Football seasons don’t always end how you’d hoped. In fact they rarely do. Only one team can be champions. There can be only one cup winner. Only a handful can get promoted or contest play-offs. Only one or two will survive a real relegation scare.
Continue reading “How I watched football: 2025-26”
When Doncaster Rovers secured a dramatic promotion to League One in April, via a late Teddy Sharman-Lowe penalty save and an injury-time Billy Sharp goal, I wasn’t in the Eco Power Stadium to see it. I wasn’t watching from home. Instead I was in Caernarfon’s main square, listening desperately to updates on BBC Radio 5Live, trying not to have a football-induced breakdown in between a castle and a farmers’ market.
Continue reading “How I watched football: 2024-25”
For three years now Doncaster Rovers have been an awful watch. Really bad. I’m talking absolutely abject ‘have these guys ever played football before, or have they just read a description of it in a book?’ stuff.
Continue reading “How I watched football: 2023-24”
This season should’ve started on Ynys Môn. In July I plotted a 17 mile walk round the island’s coastal path to Moelfre that would see me arrive in time to watch Bro Goronwy play a friendly. The walk was hot and hard-going, my ankles were stung, my neck burnt, but I made it in time and climbed the hill to Bro Goronwy’s Cae Nerys home to find an empty field. The club had folded the night before.
Continue reading “How I watched football: 2022-23”
‘What’s the point?’ Never a good sign when those three words leave your mouth is it? Usually means you’ve run out of patience, of self-belief, of desire, of fight, and chosen instead to accept the warm embrace of futility. It’s not all bad, futility, for a start it’s much less labour intensive than trying. But it’s not fun. It’s a place of defeat. The mountain of emails, the rising cost of living, the sodding thing that won’t just clip into this bastard other bit has beaten you. Why fight it?
Continue reading “Editorial: What’s the point?”
Thank God that’s over. One of the worst seasons since popular STAND fanzine first appeared on the terraces, 25 years ago finally consigned to the past tense. Subsequently, it can be of no great surprise that the tone of our end of season fanzine, issue 112, is far from an optimistic one.
Continue reading “popular STAND fanzine issue 112”
Rovers recorded their 23rd league defeat of the 2022-23 season when they lost to Walsall at the Bescot Stadium. Rovers fielded a strange-looking side with several changes from the previous game against Colchester United, and also named only five substitutes.
Continue reading “Walsall 2-1 Doncaster Rovers: 250 word match report”
Beleaguered Rovers manager Danny Schofield made five changes to his squad for the last home game of the season, including dropping Jonathan Mitchell in favour of Louis Jones.
Continue reading “Doncaster Rovers 1-0 Colchester United: 250 word match report”
Walsall is known as ‘the town of a hundred trades’. Initially adopted as a tongue-in-cheek reference to nearby Birmingham’s moniker as ‘the town of a thousand trades’, it is now – in the wake of continued government cutbacks and austerity – a sadly accurate reflection of the town’s employment figures. That said, it should however not be confused with ‘the land of a thousand dances’, which is of course, Wolverhampton. Continue reading “Go Away! Walsall”
Typical, you wait ages (well, a couple of days) for a match report and then two come along at once. Thanks to our editor’s terrible memory, both Danny Dickinson, and first Katy Bateman wrap up Rovers latest defeat.
Continue reading “Doncaster Rovers 1-3 Newport County: 250 word match reports”
popular STAND fanzine 