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”
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”
If Kent truly is the garden of England, this particular strip along the estuaries of the Thames and Medway can be considered the bit behind the shed. Think less roses and orchards and more compost heap, rusting barbecues and long-lost frisbees.
Continue reading “Go Away: Gillingham”
I’ve read Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’, but never seen it performed. But I don’t have to, I support Doncaster Rovers. Each game I’ve watched, this season and last, an interminable wait for something, anything to happen for this team, and yet it never does.
Continue reading “Crawley Town 1-1 Doncaster Rovers: 250 word match report”
These days ‘The Hundred of Salford’ is the name given to Salford City’s away following, but at the time of the Domesday Book it was the title of this part of Lancashire and was held by Edward the Confessor, which is why we know so much about it.
Continue reading “Go Away: Salford City”
When you show absolutely no signs of scoring yourself I suppose the best you can achieve is managing to stop the opposition finding the net. And that is what Rovers achieved at Edgeley Park.
Continue reading “Stockport County 0-0 Doncaster Rovers: 250 word match report”
popular STAND fanzine 