Reflecting on 2021 - allowed back to football

In lieu of going to a football game on Boxing Day, here's a review of 2021 from a soccer perspective.

I didn't attend any football matches in the 2020-21 season, meaning it was the first season in over a quarter of a century where I didn't attend a single game. I missed out on my annual trip to see Shrewsbury play Bristol Rovers in Bristol, and then Rovers got relegated so Shrewsbury won't be playing them this season. At the end of the season I blogged about how it didn't really feel like it had happened. 

Just about the only football that I had in the spring!

In the summer of 2021, the delayed European Championships were held. They were still called Euro 2020. Originally I was going to go to some games - in the before times. But then had opted for a refund. I had to console myself with watching on TV, collecting the stickers and completing the wallchart that accompanied an issue of When Saturday Comes. It was the first time I had ever completed a wallchart for an international tournament. A small achievement. 

Just before England fluffed their chance

England had a glorious chance to win the competition - helped by playing most of their games at home in Wembley. Other countries (cough*Wales*cough) had to schlep all over Europe with fans unable to travel to support them. Despite all the advantages they were afforded, England were beaten by Italy in the final, which was made more memorable by ugly violent scenes as ticketless louts kicked their way into the ground.

But in July, a new season kicked off. I went to see Barry play a friendly in Bristol (so I have seen one game in Bristol this year!) and then the games started to rack up. I went to 11 games in August -  a new record for games in a month. 

I watched Barry play away games in Aberystwyth, Cefn just outside Wrexham, and Flint, where I think I might have seen a picture of my paternal grandad on the clubhouse wall. I also saw several Grange Albion games, in one of the local leagues, watched Poole Town three times with my friend Steve, and went with my brother and nephew to watch Shrewsbury earn a creditable draw at Hillsborough against Sheffield Wednesday. 

For many clubs in Wales, the season had started earlier than normal - a precaution in case restrictions came back into place in the winter. That has proven to be prescient as just before Christmas the Welsh Government mandated a ban on spectators at sporting events. The FAW responded by putting the top three tiers of Welsh football on hiatus until January. I had reached 31 games for the season just before the spectator ban came in, which neatly took me to a total of exactly 400 games recorded on the Futbology App.

At this point it is impossible to know when the restrictions on supporters will be lifted and when I will be checking in at matches on Futbology in the New Year. Shrewsbury have a big game in January 2022 - a third round tie at Anfield. However, I feel it's unlikely I will go given the current infection rates. It may not even take place when scheduled, because covid is causing a lot of postponements at all levels of football at the moment.

And, it's not as if I'm missing out. I have seen Shrewsbury play at Anfield not too long ago. This time when the teams meet there will be no replays, so if Liverpool aren't as lucky as they were last time, with the own goals and dodgy VAR decisions, it could be memorable. 

July 2021 - End of month review

July started with us coming back from a week's holiday on the Lleyn Peninsular in North Wales (see blog posts here), and ended with us on holiday in Shropshire with family from Salop and from Edinburgh. 

There's a cheetah in this card game!

Inbetween these times away, we squeezed in quite a bit.

I came back from our North Wales holiday with a sore throat and sneezing more than usual. Apparently that can be a sign of coronavirus infection in people who have been double-jabbed, so Cathy and I booked appointments at the drive-through test centre at the Cardiff City Stadium. I now feel I have lived the full pandemic experience, now that I have had to stick a swab up my nose! 

Our tests were negative. I was impressed with the organisation of the test centre. Everyone there really knew the drill. They knew we were coming, and processed us through very politely and quickly. We had the results texted to us in less than 24 hours. It was a good experience in a stressful moment.

We also watched the European Championships semi-finals and final. England blew it, is my verdict, with a terrible penalty shoot-out in the final that will potentially have scarred another generation of kids. I mentioned last month how this was the first international championship I have experienced since my Dad died, and after the final I have thought several times about how he would have rung me up to dissect the failure in detail. These are the unexpected moments when grief catches us.

In my other blogging project, I reached a new milstone - 700 baseball cards featuring Tony Gwynn. I feel I am starting to run out of steam a bit with the baseball cards and my blogging has been very gappy of late as the supply of new cards has run out.

It might continue to be gappy, as I have started going to football matches again. I've blogged about my trips to Bristol and Aberdare. I added a third match in the month of July as The New Saints were playing Kauna Zalgiris from Lithuania in a Europa Conference League Qualifying game during our week in Shropshire. As TNS play in Oswestry, just half an hour away, I went with my brother for a fun evening out.

TNS already had a 5-0 lead from the first leg in Lithuania, so I was hopeful we would see some goals. And we did. 

It was a very one-sided affair. Kauno Zalgiris played suicide football, trying to build from the back and repeatedly giving the ball away as TNS played a high press. Several moves broke down in their own half and resulted in TNS having chance after chance to score. There was a Lithuanian guy in front of us and his partner started laughing as me and my brother started shouting 'Nooooo!' as the Kauno defenders set up for another futile attempt to play out from the back. It was cringeworthy to watch. 

TNS won 5-1 on the night, with some superb goals, to cap a 10-1 aggregate win over the two legs.

Spending a week with family also meant there were opportunities for back garden football with an array of smaller people. My eldest nephew is getting pretty good these days - he graduated from his soccer course with three trophies a couple of weeks back. He also hits the ball harder than he used to and his Dad has had to reinforce the back fence, as you can see in this photo!

I will do a summary of our week in Shropshire in a future blog post, although our big days out were actually in Cheshire and Wales, so it will be photos from not-Shropshire in the main.

Holiday on Pen Llyn - fourth and final post

This is just a final round up post of things from our holiday on the Lleyn Peninsular. We had deliberately timed it to be away during the European Championships, because I like holidays where we do stuff during the day then go home and watch football in the evenings. It worked well with mealtimes.

We took my European Championships wallchart with us!

I filled it in studiously. The asterisks are games we watched. The day Switzerland got a last gasp equaliser against France then beat them on penalties was an exciting day.

In Criccieth we saw one of the installations by the Football Association of Wales honouring members of the Wales squad.

But away from football we enjoyed the beaches...

...and scenic cliff walks.

And we followed instructions and didn't fall headlong into the sea.

We visited Nant Gwerthyn, which is closely linked to the revival of the Welsh language in the mid-20th century.

Siaradais i Gymraeg yn siopia a bwytau. Prynias i llyfr yna yn siop llyfrau Gymraeg yn Pwllheli. (I spoke Welsh in shops and cafes. I bought this book in the Welsh bookshop in Pwllheli.)

The book is 'Wales on Stamps of the World', and, yes, it's in Welsh. I found I understood more of it than I expected. It has inspired me to consider a new philately project.

In Porthmadog we called into the Purple Moose Brewery shop. Cathy found a friend who matched her hair!

The village we stayed in had a field with horses in. Something tells me this horse knows he's a good-looking horse.

We also had a pair of seagulls who clearly had learned to beg for food from people staying in the cottage. They were quite happy to walk up to the patio doors and peck for attention.

And if you tried to ignore them, they would seek a bit of height to try and eyeball you again.

But we are resistant to the charms of seagulls, even though these seemed slightly less obnoxious, and a good deal cleaner, than Cardiff's sky-rats. We ignored them and eventually they gave up and flew off.

Our week seemed to be over very quickly, which is the sign of a good holiday!

June 2021 - End of Month review

This monthly report is slightly later than usual because I was on holiday on the cusp of June and July, and there has been some football on!

In terms of another sport, I've already blogged about buying a copy of Blood Bowl: Second Season Edition. I actually bought that at the very end of April, but a couple of weeks later I responded to the siren lure of Firestorm Games, went in and bought another new team. It's the Necormantic Horror team complete with werewolves, zombies, wights and golems. Now I just need to find the time to glue and paint them.

Early on in the month, Cathy spotted some Lego on sale on Facebook. In the crate we found a selection of charming Fabuland figures, that the company produced in the early 80s. 

I have told the story a few times about the first time I visited Cathy's house and she showed me her collection of Fabuland sets still in their original boxes. That was one of the ways I knew she was the one! It's nice to add some new figures and I particularly liked the walrus boat captain!

I've already blogged about the Grangetown Zoo, which was slightly different this year and very enjoyable again. The following weekend I went back to where Anna Palamar created her mural on the side of Bruton's Bakery on Clare Road and took a photo of the finished artwork.

We are still living in the middle of a pandemic. I was invited back to the Bayside Vaccination Centre in the old Toys 'R' Us building and had my second dose. No side effects this time!

They should have called it Jabs R Us

But even though there is a pandemic, and new variants of covid hitting the headlines, we made it to our first trip to the cinema since March 2020. It was a free preview of In The Heights at the Odeon. It's always a bit weird going there because it's the cinema I used to work in, back when it was operated by UCI. My job there actually began in June 2001, so that was 20 years ago this month!.

There are plans to knock down that cinema along with the rest of the Atlantic Wharf Leisure Village (as it was originally known) to build a new concert arena. So I did wonder if In The Heights will be the last film I see there before the bulldozers move in. (Read my film review here.)

And then of course, along came the European Championships. I have been collecting the football stickers again this year, after giving the World Cup ones in 2018 a miss.

My catchphrase after each game I've watched has been "To the wallchart!"

This is the first international tournament since my Dad died unexpectedly in March 2019, and it has stirred up some feelings of grief and loss again. My Dad loved World Cups and European Championships and I know he would have been ringing me after every Wales, England or Scotland game to dissect the game and discuss the results. I have really missed that.

But the wallchart has been a helpful distraction from that post-game void which Dad would have filled.  I have often put wallcharts up and then forgotten about them. So this year I was quite pleased with myself that I managed to get out of the group stages and fill in all the gaps in the round of 16.

And that took us up virtually to the end of the month, when we went on holiday! I will be posting about some of our holiday experiences in the next few days!

End of a football season that never really started for me

Yesterday, Shrewsbury Town played their last game of their Football League One season. I have felt increasingly disconnected from football over the course of the season. It's an equivalent conundrum to the old philosophical question about trees - if two teams play football and nobody's watching, then does the result still matter?

Fenced off from football

Shrewsbury finished in 17th, a slot they inhabited for most of the season after climbing out of the relegation zone under their new manager, Steve Cotterill. They maintained that position while the manager was in hospital recovering from Covid-19, including a stint in intensive care. So it has been a difficult season, with very few positives. They reached the third round of the FA Cup, and so I watched their game on BT Sport. But the rest of the season has passed by without me really noticing. 

The one occasion I really felt a pang of missing out was back in February, when I couldn't go on my annual trip to watch Shrewsbury play Bristol Rovers. I blogged about it at the time. I felt that pang again this past weekend, when I realised that Barry Town were playing TNS in Oswestry on the Saturday and then Shrewsbury were away at near neighbours Crewe Alexandra on the Sunday. In pre-Covid times, that would have been a perfect double-header weekend for me.

The initial cancellation of the season and early days of the UK lockdown back in 2020 meant several of my plans to watch football matches got nixed. I had planned to go up to Sunderland to watch Shrewsbury play in the Stadium of Light for the first time in April 2020, but that game never happened due to Covid. This season's match was restricted too. If Sunderland win the play-offs and go up to the Championship at the end of the season, then my chance to see Shrewsbury play them in the league will probably disappear with them. (Similarly, Bristol Rovers got relegated, so no February trip to that game next year either.)

The Euro 2020 games last summer got postponed. I had a ticket for a game at Wembley and for a first ever trip to Hampden Park, but have since cashed those tickets in for refunds. The games are likely to go ahead with very reduced capacity this summer and other people who held on to their tickets are now being told they can't go. 

The other summer event that I missed was Barry Town's trip to the Faroe Islands for a Europa League game. I would have loved to have gone on that away trip, and I would have probably taken my Mum with the hope we could connect with some of my Grandma's family. We went to the Faroes as a family when I was 12 and I have always wanted to go back. 

Obviously the Euro 2020 games and the trip to the Faroes would have been quite big events. But I feel equally sad at missing out on trips to the Memorial Stadium and end-of-season double-headers of meaningless games. 

It has been over 14 months since I last went to a football match and this is the first season where I have not been to a single game since I started chronicling my football matches in 1992. I miss it sometimes, and I'm not really convinced that the season has happened at all. 

Grangetown's Lost Footballs

A few years back I discovered the Twitter account @LostFootballs, which was an ideal harmony of poignancy and humour. The account is still going although less active than it used to be in its heyday, back when Twitter was fun and not full of angry people abusing each other. 

Over the years I'd tweeted a few photos to them and had them retweeted. However, recently I've been saving photos of lost footballs for my blog. These are a few I've spotted on my walks around Grangetown and Cardiff Bay.

Let's start with a ball behind the railings of a locked schoolyard during lockdown.

Grangetown's alleys have been gated off.  The gates are easy to lose footballs behind!

A close-up of the ball shows the Euro 2020 logo. It feels kind of apt that a lost tournament adorns the side of a lost football.

There is honestly no filter on this next photo. It was a very blue sky reflected in the water as I walked alongside the mouth of the Taff. The ball's remaining patches are green.

On a walk around Cardiff Bay, I saw this ball behind a fence near the BBC complex.

A close-up shows off the Nike Swoosh. 

And very close to home, I saw this torn and battered 'casey' in the gutter at the closed-off end of my street.

It had seen better days.

With going to football matches something I have lost during the pandemic, all these reminders have taken on a new level of meaning. The most likely way to lose a football is by playing with it. With all the restrictions we have endured, these reminders that kids still play football are bittersweet.

(And thanks to Cathy, Tom and Bryan who have patiently waited while I have taken photos of forlorn footballs.)