Sunday 11 October, 10:30pm
Your eyes blink open to dull equidistant yellow flashes of street lamps dancing across the steamed up window. You wipe away the condensation and peer through the raindrops to see the familiar stark brutalist tower-blocks of New Belgrade. You’ve been here before. Continue reading “Zen, Zenith, Zenica; Losing and Winning with Wales in Bosnia”
‘Oh shit! I’ve forgotten my lucky envelope as well’.
Those words are mine. They left my mouth on the morning of the game. You need not know why the envelope is deemed lucky, nor how I’d come to forget it, but for context do consider this. I am 32 years old. I’m educated. But for the duration of a morning’s exploration of Haifa I genuinely feared I had jeopardised the hopes of my nation’s football team through the act of leaving a torn dog-eared envelope in a South London flat. This is what following Wales does to you. It suspends all notions of rationality or belief and replaces them instead with a clouded fug of paranoia, superstition, melancholy, and blind, desperate, stupid hope. Continue reading “Haifa a High; Wales in Israel”
Doable. That’s Ralph’s verdict. It’s always Ralph’s verdict. And, as ever, that’s enough for you to agree to go along for the improbable; the unrecommended but ultimately possible. Wales Under 21s play in the Czech Republic’s northern tip on Monday evening. Within 24 hours of that final whistle the senior team kick-off 600 miles away in Serbia. Attending both is, apparently, doable. So you question not how, you simply book flights. And then, feeling confident, you chuck in three more games across Friday and Saturday, because if you’re going to commit to doing silly challenges like these things you should commit fully. Cardiff. Doncaster, twice. Jablonec. Novi Sad. Five matches. Five days. Four countries. Doable. Continue reading “The Long Weekend; five matches, five days, four countries”
Continuing our series of sneaking off whilst Rovers’ back is turned for a bit on the side popular STAND Editor Glen Wilson hops up the North Yorkshire coast to the Turnbull Ground for Whitby Town vs Blyth Spartans. Continue reading “Playing Away: Whitby Town vs Blyth Spartans”
We’re men of the world here at popular STAND, and so we realise that on occasion, there comes a time when you feel the need to seek alternate pleasure. Football sadly is not solely a game played by men (or women) in red and white hoops and so sometimes circumstances dictate that we must watch other people play. Rather than see this practice go underground we’ve taken steps to ensure it can be controlled and so have come up with a feature in which it can exist in small doses. In Playing Away we recount our tales of watching others play, starting with Editor Glen Wilson‘s trip to the seaside. Continue reading “Playing Away: Bridlington Town vs Whitley Bay”
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