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”
Hiraeth is a Welsh word meaning a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, or a home which maybe never was. I’m not sure it has an antonym, but if it did, that is what I experienced on the last Saturday in August, 2021. Standing in uncharacteristic sunshine, looking over Blaenau Ffestiniog Amateurs’s Cae Clyd ground towards the mountains of Eryri – including the peak of Moelwyn Mawr which I’d been stood on just three hours earlier – I felt a pleasingly strong sense of finally returning home to a place I’d never previously lived.
Continue reading “How I watched football: 2021-22”
Going to watch football in 2020-21 wasn’t easy. Professional football was a lockout. And as local and national lockdowns came and went, so too did differing restrictions on was accessible. Even when I found games I could attend, navigating my way into them wasn’t always easy.
Continue reading “How I watched football: 2020-21”
This felt like a season of 0-0 draws. Which is hard to explain given that in reality I saw only one. But stick with me, whilst I thrash this out. I saw 31 football matches and though all of them offered me something, none really stand out. All of them – even the six-goal thriller I saw at Penrhiwceiber, even Wales qualifying for a major tournament – felt less like games I’ll one day tell people I was there for, and more like matches I will be reminded I was at. Continue reading “How I watched football: 2019-20”
A Friday night in May. The Valley is packed. It’s the 87th minute of the second-leg of the League One play-off semi-final and Charlton Athletic lead 3-2 on aggregate.
“Well, whatever happens it’s been a great season,” says James above the din.
“Aye,” I reply, “but it’d be nice to have half an hour more of it”.
About 90 seconds later Andy Butler got his head on a corner, the ball found the net, and the two of us, along with a thousand or so others, were lost in a wave of seat-tumbling stranger-grabbing sky-punching scarf-twirling collective bedlam. Continue reading “How I watched football: 2018-19”
‘What the hell are you doing here watching this?’
I was asked that question by an assistant referee on a freezing late February afternoon at Holmesdale. I couldn’t answer it then. I’m still not sure I can. What possesses me to get on a bus and travel for the best part of an hour to the fringes of Bromley, the outskirts of the outskirts, to watch twenty-two men really test the boundaries of what can be defined as a game of football? Continue reading “How I watched football: 2017-18”
Where do you go after football has finally given you all you’d ever dreamed of? After the joy unbounded of following Wales at Euro 2016 last summer, there was always a danger that watching football, any football, would feel decidedly anticlimactic. Continue reading “How I watched football: 2016-17”
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