After 90 minutes I was expecting to write about a disappointing homecoming, missed chances and League Two’s physicality. I was also going to say that the season had a long way to go, and Rovers are still a work in progress.
Continue reading “Doncaster Rovers 2-1 Sutton United: 250 word match report”
New season, new us. Which includes bothering to fire up the old podcast machine we keep out back and bring you episode 24 of the premier Doncaster Rovers audio experience.
Continue reading “podular STAND podcast: episode 24”
Underground, overground, the 163; all of these lead you to Wimbledon in south west London where a settlement has existed since the Iron Age, prior to which the land had been seen as too creased to inhabit.
Continue reading “Go Away: AFC Wimbledon”
Well, let’s start with the positives. It can’t be as bad as last year… can it? After the doom-laden pages of the relegation special that was issue 108, now comes the unbridled optimism of a first fanzine issue of a new season.
Continue reading “popular STAND fanzine issue 109”
To simply look at the scoreline from Doncaster Rovers’ opening game of the season would be to miss the whole story. Bradford 0-0 Doncaster, yet an anti-climactic return to football this was not.
Continue reading “Bradford City 0-0 Doncaster Rovers: 250 word match report”
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”
Jack Peat set out to tackle this season’s most pressing question; why weren’t Rovers relegated sooner?
In all my years of watching Rovers, I can recall only a handful that have felt as abysmal as this one. Indeed, off-field matters excluded, this has probably been the worst. Performances both home and away have been uninspiring. Players have struggled to gel. Any positive moments have been fleeting and all too often dissipated in the same puff of smoke in which they appeared. It has been tough, and few people reading these pages will need reminding of that, but what has been most perplexing of all in my view is that we weren’t put out of our misery sooner.
Continue reading “The Bottom Six”
At the end of the summer I sat in the same spot I’m writing this editorial, whilst Richie Wellens looked back at me and my decor via Zoom, and told me that he didn’t foresee Rovers being in a relegation battle come the second half of the season. A couple of weeks later Gavin Baldwin told the BBC that ‘we are nowhere near [a relegation battle] at this stage’.
Continue reading “Editorial: Where did it all go wrong for Doncaster Rovers in 2021-22?”
Well, thank God that’s all over. A terrible season that started badly and never really looked like getting better. A 46 game-long slow trudge towards League Two. Each of our most recent engagements with the fourth tier have ended in promotion… it’s hard to see 2022-23 going a similar way.
Continue reading “popular STAND fanzine issue 108”
Doncaster Rovers versus Crewe Alexandra. Or the two baldest men in the universe fighting over the world’s smallest comb. For both clubs, this season has been an absolute shambles throughout. And yet, we couldn’t both lose this one…
Continue reading “Doncaster Rovers 2-0 Crewe Alexandra: 250 word match report”
popular STAND fanzine 