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The DA brings the Football cities united tour to Dublin , in association with Roganstown Golf and Country Club
A writer should never admit to leaving a heck of a lot to be covered in the final part of a 3 part series, so I won’t. But if writers were able to admit to such idiocies, then I may very well start this post by doing just that. You should know however that if you stick with it there’s a story about Jack Charlton drinking and an Estonian missing a really rubbish penalty…So there you go.
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The DA brings the Football cities united tour to Dublin , in association with Roganstown Golf and Country Club
Imagine if you will the typical student football game you may well have been involved with: Stumbling out of bed at 10 in the morning being sure to swerve some traffic cones and ‘for sale’ signs whilst all the time trying desperately hard to wipe the smell of rancid kebab off your face and scrape the mud off the unwashed boots you said you’d clean last week but instead left by the bath tub to build small colonies of potentially undiscovered life forms. Then imagine you look up who you’re playing that day to discover that your opponents are in fact Champions League regulars Villarreal.
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The DA brings the Football cities united tour to Dublin , in association with Roganstown Golf and Country Club
It can be fairly daunting writing articles sometimes and never more so than when you have absolutely no idea what you’re writing about. Last season I ventured out into the familiar settings of the English football league with at least a vague idea about what I was likely to encounter. When I accepted an invitation to extend the tour to Dublin, Ireland I might very well have agreed to write a piece on the finer points of agricultural best practises between the years of 1945-60. To put it bluntly, I’d guess it involved milking a cow at some point but wouldn’t be 100% sure. Irish football, despite not living much further away than the likes of Newcastle United or Sunderland was a complete and utter mystery to me. I’d heard the odd word about it here and there, perhaps a team name had come into the equation at some point, but for £10million pounds I couldn’t tell you who was good, who was bad and what the general make-up of the league was. When it sometimes feels like there are thousands of people online just literally waiting for a grammatical slip they can correct for their own satisfaction, writing a report on something you know absolutely nothing about can seem a bit of stupid idea. But on the other side of things, my kind tour guide Andy Greenslade had offered to put me up in a quite simply stunning hotel for 4 nights. And I don’t tend to say no to those kind of offers, regardless of my inability to plan ahead to the eventual article I’d need to produce.
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The DA brings the Football cities united tour to Dublin , in association with Roganstown Golf and Country Club
We’re delighted to announce that following our season long tour of footballing cities in England, the DA is paying a one off visit to the city of Dublin to sample the Irish delights surrounding the beautiful game. Thanks to Roganstown Golf and Country Club the tour will stretch it’s oversea’s legs and take in three games in three days at the following venues:
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In a new feature for the DA, Andrew Allen takes a look at football in parts of the world less documented. If your team is in the Europa League, you may want to take notes from time to time…
Andrew Allen is the editor of whenwewereheroes.com
What a difference a decade makes. One minute the godforsaken people of war-torn Chechnya are trembling in the face of a relentless bombardment by Russian bombs, the next they’re watching their young President slide-tackle Diego Maradona while Craig David regales them with lyrics about his insatiable sexual appetite.
The DA concludes the Mitre Football cities united tour
Ever since the 1966 World Cup final, commentators have longed to find an iconic expression they can call their own. You hear it at every major final; the guy in charge of the microphone slowly breaking up their sentences, for sound bite purposes of course, on the off chance England won’t get knocked out on penalties again or just plain suck in the last 16. No one, other than possibly very, very recently with Ray Wilkin’s hapless ‘Stay on your feet’ has managed to conclude a classic footballing moment with such precision as ‘they think it’s all over, it is now.’ Coming up with a summary for this tour I can now realise just why. It’s sodding difficult.
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The DA continues the Mitre Football cities united tour
It felt wrong celebrating 20 weeks’ worth of football touring when just two days previously I’d read a report of a guy who’d, just a couple of seasons ago, visited all 92 grounds in one season and lived to tell the tale. Likewise, some fans go home and away with their teams week in week out, and have done so for many, many years without reprieve and they don’t consider it to be a success of any sort; it’s just habit. All I can say to those fans is how lucky your football team is to have you because going up and down the country every single weekend is not only hideously expensive but also extremely tiring to boot. Like I’ve said many a time on this (I won’t say epic adventure, seeing as it’s only 20 games…but close to epic) tour, clubs should never forget who make them tick, and that is the supporters. It feels like some of them already have, and they’ll regret it.
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The DA continues the Mitre Football cities united tour
I can only apologise to Wolverhampton for the terrible first impression created in my head before I’d even stepped out of the door. A severe case of man flu does not make anyone long to trek out into the rain at 7.30 in the morning knowing full well they have to stop off at Cheltenham due to the Rail Network’s traditional ‘let’s dig stuff up’ Saturdays. To put it bluntly, I would rather have spent the day with El Hadji Diouf.
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The DA continues the Mitre Football cities united tour
Anything that reminds you of Steve Ogrizovic with his shorts down by his ankles can not be a good thing. Unfortunately for Coventry City this scar indented into my retinas has long been associated with their club. I can’t remember what game it was, or even what year for that matter, but the recollection of the live TV moment when Ogrizovic reached down to cover up his Y-fronts and pull up his shorts after a dressing malfunction is something that will probably haunt me for the rest of my life… That said the Sky Blues were also the first Subbuteo team I ever owned so swings and roundabouts I guess…
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The DA continues the Mitre Football cities united tour
I’ve always been slightly suspicious of Nottingham, largely down the fact I don’t buy into all this Robin Hood ‘hero’ stuff. Whilst the concept of a lovely man in green tights robbing rich muppets blind is quite a pleasant one, Robin Hood sounds to me like nothing more than a glorified drug dealer…or at best a generous shoplifter. And think about it: Rob-in Hood. This man was sending out subliminal messages to future gangs of teenagers everywhere. In my book, he is the definition of the word ASBO.
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