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”
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”
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