Britain seems like a tiny island when viewed on a global map, although it’s still much larger than most of its near neighbours in Europe. You can forget how diverse it is, become blinkered by your own area of it, if you don’t tend to travel far, especially in recent pandemic-blighted times. Your vision of […]
“Cheese! Cheese! Cheese!” The crowd starts chanting. A low rumble of voices at first. Slowly it builds until everyone is on the same page. “CHEESE! CHEESE! CHEESE!” They are calling for the release of the first roll of cheese from the top of Cooper’s Hill. Or perhaps they are simply expressing their love for cheese. […]
Football lovers usually have a specific personal place where, for them, football belongs. This place is often where it first kicked in, that football obsession, or where it was steadily nurtured over a childhood. You often see television features where players are taken back to their roots, illustrating their rags to riches stories, and asked […]
“You don’t have to be a world beater, you just do what you can.” Next summer’s UEFA Euro 2016 in France is shaping up to be a unique football tournament of European giants as well as smaller, almost forgotten nations. Wales currently stand on the brink of Euro 2016 qualification, a single point away from […]
Most saturday afternoons of my young adulthood were spent playing football at low amateur levels. Usually my sides were beaten, often embarrassed and sometimes utterly humiliated by teenagers half my age. On rare occasions my team won – there was one memorable cup final (we lost heroically), and one or two promotions. But I never played […]