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”
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