• With the excesses of Christmas and New Years’ Eve still greasy in our stomachs we process, pilgrims ever, to the hallowed ground. Taking our seats near the Forest fans, crammed like teeth in the Smethwick, we hear the first distant rumbles: unbeaten away, unbeaten awwaaayy we’re Nottingham Forest unbeaten away! It is almost dark already […]
  • As miracles go: walking on water, water into wine, they’re both fine but these will be of little consequence, forgotten about completely from this time hence, mere trivialities, footnotes in an inconsequential play- if we ever get to see that most unlikeliest day, A day that would surely have been Heaven-sent: when the England football […]
  • They stare at me, sombre-faced and disapproving from their sepia prints in stained oak frames. Arms folded, and sporting moustaches now seen only on pantomime villains, you just know their centre-partings were bryl-cremed into place, while those boots, tied around in three thick coils, must have been akin to wading across No Man’s Land on […]
  • Most hotels booking out rooms by the hour probably have peeling wallpaper and more stains on the bedsheets than a CSI crimescene. But our course was in a fancy one: all air-conditioned conference rooms, Sky News ticker-taping endlessly on the flatscreens in reception, and a free lunch that almost made the boredom worth it. After […]
  • (Part 1- An acrostic) We clicked through turnstiles in hope rather than Expectation. Fickle Fortune had not, thus far, favoured Roy’s Big Plan- Stuttering and stumbling and stubbornly refusing to catch fire. ‘Top half next season,’ we’d all laughed, ‘or even higher?’ (Buoyed as we were by the belief and flair Roy had instilled) it […]