My April 2026 round-up (part 2)

This month has been so busy I've had to do two round ups. In part 1, I mentioned canvassing, litter-picking, going to a local history evening, football and loads of other stuff. I've also blogged a Book of the Month, an Album of the Month, and about my monthly Blood Bowl fixture with Bryan.

I spent the first and last weekends of April in Shropshire, celebrating my birthday at the beginning of the month by feeding rhinos at West Midlands Safari Park, and then celebrating my youngest niece's birthday with a family party on the final Saturday.

Since my interim round up post I have been in Liverpool for the Diabetes UK Professional Conference (DUKPC). 

The programme I work on had a bigger presence than ever before including involvement in some sessions. This meant I had my second bucket list moment of the month (after the rhinos).

Nine years ago, in 2017, when I was working in the NHS, I went to DUKPC as a punter with my friend Sara. It was being held in Manchester. I remember saying to her that one day we would be presenting together at the conference... and nine years later my prediction came true!

The whole conference went very well from our perspective. We had a great team of young people working with us. It was even sunny the full time we were there.

After the conference I went to Shrewsbury for the weekend. My niece's birthday party included a bouncy castle and a piñata. I took this photo of my Mum just before she delivered the killing blow that smashed the poor colourful donkey.

Everyone else had a go too. Some people were more dangerous flailing with a stick than others!

I went to Shrewsbury Town's final home game of the season in the afternoon. It closed out a nice symmetry as I was at their opening home game back in August. It's been a long old season and they looked in danger of a second successive relegation for much of it. But they were safe by the time this game came around. It finished 2-2 and Shrewsbury's equaliser was voted goal of the season a few days later!

Blue the Lion, the Shrewsbury mascot, got injured during the half time mascot race with Fleetwood's Captain Cod and had to be helped away. It's perhaps an indicator of what a poor season it's been that their mascot lost a foot race with a fish.

I got to see some bonus football watching Zac on the Sunday morning. His team were drubbed so we went to Greggs afterwards to drown our sorrows in sausage rolls.

My final game of April was Gloucester City v Poole Town in the play-off semi-final in the Southern League Premier Division South. I went with Steve. It was a great game but I'll mainly remember it for some terrace aggro that delayed the game when two scrappers fell over an advertising hoarding.

Gloucester won 3-2 after extra time. I think it was the first game I'd seen this season that went to extra time.

It was my 10th Poole Town game. I got a Futbology badge when I checked in.

And then on the last day of April I did my final station trip of the Senedd election campaign, with my friend Anna.  I have done 28 of these weekly sessions since October and I am weirdly going to miss them when the election is done.

May is going to be busy with the election and then some traveling. So next month's round up will likely be another full one.

Mega Saturday

Saturday was a busy one. It started with a Keep Grangetown Tidy litter pick that produced its usual haul of rubbish but this time had an unexpected sad inclusion.

Yes sadly the smiling octopus is on its way to landfill. These big soft toys are a staple of the Cardiff Bay Beach or city centre Winter Wonderland fairs and I've often seen parents carrying them away from such events; usually the parents look a lot grumpier than the octopuses do. 

My collecting partner for the day was Claire.

And we had another decent turn out, with lots of new people.

I don't know who found the octopus. I found a toy on the other end of the size scale - one of the pups from Paw Patrol.

He had been well played with before being thrown or lost in a hedge and now he's also on his way to landfill. Such is the fate of lost toys. 

After cleaning up the streets, I picked up Steve and we headed to Merthyr Tydfil to watch Merthyr Town play Poole Town. Steve has been a fan of Poole since he was a lad and I've been to see them a few times with him. The last game we went to, Poole won 7-2. However we were expecting a possible heavy defeat this time, with Merthyr sitting top of the table. 

When I checked in on Futbology I got a badge for my 600th football match. 

There is a caveat to this milestone. I don't have any of the matches that I went to before 1992 listed. (1992-93 was the season I started logging the matches I went to.) So it's the 600th game logged on the app. 

Contrary to our prior expectations, Poole won 2-1. Merthyr were very good in the first half but only scored one and Poole got a flukey equaliser direct from a corner. The Merthyr team were sent out early for the second half but something had sapped all their confidence and Poole scored an excellent team goal that proved to be the winner. Cue 'absolute limbs' among the Poole Ultras behind the goal.

But the sporting excitement wasn't over for the day as I had a Blood Bowl battle booked with Bryan.

On my week's holiday I had done some painting, and since coming home I had managed to paint my team of wood elves. I decided to give them purple hair and was quite happy with the result. I already a mostly painted treeman figure and he joined the elves for this match.

I've called the treeman Mosstyn, and it wasn't long before he was in the thick of the brawling.

The elves are very agile, meaning players can break through the other team lines. This led to a high scoring game with the elves winning 4-1.

However, they aren't so good defensively. They ended the game with four serious injuries and a casualty box full of maimed elves. In return they barely won any blocks and didn't inflict a single meaningful injury. 

Bryan seemed happy with maiming so many players despite the loss. And I enjoyed playing with a new team that had been sitting unused for so long.

And that was my mega Saturday. Looking forward to a quieter Sunday now!

500 scorelines (more football data nerdery)

I freely admit I'm a football data nerd. I've blogged previously about my 'Book of Days' project and also how a football app has influenced my matchgoing. 

Last week I clocked up my 500th football match since I started logging going to football matches in 1992. This seemed like a large enough round number to provide a dataset for me to review to see which scorelines are the ones I've seen the most. I've gridded them up and colour coded them to show incidence rates.

It's a simple grid - 'home' scores are down the left hand side and 'away' scores are across the top. 

The data

There are some caveats about the data. I excluded one game because it was abandoned after 15 minutes (when the floodlights at Jenner Park blew a fuse and robbed me of a twofer!) so technically there are only 499 games on the grid. The results are either after a full 90 minutes, or at the end of extra time in cup games that went to extra time. Penalty shoot outs aren't included.

I haven't divided the games up by type (league, cup, friendly). The 500 games in the dataset include results from games seen in all four countries of the UK and one game in the USA. It includes international matches, including three Olympic matches. There are two women's games.

The results

The obvious finding is that it's hard to score goals in football so it is far more likely to see a game where each side only scores 1 or 2 goals. I've seen marginally more games where the away team won 1-0 than games that the home team won 1-0. I've seen exactly the same number of games that finished in 2-1 victories for both the home and away teams. And the most likely score for any game I go to see is 1-1.

Where the numbers get more ragged things get more interesting. I've never seen a home side win 4-3, but I have seen three away teams win 3-4. I've seen teams win away 3-5 and 4-5 (which was a very memorable Poole Town game against Paulton Rovers), but I've not seen home wins by the reversed scorelines. 

The proper outliers are all memorable. The highest scoring game I've ever been to is the 16-0 victory for Cardiff Corinthians in the Welsh Cup last season. It's all out on its own on the grid. The 8-3 result was at the tail end of last season when Barry Town thrashed Afan Lido. The 2-7 is from this season - another Poole Town victory. (Poole seem to be doing their bit to keep my scorelines looking interesting.)

I will update this when I hit my next worthwhile matchgoing milestone. Maybe by then I will have seen a game end 4-3. If I can add to the smattering of weird scorelines on the fringes too, that will be a bonus.

25 years of football - fun football mascot malarkey

I've been writing a series of posts about going to football matches over the past 25 years. Admittedly they are a bit self-indulgent. I wrote them for me, really. But this post is different. This post is for Cathy.

Cathy loves football mascots. When they show those scene-setting clips at the start of game highlights on Match of the Day, she always goes "Yay! Mascots!" if they get a half second of screen time.

I've seen a few football mascots and I try to take photos to show her later. Here are some of my favourites.

Got to start with Lenny the Lion. Lenny is the Shrewsbury mascot.

Dylan the Dolphin from Poole Town. I dig his strutting attitude. Impressive for a mammal with no legs...

Spark the Cat from Queen Spark Rangers. (Do you see what they did there?!?)

The mighty, famous Gunnersaurus Rex (Arsenal).

Rocky the Robin (Cheltenham Town) - one of the few mascots to bother talking to away fans.

But what do mascots do? They have lots of important duties on match days.

Making sure all the little kids are hopped up on sugar ready for the game by carrying around a copious bucket of sweets and occasionally hurling them at force into the crowd.

Geeing up the crowd, like Newport County's optimistic Spytty the Dog here.

Dancing on the halfway line to entertain everyone during the warm up, like Gilbert the Gull from Torquay United.

High-fiving the fans.

Posing for selfies.

Contemplating the inevitability of one's own eventual non-existence, like the Moping Giant from Yeovil.

Making sure the visiting team are welcomed, and possibly confused about whether you are actually the home side's goalkeeper.

Joining in a minute's applause. Or a minute's silence. Because nothing honours the greats of the game or our glorious war dead then someone in a giant grinning furry animal head, trying to look suitably sad.

Interesting side note. In that picture you can see Lenny the Lion's colleague, possibly partner, we aren't sure. 'She' is imaginatively called Mrs Lenny. (I am not making this up.)

The problem is that Mrs Lenny, while clearly identifying as female, hence the giant pink bow, first appeared with a full mane, not unlike Lenny himself. Given that Shrewsbury played at Gay Meadow at the time, it seemed like this was a very progressive stance towards coupledom for a fairly staid club.

Now though it appears Mrs Lenny has less of a mane, as seen in this photo, which makes me wonder if there is some kind of process being undergone here. I'm not sure whether it's as progressive to have a couple where one half is transgender as having an openly gay mascot partnership. But it's interesting, and a good model for the kids in terms of acceptance and tolerance.

And finally, mascots must always, always, always, keep their spirits up. Like Bartley Bluebird here, from Cardiff City, who is depicted waiting longingly for a goal that just wasn't going to come.

And then gave up.

25 years of football - my top 5 most memorable matches

I recently blogged about my own football-going records, covering 25 seasons of going to games. It's kind of hard to pick out the best games, or the most memorable. There are some I will never forget. Here are programmes (and some photos) for five matches I went to that I think are the ones I will remember forever.

Newcastle v Aston Villa - 2 April 2005

It was a game on my birthday - always a bit special, that. My sister-in-law, Abby, had bought us really good tickets quite close to the pitch. So close we could see Alan Shearer doing his shouty, pointy, bossy stuff, and Graeme Souness glowering in the dug-out. Kieron Dyer was Newcastle's highest paid player. The woman behind us didn't rate him. "He's too fancy for me," she said. "Too fancy!"

Too fancy! has become a bit of an in-joke for me and Cathy.

This game itself has become legendary. Newcastle had three men sent off. Two of them - the "too fancy" Kieron Dyer and wannabe thug Lee Bowyer were sent off for fighting each other. The third, Steven Taylor handled the ball on the line, and then collapsed holding his chest in a laughable attempt to fool the referee. Aston Villa won 3-0. They were already leading when Dyer and Bowyer started trading punches.

They were properly swinging as well. None of this brush a guy's cheek and he falls to the ground clutching his face nonsense. They'd have done ice hockey proud.

In the programme, there's a bit about how the game brought Bowyer "into conflict" with his former boss David O'Leary.

That may have been true, but it brought him into more conflict with Kieron Dyer.

I remember leaving the ground, trying hard not to stand out as a non-Geordie in a seething sea of very, very angry Geordies. There was a palpable sense of repressed fury in the crowd. It just needed a spark to erupt into a riot. If that had happened, St James' Park would have been ripped apart and we'd be talking about the day two Newcastle players were lynched by their own fans.


Wales v Italy - 16 October 2002
The Millennium Stadium was packed. Noisy Italian fans. Even noisier Welsh fans.

Wales scored first. Italy equalised from a soft free kick. But then Craig Bellamy scored what proved to be the winning goal. I remember the headrush from leaping up when the goal went in.

This was part of the campaign for Euro 2004 that saw Wales miss out in a qualifying play-off to a Russian team later exposed as harbouring drug cheats. Given everything that's come out about Russia since, that shouldn't be a surprise.

Wales were a team much greater than the sum of it's parts. Here's the squad for the game. There weren't many stars in it.

By contrast, this is Italy's squad. Less than four years after this game, Italy won the World Cup. Again.

Shrewsbury v Everton - 4 January 2003
Two games from the same season make my top five. This was an FA Cup match from the era when tickets for football matches looked like this:

Not a bar code to be seen.

The programme features a delightfully dated early twenty-first century photoshop montage pitting boy wonder Wayne Rooney (whatever happened to him?) against Shrewsbury's feisty talismanic striker Luke Rodgers.

An interesting factoid: the Everton team were managed by former Shrewsbury central defender David Moyes (whatever happened to him?), while Shrewsbury were managed by legendary former Everton central defender Kevin Ratcliffe.

I was on the Riverside, which was the side of old Gay Meadow that backed on to the river. It was a long roofed terrace and it was rammed for this game. I don't remember much of the football. There was a crowd surge when Shrewsbury scored the opening goal - a Nigel Jemson free kick that Richard Wright completely screwed up. Niclas Alexandersson scored an equaliser for Everton. He was a squad member getting a rare run out. (I'd ask whatever happened to him, but that would just be sad.)

The surge I really remember was the one when Nigel Jemson scored with a header in the second half. If you've never stood on a packed terrace you may never have known that sense that suddenly you aren't yourself any more. You are travelling as a mass, forwards, cresting on a wave of fellow fans. It doesn't matter of course because you are yelling and hugging your mates, and just loving the moment.

Unless your name's Mike and you're an Everton fan in the home end with us, and this is probably one of the most painful football experiences you will have. (Probably not, really. He is an Everton fan after all.) Yeah, it really sucks to be Mike that day. But for the rest of us, woohoo!

Again, a squad comparison. This was the Shrewsbury team that would get relegated out of the football league at the end of the season, eight points adrift of the second bottom team.

Kevin Ratcliffe has not worked in management since the end of that season. He tips up now and again on BBC Wales as a pundit. David Moyes brought his West Ham team to Shrewsbury's new stadium in January this year for an FA Cup game. It finished 0-0.

The Riverside got demolished a couple of years later. They built yuppie flats on it.

I'm still friends with Mike. He'll likely read this. DO YOU REMEMBER THIS GAME, MIKE?


Cardiff v Shrewsbury - 10 January 2016

Another FA Cup game. I've got to include this because I'd seen Shrewsbury play Cardiff three times in Cardiff and never win. The first was a Cardiff City promotion party that was curtailed slightly early by the referee because of crowd encroachment on the pitch. The second was a midweek game that I remember mainly for a Shrewsbury fan being hit in the eye by a coin thrown from the Cardiff fans. The third was a hammering that I watched from the away terrace behind the goal nearest to my house. All three were in the third or basement division.

This was the fourth time I'd seen Shrewsbury play Cardiff in Cardiff, but the first at their swanky new stadium. They were a fancy dan Championship side now, having just spent a season in the Premier League no less. It was also live on S4C on a Sunday night which might explain why almost nobody turned up. Seriously, it was empty. This was the home end:

And Shrewsbury won! 1-0 with a smash and grab bundle-it-over-the-line goal right in front of us in the away end. Oh how we celebrated! Me and Steve and Connor and John! Good times!

My friend Nigel, caught a still of us all intently watching the game from the S4C coverage.

This! This is how you watch a televised match. None of this waving at the camera really excited like.

Paulton Rovers v Poole Town - 25 October 2014
I've included this one because a game doesn't have to be a team full of stars for a match to be memorable.

My friend Steve is a Poole Town fan and he has taken me to a few places to watch them play. Glamorous places like Merthyr, Weston-Super-Mare, and even Poole itself. But few places feel as out of the way as Paulton Rovers. I'm still not entirely sure where Paulton is and I've looked it up on Google Maps. It's somewhere nearish to Bristol. Or Bath. I think.

It's in the country.

You can get very close to the goals.

So, why is this memorable? Well, it was one of those games, you know. Paulton were soon leading 2-0. Then Poole pulled it back to 2-2. Then Paulton scored again twice, either side of half time. Poole got another goal back, then won the softest, most dubious penalty ever to make it 4-4. Then with barely minutes to go, unbelievably went ahead and ended up winning 5-4. A very exciting game, and proof that entertainment can be had wherever you end up watching football.