result being that I felt like a saucer-eyed Hunter S Thomson caricature hurtling across the country, completely out of control. The second fear was that I was going to lose my mind if I had to hear any more of the twisted ‘logic’ of Emma, my regular companion on these long trips (who had provided all the sweets that were causing my mania and was therefore, in my mind, Dr Gonzo to my Hunter ST). It was the topic of time travel that seemed to keep returning to blight hours of tedious motorway driving.

‘But I don’t get it? If you get on a plane in Australia and fly to England, which takes a day, but arrive on the same day that you left – surely that’s time travel. You’ve gained a day in your life, right?’

‘We’ve gone over this so many times, you haven’t gained a day. You’ve just travelled through many time zones over the course of day, resulting in you arriving in another country technically on the same date as you left. That’s not time travel.’

‘But, you’ve gained a day. That day you left, you can do what you want with it, again, since you used the first day to fly, surely?’

‘No,’ I shook my head. ‘That’s not how it works. Time is linear; hours, minutes and so on are a construct of man to document the passing of seasons. You have to be on a plane for a whole day for you to fly from Australia to England. An actual day. Just because it’s the same calendar date, due to the many time zones that cover the world so lots of people don’t have to live their waking life in the dark, doesn’t mean that it’s time travel. It’s just travelling while time is happening.’

‘But… you get an extra day…’

I lost my cool. ‘Jesus f*****g Christ Emma! You don’t get an extra day and it’s not time travel! It’s just how mankind measures the passing of lunar cycles; you don’t go back in time by flying from Australia to f*****g England!’

She shook her head. ‘No.’

‘What do you mean “No”? That’s not a response, you can’t just say “No”.’

‘No.’

There was silence for a little while. I ate some more Skittles.

‘What if you kept flying west, like, refuelling the plane as you went? You’d definitely be going back in time doing that, wouldn’t you?’

I could feel my eyes beginning to bulge.

‘We’re stopping at these services up ahead. I need some fresh air.’

I’d been to two early qualifying rounds of European competitions before, but this one felt like a proper fixture between teams that would have no chance of bothering the group stages, let alone the final in ten months’ time.

I’d been to Anfield to watch Liverpool play FBK Kaunas in the second qualifying round of the Champions League the season after they’d won the thing. It was an amazing experience, with the Kop singing ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ and the memorials to the Hillsborough and Heysel tragedies. It was spine-tingling stuff.

The second match was between Fulham, then a long-established Premier League team, and NSÍ Runavik of the Faroe Islands in 2011, when Fulham had qualified through the fair play league. There was intense stuff at Craven Cottage on a warm summer’s evening on the Thames too, though not from the beautifully antiquated ground but from the Michael Jackson statue that was so bad it had my friend in absolute awe. I had to gently lead him away to watch the match. I think he would have been quite happy to spend his entire time at the lovely old ground studying that gaudy, plastic horror show in the corner. This, thankfully for the Fulham faithful, has now departed.

Both grounds and clubs were big time, stuck in the early qualifying rounds by chance: Liverpool because UEFA let them defend their title even though they hadn’t qualified through the league, controversially at the expense of their city rivals Everton, and Fulham because they had started the least amount of fights.

But Bangor City, of the Welsh Premier League, and Stjarnan of Iceland… this was the sort of match that typifies the early qualifying rounds, the sort of match I’d been dreaming of for years.

Every July, I’d find myself looking at the opening round draws, wondering how long it would take to drive to Luxembourg and back. Every July, I’d disappoint myself with the realisation that 16 hours and two channel tunnel trips to watch FC Dudelange might constitute insanity. (Might. I’m still thinking about it.) But North Wales and a paltry ten hours in the car to watch a Welsh semi-pro team take on a club from the suburbs of Reykjavik, well, that wasn’t so bad.

In fact, it was well worth it when we were confronted by the scenery of the north Wales coastline: wind farms (I like them) faint on the horizon out to sea; the mountains of the Snowdonia National Park rising up inland to our left; signposts to Llanberis proof that Snowdon and its stunning views were within reach. It had been bright and sunny all the way up, but the mountains reared up as we approached Bangor and clouds began to snag among them. The silence as we took it all in was interrupted just the once.

‘If they were low enough, could you punch a cloud?’

Bangor is a picturesque town of 16,000 inhabitants, topped up by another 8,000 students who attend the university. It sits on the banks of the Menai straits overlooking Anglesey and we headed straight to the pier (I love piers) to stretch our legs and take in the view. Even people who don’t get excited by piers, something I don’t understand but appreciate can happen, would find Bangor pier enchanting; the perfect antidote to a long motorway drive. It was quiet, save for the cries of a gull skittering away between the stanchions below from a couple of men in waders harvesting mussels from little eddies of water that snaked through the vast mud flats of low tide.

‘Does your friend want to come in and take some pictures?’ The lovely official on the gate asked when he noticed Emma’s camera. ‘The ground is nice and quiet just now.’ It was about three hours before kick-off and we’d just collected our tickets.

‘Really? Is that ok?’ I asked.

‘Of course it is,’ he said, opening the turnstile, ‘have a good look round now.’

The Book People Stadium was opened in 2012 and is a beautiful place to take in a football match. Through the fence and trees on the far side of the ground you can see down to the Menai Straits, and if it hadn’t been built in a little dell surrounded by trees you would be able to see the mountains beyond Bangor as well.

The flags of Wales, Iceland and UEFA fluttered on either side of the main stand which looked like it could hold maybe 700 people. A few people were tending to things around the ground; the pitch was pristine on what was, for Bangor, the first day of the home season. As Emma took her pictures I watched the people working. You could see the sense of pride, as you could in the lovely official on the gate, as they worked; pride in their club, their stadium, the community it stood for and the fact that they were back in Europe. I felt excited to be there to witness it.

It’s amazing how quickly all the fatigue of a long drive just falls away once you get to a ground, especially one so warm and welcoming as Bangor’s.

Pictures done, we headed for a bite to eat at The Antelope pub right on the corner of the Menai Bridge. Like everything else here the bridge is beautiful in its design, and links the mainland to Anglesey. At The Antelope we saw our first Stjarnan fans wearing specially made tour shirts to mark their first ever excursion into European football. There were three of them and we later discovered that they made up one tenth of the away fans who had made the long and expensive trip.

I’m guessing that there was some UEFA stipulation that Bangor could only sell tickets for the seated areas of their ground, which meant that as the 6.45pm kick-off approached it didn’t look very busy. However, the tannoy announced that the attendance was 805, 150 or so less than the total number of seats available. Not too shabby really for a match pretty much out of Bangor’s grasp already.

As the players warmed up one of the locals, an old-timer who looked and sounded not unlike Ricky Tomlinson of Royal Family fame, motioned to the Stjarnan keeper.

‘Hey keeper, do you speak English?’

Ingvar Jónsson stopped his warm up and nodded, approaching the barrier.

‘Good. Could you let in four goals please?’

Jónsson stopped, shook his head in slight disbelief and went back to warming up. The old-timer chuckled to himself, then carried on round the ground to one of the two small stands on the far side of the pitch.

‘Do you speak English?’ had been a good shout, as it quickly became apparent that my flippant comment in the car about ‘why spend so much money on signs in Welsh as well as English if no-one speaks it?’ had been well off the mark. There were lots of people talking in Welsh, at the pub and in and around the ground, and arguably they outnumbered those speaking English. It had a soft, lilting sound to it and reminded me a lot of the Faroese language I heard when I went out there (another chapter entirely), and indeed the Icelandic we could hear being spoken from one small corner of the main stand.

It also helped to answer another question that I had been thinking about in the car, nonsensical Emma-isms notwithstanding, namely: ‘why do some teams prefer to play in the Welsh Premier League, rather than in the larger English pyramid system, like Colwyn Bay just up the road, with more opportunities potentially to move up into bigger professional leagues against bigger name sides?’

The answer was all around me as I watched the stands begin to fill: because the people of Bangor are Welsh, a lot of them speak Welsh, their community and identity is clear, their league is theirs and is perfectly fine to satisfy their desire for good, competitive football. If you do well you have a chance of playing in Europe, of winning the league and being the best team in Wales. They are the epitome of why I wanted to start this book in the first place: because life doesn’t revolve around the English Premier League, and this match, this stadium, this atmosphere of simple pride in their culture and identity proved that.

We found a couple of seats in front of the old-timer who had been bothering the Stjarnan goalie and sat in raptures as he and three of his friends, all, like him, in their 70s, talked and ranted about a controversy raging at their local bowls club.

‘They should have kept it in house, rather than forward it to the league,’ said one.

‘Yeah, now the only way they’ll lift his life ban is if he apologises,’ added another, ‘and we know there’s no chance of that happening.’

‘He’s going to be hard to replace,’ the third man sighed.

‘We shouldn’t have to; it’s all a load of rubbish from the league. We should write back and tell them to f**k off,’ the goalie-botherer replied.

‘F*****g idiots,’ the second man muttered.

I wanted to ask them what their friend had done to warrant a life-time ban from crown bowls, but at that moment the teams came out and that answer will forever remain a mystery. I like to imagine some fist fight over a septuagenarian lady bowler, false teeth flying as a jack smashes into the face of the bowler getting a little too fresh with another’s squeeze.

From the kick-off you could tell that Stjarnan were just sitting back on their 4-0 first leg lead, absorbing some incisive attacks from Bangor’s wide men in Jamie McDaid and man of the match Sion Edwards, supported by some decent play from Damien Allen in midfield. Every now and then Stjarnan upped the pace and looked very dangerous, cutting through Bangor at will, however the match remained goalless through a cagey first half that was lit up by one of the weirdest chants I had ever heard. It rose up out of nowhere from the main stand, in English, and to the tune of The Pet Shop Boys’ ‘Go West’:‘Shoes off if you love Bangor, Shoes off if you love Bangor, Shoes off if you love Bangor, Shoes off if you love Bangor,’ and lots of the fans duly obliged; took off their shoes, and started waving them in the air.

I have no idea how or why this came about, and I didn’t ask. Some things are better left a mystery. They were selling t-shirts in the club shop with a picture of a shoe beneath the slogan ‘Northern Sole’. I’ll leave it at that.

In the second half, Stjarnan slowly began to ramp up the pressure, which finally told midway through with a worldie of a goal from their defender Martin Rauschenberg screaming an unstoppable shot from well outside the box into the top right hand corner. Bangor heads dropped a little, with the exception of Sion Edwards who was immense, running himself into the ground and attacking almost singlehandedly until the final minute.

Gaps began to appear, and Arnar Már Björgvinsson helped himself to two goals as Bangor were cut apart. Right at the end, Atli Jóhannsson scored a tap-in through more incisive passing.

4-0, 8-0 on aggregate seemed a little harsh on a decent Bangor team, but this and the first leg were their first games of the season. Stjarnan were a little under halfway through their Icelandic Premier League season, and were unbeaten in second place. This may well have contributed to the score; one team being ring rusty, the other finely tuned, and maybe if these matches had been played in October, after Bangor had had a few months under their belts, things would have been a little closer. We’ll never know. I got the feeling that Stjarnan just had a little bit more about them, and probably would have no matter when they played. We would see how they got on against Motherwell in the next round.

Without wanting to sound like a clichéd fool, the score-line didn’t really matter too much, as on the day football was the winner. (Jesus!) However, it is true, for a number of reasons: the standing ovation the main stand gave the Stjarnan fans, who had to leave early to catch the last bus back to Wrexham where they were staying, singing and waving their shoes in the air as they headed out the ground. The exhausted Sion Edwards, leaning against the barrier that ran around the pitch apologising to the Bangor fans as they filed out. (Many of them told him: ‘You’ve got nothing to apologise for. You were outstanding.’) The warmth and honesty of Bangor City FC; from their officials, to their fans, to the players, who clearly knew a lot of those that had been in the stands cheering them on.

Football has won the day again when you leave the ground and know that, forever more, you’ll be keeping your eyes out for the Welsh Premier League scores during final score; because, yet again, another club has gotten itself under your skin, (dug in even deeper from reading in the programme – three pounds, solid effort – that beloved ex-Saints manager Nigel Adkins had managed Bangor the last time they played Icelandic opposition). Through knowing its simple and humble place in the firmament; that it is there for the community it represents, that it is there because of the community it represents, it becomes a bit of everyone, and everything, as vital as the Menai Bridge, as unifying and synonymous with the town as the pier.

I just hope that in the coming weeks we can say the same thing about the local bowling community, that sanity prevails, and no-one needs to receive a letter telling them to ‘f**k off’. My arse.

PS. Despite it being a ‘night game’ the floodlights weren’t needed. In fact it was still light long after we set off for home.

2

21 July 2014. Swindon Town v Southampton Pre-season Friendly

PRE-SEASON FIXTURES can often be tedious affairs for those of us in the stands. They are a great work out for the players and useful for the manager in developing things practiced on the training ground, but for the fan the edge is missing with nothing riding on the outcome, and the players are not really at the blood and thunder levels expected of them come mid-August.

I do however enjoy the feeling of just being able to sit back in the warmth (hopefully) of a summer’s evening and watch your team play, knowing that the result doesn’t matter. It is a feeling that brings back happy memories of Victoria Park as a young boy and hot, humid, carefree pre-season summer nights sat in the stands with Grandad, batting at mosquitoes, the rich smell of freshly cut grass thick on the warm breeze as we watched Salisbury take on the reserve sides of Bristol City, Southampton and tonight’s hosts, Swindon Town.

Maybe, if you’re lucky, you can catch that feeling at the end of the season too, at midweek games crammed in to get all the fixtures done on time. I remember as a boy Blackfield & Langley’s Hampshire League matches being played out beneath failing light with midges starting to circle and bite beneath the branches of big old oak trees that lined one side of Blackfield’s recreation park pitch on balmy May evenings, full of the promise of a hot summer to come.

However this feeling, predominantly, is the preserve of pre-season and is a feeling that I like to call ‘Susan Sarandon’. Susan Sarandon, the feeling, is named after Susan Sarandon, the actress, for her role in Bull Durham, a film about a minor league baseball team in the middle of anywhere America. Her character sits in the stands every match and tries to help one player every season with her own special kind of coaching. It’s a great film and you should check it out. It captures Susan Sarandon, the feeling, or the notion I have of what it must be like to watch small town baseball at the height of an American summer, with hot, balmy evenings, the chatter of families and friends in the bleachers lazily watching the play below, the crack of ball on bat, ripples of applause, organ music drifting up into the floodlit night sky between innings. It seems idyllic, at least that is how it is portrayed in the movie, and that is how I gauge if a pre-season football match is any good: if I am feeling all Susan Sarandon.

Even with the possibility of feeling Susan, I rarely go to friendlies. It is good to see players playing with a total freedom, trying little things knowing it’s not the end of the world if they don’t work. That’s all good, but more than one a season and their lack of edge, and sometimes their lack of Ms Sarandon if it is belting it down with rain, and I start to feel a bit unfulfilled.

However this friendly was worth the relatively short trip for three reasons: to see a dear old friend who we didn’t get to see enough of, to watch a match in a lower league stadium and to see the remnants of a very successful Saints team, now decimated by manager and player departures, try and shape itself up for a new campaign.

Ronald Koeman, our new manager, in reaction to what seemed like every single player wanting to leave the club, had come in with the revolutionary (or just pragmatic, given the amount of empty seats on the team bus) tactic of fielding a six-a-side team in the Premier League the coming season. The hope was presumably that a rush goalie system used in school playgrounds the length of the country would bamboozle some of the world’s great tacticians and lead to an unorthodox first Premier League title. With respect to our hosts, Third Division Swindon Town, Koeman decided to pad out the team to a full 11 with academy players, not wanting to show his hand too early on. Keep them guessing Ronald, I like it.

For Saints fans, the new season was almost something to dread. We had lost one of the best young managers in the game, who moved to Tottenham, we had lost our captain and most creative player to Liverpool, our talismanic striker, also to Liverpool, and we were about to lose our best centre back, to cocking Liverpool! Our latest in a long line of 18-year-old wonderkids had gone to Manchester United, and Arsenal, Tottenham and many others were circling around another five of our players.

This was happening because last season we played some of the most attractive and attacking football the Premier League had ever seen outside the top four teams. And those big teams wanted a little of the magic dust we had spent years creating and honing. Such is life spent supporting what is seen as a ‘small’ club.

I’m not bitter, I’m really not; we don’t have the financial clout to reach the Champions League, so sometimes the most talented players need to move on, to challenge themselves. (Though I may seem bitter after the first game of the season, away to Liverpool, if three certain players all score!)

It’s going to be a tough season; an impossible season if we compare it to the high water-mark of the last. We just have to hope.

But back to my list of three reasons why we were rocking up at the County Ground, Swindon on a Monday night in July. Number one: Effie.

I met Effie when she came to work where I do. She is a delightfully wonderful and lovely, caring human being. We all need an Effie in our lives and hopefully you all have one. However, no matter how lovely she was, when she arrived at work to help fund her studies at university she was not a football fan.

I discovered this due to another work colleague pulling out of an away trip to Walsall in December 2009, back when Saints, fresh from being saved from oblivion by sadly now passed Markus Liebherr, were still in the relegation zone at the foot of the Third Division, battling to overcome a ten point penalty for going into administration the season before.

We had the four tickets, Greg (another long time away travels companion) and I. A third ticket was filled by an Emma (not the Emma already mentioned). So what to do with the fourth ticket? Walsall away, December, bottom of the Third Division; it was such an attractive proposition, that ticket should have flown out of our hands, but it hadn’t and we had run out of football friends to ask. But there was Effie, sat at work, and as a joke, knowing we had never even really had a conversation about football before, I asked her if she would like to come.

‘Yeah, alright,’ she replied, to my considerable surprise.

‘But it’s tomorrow,’ I warned her.

‘That’s fine. Can you pick me up?’

From one throwaway comment doth a freakin’ monster grow! Effie quickly fell in love with the atmosphere, the passion, the camaraderie and everything else that is associated with following a lower league football team. She went to every game she possibly could, come rain or shine, sleet or snow. She fell hook, line and sinker, heading every ball, celebrating every goal like she had scored it herself, hurling abuse that would have made a docker blush at every injustice. It was wonderful to watch.

Seeing her experience her first night match, home wins and losses, away wins and losses, terrible refereeing, and amazing goals was like having an out of body experience, watching myself as a young boy going through it all for the first time. No-one made her like it. It just captivated her all on its own.

They had a nickname for me when Greg, Effie and I set off from work across the car park to another Saints game – Gandalf, the cheeky shits. Because I was much older and much taller than the other two, it looked like I was leading a couple of Hobbits off on another adventure, which, I suppose, I kind of was. I often felt like such a comforting figure as Gandalf when Saints lost, looking down at the two forlorn faces either side of me, trying to cheer them up.

However, it could have all been so different if Effie hadn’t had something clarified to her in the away end at the Bescot Stadium, Walsall, on that cold December afternoon. After the kick-off Greg and I quickly became engrossed, and didn’t really see the concern, almost horror, spreading across Effie and Emma’s faces. Saints were shooting towards us in the first half and every goal kick by Trinidad International Clayton Ince was greeted with the traditional chant of ‘YOU FAT BASTARD AAAAHHHHHHH!’

Although annoying, it was actually quite funny, because either the Walsall goalie had a very unflattering shirt on, or he was in fact getting on for a right old pie of a man. I don’t think it was the shirt. It wasn’t until midway through the first half that I caught the girls’ concerned expressions after another goal kick.

‘I can’t believe it,’ one of them was saying.

‘Are they really allowed to get away with that?’

Emma shrugged.

‘Get away with what?’ I asked.

‘Calling him that,’ said Effie.

‘But,’ I said ‘but… he is?’

‘Yeah, I know, but Jesus. It’s the 21st century. It’s disgraceful.’

‘Wait a minute. What do you think they’re singing?’

‘Well, I really don’t want to say it, but… aren’t they singing “you black bastard”?’ Effie blushed.

‘Fat, Effie. They‘re singing “you fat bastard”.’

Emma and Effie digested this information for a moment, then fell away into fits of hysterical laughter which led to them pretty much missing the rest of the half.

‘Ohmygodithoughttheyweresingingblackohmygodwellthatsfairenough heisprettyfat.’

Had Effie not asked the question there is a very good chance neither she nor Emma would have ever set foot in a football ground again. They would have probably avoided me and Greg as well, seeing our chuckles as tacit acknowledgement of BNP membership.

The second reason for an evening out in Swindon was the enjoyment to be gained from watching football in a lower league ground, albeit a pretty large one. I’d been to a number before, mainly with my old mate Russ who was a Brighton supporter back when Brighton were homeless and hovering above the relegation zone in division four in the late ’90s. I’d loved the trips to Darlington (twice), Exeter, Southend and Shrewsbury, because they felt like ‘proper’ football matches at ‘proper’ grounds. Southampton had been a top flight team pretty much all my life. I’d never experienced relegation out of the big division until 2005 and as such you get a little bit pampered watching the best of the best all the time in big stadiums. However lower league football offered me a step back in time to the feelings of watching Salisbury in the southern league in the ’80s, watching matches in great little grounds bursting with character; I mourn the loss of Darlington’s old Feethams ground even now. It’s sad that no-one else can enjoy its wonderfully ramshackle charm.

I didn’t see much to be positive about when we slipped into administration in 2009, quickly followed by relegation into division three. I felt particularly glum on one miserable trip to Sheffield Wednesday Greg and I took in April 2009, the week after we’d been put into administration. We lost 3-0, were truly awful and had to stand, on the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough tragedy in the Lepping’s Lane end (where those terrible events occurred), in front of 96 empty seats, each one with a bouquet of flowers for every lost soul that day.

No, there was not much to feel positive about.

What followed, however, turned into the best five years of supporting the Saints I had ever had: a Wembley win in the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy, successive promotions, followed by stabilisation, then significant progress back into the top flight. What beat all of that, hands down, were the two seasons in the Third Division watching a completely different set of teams week in, week out. Smaller clubs from smaller towns, with fans even more dedicated than those from Premier League teams, as these sides had little chance of glory ever. The football was great; these teams really tried to play and it felt more like football back when I was growing up, before the financial explosion of the Premier League.

Both Greg and I were really getting into watching Saints play Exeter, Hartlepool, Orient to name but a few. It was good honest stuff, between honest teams, supported by honest, passionate fans. We wanted more, so we started to go to away games, to places like Wycombe, Yeovil, Walsall (as you know) and Bristol Rovers. I screamed like a little girl when Morgan Schneiderlin, my hero, scored his first goal for the club. While everyone else was cheering and shouting as his dipping, long range shot smashed into the net, I found myself screaming ‘MORGAAAAAAN’ at the top of my lungs, much to Greg’s amusement. Even now I get a barrage of texts spelt much like that every time he scores!

Third Division football was a blessing and a joy, and enabled me to delve into another side, a more honest and believable side to modern football in England, taking in grounds full of character and soul, rarely troubled by success. In our second and last season in the Third Division I went back to Walsall with Effie, as well as Brentford (the only ground with a pub on each corner), Carlisle, and on a cold Tuesday evening in February, to Hartlepool. It seemed like glorious serendipity as I got off the coach outside Hartlepool’s ground, after a seven hour journey, to see ‘Welcome to Victoria Park’ written across a sign at its entrance. It was love at first sight; that little ground, which, although obscured by the night, overlooked the town centre, the harbour and the North Sea beyond.

I bought two programmes that night; one for me and one for Grandad, and I wrote to him on the long coach journey back home how I’d been to Victoria Park once more. I had gotten into the habit of buying an extra programme for Grandad the year before. He was in the advanced stages of dementia by then and we were looking to find ways to keep him stimulated. I had thought of programmes.

We had always gotten a programme each wherever we went to see football together, and as a boy I would, from time to time, get the odd programme through the post from him whenever he had gotten one from one of his workmates, who knew I loved them and would bring them in for me if they went to a match. The excitement I felt when a new little parcel with a Salisbury postmark fell through the letterbox was intense. Where was this one from?

To this day my favourite programme, of a collection exceeding 1,200, is an old and battered Hampshire League one from Downton in 1984 that had clearly been folded up and forgotten about by Bobby Andrews, Downton forward and work colleague of Grandad, after a match that he had played in. After some time being battered about in his work coat he noticed it again and gave it to Grandad, who handed it on to me almost apologetically, stained and beat up as it was.

I loved it. It smelled of oil, but I loved it; the red cover, the logo of a Robin on the front (their nickname is the Robins), the erratically typed notes inside, the name of Bobby Andrews on the team sheet in the centre pages. I was in awe, an actual player had given this to Grandad, who gave it to me. An actual player! In the 30 years since, books, programmes, all sorts of stuff have been become misplaced or lost. But not that programme. No way. It’s too precious.

Nan said that after I’d started sending Grandad programmes he would sit quietly and study them from cover to cover, like he used to. How much he was actually taking in wasn’t really the point. He would sit there and pour over them, giving Nan a bit of time to herself.

I don’t know how much he comprehended of that Hartlepool programme and what it meant to me; all those wonderful times that we’d shared at our own Victoria Park and other little non-league grounds that I still cherish so much. I like to think that he knew the significance.

We had driven to Cheltenham, where Effie lived and had returned to once her studies were over, much to my annoyance. There, we met up for some lunch and spent a few hours relaxing on the hills above the pretty town while we waited for her boyfriend Wills, a lovely, funny bloke, to finish work, so we could head off to the match together.

The journey was relatively uneventful, until we came to Swindon. Roundabouts. What the hell?! There were so many, everywhere. It’s like the place where roundabouts from all over the world come to die. Next to the County Ground there was one large roundabout and on it there were five smaller ones! It was total carnage and insanity and we had to cross it three times as we tried to find somewhere near the ground to park.

Ah Susan, sweet, sweet Susan Sarandon! It’s going to be a good evening, I thought, as we took our uncomfortable seats in the away end. The country had been basking in a mini heat-wave for a couple of weeks and you could feel it in the air, even long past seven in the evening; the crowd relaxing in shorts, shielding their eyes from the sun to look out at the players warming up. It was glorious; if you listened closely you could hear the faint crack of bat on ball echoing about the stands, organ music playing in between innings. It was so warm, even in the shaded away stand, that when the sprinklers came on to water the pitch just before the kick-off the faint spray drifting on the air felt refreshing and welcome.

The County Ground consists of two decent size stands running the length of each touchline, a shed end behind one goal and some uncovered seating behind the other. Technically it was a lower league ground, albeit a lower league ground that had hosted Premier League football for a short time in the ’90s. It certainly wasn’t a lower league ground in the way that Hartlepool or Exeter’s are, which is in no way a slight on either. In fact I’d say it’s a compliment.

As we walked around the ‘CG’, as the programme calls it, I noticed a picture of the stadium with six or seven different club badges they had used over the years across the top. I recognised one as being on the cover of a Swindon programme from the ’80s that Grandad had sent me and was therefore my favourite of them all. Surely changing your badge that many times must be a record?

The match, as I had expected, was pretty nondescript; the first half spent trying to work out the names of the many youth team players Saints were fielding. Harrison Reed I recognised as he’d played a bit last season, but there were a few that had me and most of the away end scrabbling along the team sheet in the programme for clues. Whoever they were, they could play pretty well, which was good to see.

The relaxed nature of the whole event had me drifting off from time to time, looking out across the uncovered seating to our left, watching small clouds wander by, the far floodlight stretching up into blue sky that gradually began to tinge with red and as the sun began to set the shadows of the players on the pitch lengthened toward the far touchline. One by one, as dusk fell, the floodlights flickered into life, replacing the natural shadows of the players with the familiar floodlit shadow that seemed to stretch out in three different directions from each player.

I then had a brief physics moment, trying to fathom how four floodlights, one in each corner of the ground, cast only three shadows. After deep thought, I remembered that I was useless at science and had no idea, which settled the issue and the whole thing was filed in the ever bulging ‘it’s good not to know everything’ section of my brain.

The second half followed the same pattern as the first, with Saints dominating play and Swindon creating the odd moment of pressure around our box. But it was Saints’ Jos Hooiveld who scored the only, pretty scrappy, goal of the game, before one of the greatest substitutions I have ever seen.

With about 25 minutes remaining Ronald Koeman made nine changes at the same time, causing great distress to the tannoy announcer who had already struggled through the Saints players names once at the start of the match. The name of our sub goalie, Paulo Gazzaniga had been the highlight, as he stuttered:

‘Um… Paul… io… Gazzy… ahgingingia…’

Unimpressed by Koeman’s antics he just said: ‘Substitution for the Saints,’ then, realising there were nine, he muttered something, paused and then just turned the microphone off.

At the final whistle everyone seemed happy enough; the players had got what they needed out of it and the 3,000 or so supporters had signalled the end of a long off season by getting back into the stands.

‘I can’t wait for the new season to start after that,’ Wills said, seeming to articulate what everyone was thinking. The ball was now rolling and the clock was ticking. The fixtures were out and waiting to provide joy and misery to millions across the country and we were just itching to get amongst it.

But as we headed off into the Swindon night, I looked back at the County Ground, at the floodlights burning into the darkening skies and nodded to my summer lover.

Goodbye Susan Sarandon. Until next pre-season…

3

27 August 2006. HB Tórshavn v Skála Faroe Islands

I KNOW, 2006 doesn’t sound like it took place during the 2014–15 football season. It didn’t. So I should explain why this is included. 2006, for me, was the year where I took a chance and decided to try and follow some of my dreams in the hope they could develop into a career or, at the very least, become a constructive way to spend my free time. I had decided to head out on some football adventures in the hope I could write them up and possibly get into sports journalism, as I’d enjoyed writing from a very young age and wanted to try my hand.

2006 saw me take in a World Cup match in Berlin (Ukraine v Tunisia, 1-0, voted the worst match of the whole tournament), a trip to the Faroe Islands in August and a week out in North Cyprus in November to watch the Tibetan National Football Team take part in the ELF Cup, an unofficial tournament mostly populated by nations/regions not recognised by FIFA or the United Nations. As a result of that final experience (which will feature later on) in February 2007 I became an intern at the Free Tibet Campaign offices in London, travelling up on my days off.

All these new doors were opening to me, new possibilities and options unfolding here, there and everywhere. However life very often gets in the way of all our best laid plans, and my father taking his life in March 2007 soon had all those new doors slamming shut once more. The need to look out for my loved ones and then dealing with the mental and emotional fall-out of it all, took precedence, and kept them closed for quite some time.

But looking through the handwritten ‘notes’ I had made at the time (they’re like the scratchings an epileptic spider having a seizure might make, brought on by falling into a pot of ink, then trying to make its way to spider hospital via a blank piece of paper), I realised that all the issues and topics raised then are just as relevant now, eight years later. So I thought that I should include them here in this book, if for no other reason than to make me feel like I have reclaimed what seemed for many years to be lost time and wasted opportunities.

I’m going to sneak them in during the book at roughly the same dates in the season as they originally occurred.

The 2006 adventures weren’t my first or last excursions abroad to watch football. There had been Le Havre v Sochaux in the ’90s (that’s as specific as I can get – it was part of a trip to play for a local team against a club I had become friends with. They plied us with Pernod. All I remember is nearly whiting out on the pitch as a result of all the alcohol).