Month: August 2014

The Football Neutral: Match Twenty Nine – Bury vs Plymouth Argyle

/ megagoalz / 5 Comments

2014-08-23 14.11.12

The only way to read this post in FULL along with 23 others from 2014/15 is to buy my season review eBook in the Kindle store. It’s less than £3 and over 300 pages of my daft adventures. Pick it up, enjoy it and you’ll be supporting my travels next season. Feel free to tell anyone you might know about it too! Thank you so much!

…I also remember Bury were sponsored once by Birthdays, the card shop that I believe was once owned by Bryan Robson.  The pastel logo on the front of the shirt didn’t exactly fit in with their rugged northern image, and yet I’d kill for one of those shirts now.  I do love a strange sponsor on a shirt.  Takes me back to my days reading 90 Minutes every week.  Here are some of my favourites:

CLYDEBANK – Sponsored by Wet Wet Wet – Being sponsored by a band is pretty cool (Newport County were briefly sponsored by Goldie Looking Chain, I’m sure) but when it’s one of the most insipid bands to ever darken the charts then it’s really not very rock and roll. My childhood felt haunted by Love Is All Around, and even being addicted to heroin couldn’t make Marti Pellow become a badass frontman.

CLUB MEXICO – Sponsored by Bimbo – Apparently a bakery, Bimbo sponsor a lot of Latin American teams.  I cannot see it without giggling.

FC NURNBURG – Sponsored by Mister Lady – I own this shirt!  A local clothing company, it doesn’t stop it being hilarious in the extreme.  I like to think they had a radio advert with the jingle set to Jimi Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady”.

BRIGHTON – Sponsored by Nobo – Ha! Their shirt said nob! …

Remember, to read the rest of this post from last season you can pick up my eBook for less than £3. 24 matches, many thousands of miles travelled. Thanks!

 

The Football Neutral: Match Twenty Eight – Chesterfield vs Rochdale

/ megagoalz / 2 Comments

2014-08-16 14.18.16

The only way to read this post in FULL along with 23 others from 2014/15 is to buy my season review eBook in the Kindle store. It’s less than £3 and over 300 pages of my daft adventures. Pick it up, enjoy it and you’ll be supporting my travels next season. Feel free to tell anyone you might know about it too! Thank you so much!

….I’ve been to Chesterfield to watch football before, a League Cup game at their old home Saltergate.  I think Leicester won 2-0.  All I remember is one really mouthy Spireite repeatedly walking over to the fence separating the fans and making a cut throat gesture whilst fans of both sides laughed at him (especially the Chesterfield fans who wore looks of “we have to put up with this prick all the time”).  At the end of the game he did it one final time, before running off and falling down some stairs.  When we were let off of our terrace we had to walk past him being loaded into an ambulance, where he was slightly less mouthy.

I remember Saltergate being a fun ground, if a bit run down even then.  The Proact Stadium opened in 2010 and is a tad bigger.  It certainly feels like a new stadium (as they always seem to), but the fans inside it try to make it a decent place to watch football.  It seems very breezy as well, with the open corners and the peak district not a million miles away.  It’s not as windswept as Barnsley used to be back in the day, but you can tell that you’re in Derbyshire if you were dropped there unknowing.

Like all new stadiums, you can’t just buy your ticket at the turnstile.  You have to go to the ticket office, get it, and then scan it through a barcode reader at the turnstile (yes, those AGAIN).  I queued up to get mine as a Norwegian man was getting his and asking about the best place to sit on his first visit to the ground.  Maybe he was the Scandinavian version of me, I didn’t ask.  He could well have been on stage in Oslo the night before and then driven over.  He still would have spent less time in his car on the Friday than I did….

Remember! From now on the only way to read on is to pick up my eBook. I’d be super grateful if you did!

The Football Neutral: Match Twenty Seven – Fleetwood Town vs Crewe Alexandra

/ megagoalz / 2 Comments

2014-08-09 14.29.48

The only way to read this post in FULL along with 23 others from 2014/15 is to buy my season review eBook in the Kindle store. It’s less than £3 and over 300 pages of my daft adventures. Pick it up, enjoy it and you’ll be supporting my travels next season. Feel free to tell anyone you might know about it too! Thank you so much!

….So then, it seems that I’ll be watching football in different places every weekend again this season.  But why, may you ask?  Because last season was both tremendous fun (trips to watch Guiseley, Ebbsfleet, Wigan, Portsmouth, Ajax and more) AND it seemed that me staying away from my own club (asides from a couple of times at the end of the season) made us be rather brilliant and get promoted to the Premier League.  More than one Leicester supporter has made me promise to continue watching other clubs this year – and every year – if it means we become the world-beaters that our owners want us to be.  I will not argue with that at all (plus the people who asked me to do it are bigger than me).

Obviously I’ll once again have to try and stick to my own rules – which you can read here – and I’m throwing myself the additional curveball of trying to not go back to any stadia that I visited last season (even though my own rules just state within one season).  I figure that there are enough grounds for me to go to.  Saturday was a case in point; with me working in the North West (Preston Frog and Bucket, where I did jokes about Blackpool’s lack of players.  They’re a football savvy crowd – I once did ten minutes on Nuno Gomes inexplicably ending up playing for Blackburn Rovers) I had tons of games to choose from.  Accrington was quite tempting, having never been there before and being a child of the eighties.  You know what I mean.  Read the following two words:

Accrington Stanley.

If you either read them in a Scouse accent OR followed the words with “exactly” then you’re around the same age as me.  Although that is a more long-winded and niche age test than me just reading out your birth certificate.

In the end I decided to go to Highbury.  No, not that Highbury.  That one has long since been knocked down and had overpriced flats built in its place.  I mean the home of Fleetwood Town, and this season it is a stadium that is hosting League One level football for the very first time.  You might be reading this now thinking “that’s not a big deal, it’s only League One”.  If that is the case, allow me to slap you around the gills with an amazing statistic: Just ten seasons ago, Fleetwood were playing in the North West Counties Football League Premier Division.  I’m a nerd and I didn’t know how far down the pyramid that was until I looked it up.  It’s the NINTH tier.  They’ve gone from that level to the THIRD tier in ten seasons. That is a remarkable achievement.  Seemed only right that I go and watch their first ever game at that level….

Remember! Pick up my eBook to read the rest! Thanks!