Hundreds of miles from home, fenced in on a crumbling, open terrace. Cold. Soaked through. I’d just watched my team lose 2-0. It was the best night of my life.
In October, Wales qualified for Euro 2016. The only dream I’ve ever allowed myself to have, realised in front of my eyes. In a football sense, nothing that followed was going to come close to topping that, nor frankly, was it going to matter. Continue reading “How I watched football: 2015-16”
When you get in the habit of watching live football, any live football, to the point of consuming live football, every season runs the risk of stumbling to a conclusion. A desperate scramble to watch tenth tier league cup finals and rearranged reserve team play-offs in order to get one last hit before the reality of the football-free, barbecue-smoke backed summer months hit home. For me, and 33,279 others, there was no danger of this season petering out in such a way. That’s because, ahead of us all the way through, firmly in our calendars since last summer, our end-of-season boss level awaited; Wales versus Belgium… and it didn’t disappoint. Continue reading “How I watched football 2014-15”
Convention tells us that the seasons in which your football team gets relegated are the worst seasons you can ever experience. ‘Despair’ is a word that’s thrown around a lot. ‘Hapless’ is another. This past year I watched Doncaster Rovers fall from the Championship, but neither of those words come close to fitting what I experienced, because, you know what, I really enjoyed it. I know I’m supposed to be in a permanent despondent funk as I mooch about the house toe-ending household pets, but the truth is I can’t look back on the 2013-14 season anything other than fondly. Continue reading “How I watched football 2013-14”
I’m not a photographer. I don’t even own a camera. So this is neither a portfolio nor an exhibition. But I do like photos, so when attending matches last season I made an effort to take at least one, using just the camera on my phone and the instagram app. These are they; a collection of images representing all the football I saw between July 2012 and May 2013. Only one game is missing – Doncaster Rovers’ 2-1 win at Crewe in April – as I had my phone stolen on the morning of the game, but the rest are all present and documented below, some it has to be said, much better than others. Continue reading “How I watched football 2012-13”
In a corner of South Yorkshire, 10 May is Sir Francis Tierney Day. He won’t mean much to many who reside more than ten miles from the chimney at Peglers Works (except perhaps supporters of Crewe and to a lesser extent Notts County) but Franny Tierney will always hold a special place at Doncaster Rovers. His knighthood is not official, it was bestowed on him not by Her Majesty but by the Pop Stand, and it remains as a longing acknowledgment of him scoring THE goal in Doncaster Rovers’ history. The goal that returned the club to the Football League five long years after our status as one of the 92 had been ripped away from us through one man’s spite. Continue reading “It Was Seventeen Years Ago Today; Point of Return”
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