And the Women's Euros have begun

Cathy very kindly put my When Saturday Comes wall chart up for the Euros.

Last night I got to wrote in the first results. That means the Euros have officially started!

We have another wall chart - it's the one we got free outside Caernarfon Castle on our recent holiday.

I like how there is a lot of Cymraeg on here - but it's a real mix of Cymraeg and Saesneg.

I'm not using this wall chart but the other side says "C'mon Cymru" so we have got that up on display underneath the other one.

August 2022 - squeezing the most out of summer

August was a very full month. I've already blogged about our week on holiday in Shropshire and our trip to the Shrewsbury Flower Show. It was also a 'decamonth' of football matches and I had time to see some model trains as well. 

The Cardiff Model Railway Exhibition was on the weekend after we got back from our week in the Shire. It was held in the ice rink around the corner from our house. There were an array of impressive model railway layouts and other stands there. As is usually the case with model railway exhibitions, there was a mix of detailed attempts to recreate real life in miniature, along with more whimsical 'fun' layouts.

However my favourite trains were the miniature live steam engines that were just running around a simple circle at the back of the room. There was a clever use of foreshortened scenery to make it look interesting, and something for the kids as well!

Speaking of 'for the kids', the new series of Bluey is now on Disney Plus. Cathy and I have got really into this lovely cartoon show. She went into town one day and brought me back a present.

(I posted this on Facebook in a group about Bluey and got hundred of likes and comments from other grown ups all saying "WHERE CAN I GET THIS?!?")

As I mentioned, on the football front, August was a 'Decamonth'. I went to ten games. I also had a small article published in When Saturday Comes. It's the September issue and will still be in the shops if you want to go and read it.

The article provoked some discussion among Barry Town fans as to whether that was the right shirt or the player named in the article. I did explain that the image choice was an editorial decision!

My footballing adventures began right at the start of August with a trip to the Port Talbot sea-side to watch Afan Lido v Barry Town. The ground is so close to the beach there were little piles of windblown sand in almost every nook and corner. 

The Barry goalkeeper didn't have much to do as Barry won 4-1 to get their first points in the JD Cymru South this season. 

I also saw my first ever 4-4 draw, at Cardiff Draconians v Brecon Corries in the second qualifying round of the Welsh Cup. The Dracs were winning 4-2 with only a few minutes to go, then conceded two goals. There was no extra time - it went straight to penalties. Almost inevitably, the Dracs lost the penalty shootout 8-9. It was very disappointing for them. 

I went to two Shrewsbury Town games during our week in Shropshire, and added a third before the end of the month. On Bank Holiday Saturday I drove to Bristol and met Ken, a family friend who lives in Bristol, for Shrewsbury's game at Bristol Rovers.

Ken is a season ticket holder at Aston Villa but he didn't mind slumming it with me in League One for the day. It was the first time I'd been to watch Shrewsbury play at the Memorial Ground since leap day in 2020. It's an easy away day for me, and this was the fifth time I'd been to a game there since 2017. It was also the tenth time I've seen Bristol Rovers, so when I checked in on Futbology I got a badge.

I also went to my first two Grange Albion games of the season, sadly both defeats. The second game was on Bank Holiday Monday at the ostentatiously named Ocean Park Arena.

Albion were playing Clwb Cymric, a Welsh-speaking team who have been on the rise recently. This game was the last one on the South Wales Groundhop, which meant there was a programme available. It's the first Grange Albion game I've been to with a programme!

I acquired a few baseball cards in the course of the month, including a set that arrived in a tube! 

I will be blogging about them on my baseball card blog sometime soon.

And as a final photo from the month - here's one from the honey tent at the Shrewsbury Flower Show. I don't know why I didn't include this in my round up, because it really amused me. 

Scottish Premier League for the night: Celtic v Dundee

When I was growing up my friend Edwin who lived round the corner supported Celtic. (His family were from Scotland.) Back then we collected football stickers and Edwin was keen on trying to get all the Celtic players.

Fast forward 30+ years and I had the opportunity to travel to Glasgow for a conference with work. On the off-chance that I might get to a game I looked up the fixture list and it turned out there was a game scheduled for the day I flew into town. Celtic v Dundee in the Scottish Premier League.

The taxi dropped me off right outside

Booking a ticket was very easy and every seat has a 'view' option so you can see what the view was going to be like. I had asked for advice on the When Saturday Comes message board because I didn't want to end up in with the Ultras. I was safely away at the opposite end.

I got a taxi out to the ground. The driver asked if I wanted to go the quickest route or the fastest route, along the elevated motorway, which also gave you a view of the ground. I opted for that and we arrived with plenty of time to spare. I went into the Celtic Superstore. They had everything you could imagine in there in Celtic colours. You could kit out your house in green and white if you wanted to. I bought a scarf and a programme as souvenirs.

Celtic Selfie (note scarf)

I made a big mistake of buying a veggie burger from one of the many food vendors outside the ground and missed out on the chance of a MACARONI PIE inside! (Although as Cathy pointed out that would be a mightmare from a carb point of view.) Still, the curly fries were good. And I will know to wait until I'm inside next time.

Even the little men on the sign wear hoops

Some people have added their own messages to the signs

I had a great view from my seat. There were a lot of spare seats, including most of my row, so second half I moved along a bit to get some space.

Dundee wait while Celtic huddle

The game itself was not a great advert for Scottish football. Celtic started brightly but soon fizzled out into bland play-it-across-the-park football. There were a couple of chances from free kicks and corners, for both teams. But really Dundee had come to defend and hit Celtic on the break. But Celtic were playing possession football and lying deep themselves, so rarely lost possession.

Celtic on the attack

The Celtic crowd are unforgiving, apart from the Ultras in the opposite corner who bounced along and chanted almost throughout the game. Within a few minutes there were sighs and expletives in response to mis-hit passes. From so high up it was obvious that as a team, Celtic were fairly clueless. The goalkeeper, Craig Gordon, echoed the frustration of the fans when he got fed up that no one was ever ready for a pass or throw to play the ball out from the back. He ended up just hoofing it upfield where it was inevitably headed back by a Dundee player.

And on the defence...

Celtic had one really good chance in the first half when they unpicked the Dundee defence for the only time in the game, but then the striker fired wide. Other than that, Dundee defended solidly while Celtic passed the ball across the park in front of them, and then cut it out when Celtic tried to go forward.

Midway through the second half Colin Kazim Richards came on. He's a much bigger unit now than he used to be. He made an impact, just not a positive one, as every touch seemed to be a foul. With twenty minutes to go, a goal seemed less and less likely and even the Ultras stopped making noise. Dundee could have won it at the death but their unmarked player somehow headed wide from a corner. Shortly after it was the final whistle, with lots of boos from the fans who had stayed to the bitter end.

Heading towards a 0-0 draw

Even with a final score of 0-0, I'm glad I went. It was a new experience, And I would go again if I had the chance. Mainly for the promise of a macaroni pie than the hope of seeing a brilliant game of football.

2015 in review: The non-fiction books I read

I've already blogged about the fiction I read in 2015. Here are some short reviews of the non-fiction I read during the year. I've divided them up into sections.

Football

I do read quite a few football books. The joke in book group is that I tend to read books about goalkeepers, particularly German goalkeepers. This year I kept up the tradition...

The Outsider: A History of the Goalkeeper - Jonathan Wilson
This is the book about goalkeepers and starts from the interesting premise that goalkeepers are different, both in terms of the role they play and psychologically. The historical stuff about the development of goalkeeping as a specialist role is really interesting. Unfortunately it gets bogged down discussing the various goalkeepers produced by different countries. While the research into, say, Cameroonian keepers, or the inheritors of Lev Yashin's spot in the Russian national team, can't be faulted, the material does all get a bit samey. There are also a few occasions when the author references stuff with the assumption the reader will know what he is talking about. I got most of them, but some I had to look up.

The Incredible Adventures of the Unstoppable Keeper - Lars Pfannenstiel
I got sent this to review for When Saturday Comes. Lars Pfannenstiel is a German journeyman keeper who ended up playing on all six continents, although never for anyone particularly good. He seems to regularly ditch everything to follow the gilded promises of agents or club owners, which invariably come to nothing. He cuts a fairly naive figure as a result. My (longer) review for WSC is online here.

An Autobiography - Pat Jennings
When I was a kid I collected football stickers (I still do!) and the first collection my brother and I had was Panini's 'Football 85'. The first team in the album were, of course, Arsenal, and the first player was their goalkeeper, Pat Jennings. So, he is one of those players who I can picture really clearly (at least, his sticker!). This autobiography was from 1983 and it's interesting to a point. He comes across as fairly dull, but some of the things he talks about aren't. For example, the stuff people chucked at him from the terraces. He ended up with a dart (!) in his arm on a couple of occasions. There's also a bit late on in the book which just wouldn't appear in a book by a pro sportsman now, when he worries that players playacting and pretending to be injured would make other people think footballers are "poufs". That's a word that doesn't tend to be used these days. Altogether now, "It was acceptable in the eighties..."

Full Time - Tony Cascarino
Not a goalkeeper, but another footballer from a different era. Cascarino played for a number of top clubs and also the Republic of Ireland in the late 80s and the 90s. This was one of the first truly confessional footballer autobiographies and it is really interesting. The section when he talks about splitting up with his wife is raw and honest and you can tell he feels like an utter shit about the way he treated her. There's a revelation that he might not have ever been eligible to play for Ireland after all, and an interesting accounting of where all the money he made disappeared to. It's hard to read the book and not like Tony Cascarino, mainly because he is being honest about how unlikeable he is. I'd quite like to read an updated version to find out what happened to him after he retired.

Theology

Gospel of Freedom - Jonathan Rieder
This is a very scholarly, yet accessible, study of Martin Luther King's 'Letter from Birmingham Jail' that unpicks King's theology of non-violence and liberation to thoroughly explain it. It's rare I would use the term 'life-changing' of any book, but this has really impacted on me. Particularly the challenge of Dr King regarding what kind of 'extremists' we will be. In a world that seems to be dominated by the actions of extremists, the call to be extremists of love and justice, is still powerfully relevant.

Other non-fiction

A Universe from Nothing - Lawrence Krauss
This is trying to make astrophysics simple and it must work because I understood it. Put simply, it proposes that the existence of the universe was inevitable given quantum fluctuations. There is no 'cause' to the universe; it just is. In philosophical terms this means the world is just a 'brute fact' and various cause-related arguments for God's existence are rendered moot.

Too Much Information - Dave Gorman
This is like a book version of Dave Gorman's TV show Modern Life is Goodish. He makes some great points about how spammers ruin Twitter and how bands shouldn't stick new songs on 'Greatest Hits' albums (or release such albums if, in fact, they haven't had many hits!), but generally it's one of those semi-forgettable books you breeze through, chuckle at, and then stick on the shelf to never read again.

So, that's it. All in all I read 22 books in 2015. Not a bad reading rate!

Previous posts:
The Douglas Coupland books I read in 2015
The other non-fiction I read in 2015

A collection of Shrewsbury scarves

I've recently had an article published on the When Saturday Comes website sticking up for half-and-half scarves, with a bit of history of the ones I own. Here are some photos and additional comments.

Half-and-half scarves, if you don't know, commemorate games between clubs. They often feature the date of the game. Here are the four I own. Two are from the same game.

You'll notice the Arsenal one circumvents copyright issues.

I have some other scarves too. A vintage one from before the move to the new stadium, one that was for sale at the Wembley play-off against Bristol Rovers, and the 125-year anniversary scarf.

The Wembley one is a nice memento of a pretty horrible game.

Generally in life you only need one scarf. But these are more than that. They are a record of fandom. With the demise of the much-maligned 'Clippy' the Lion from the club badge, there are new scarves being produced for the forthcoming season. I probably will end up buying one.

2 gems from the WSC Weekly Howl

The first rule of proof-reading - always check the headings!

Secondly - whose idea was THIS?



Available on Amazon

Some other bits of writing & stuff

Occasionally I engage in some self-promotion.

A pessimistic article I wrote for When Saturday Comes has attracted at least one angry commentator detracting my status as a Shrewsbury fan. Surprisingly I'm less than bothered.

I don't usually plug stuff I've written for work, but I was involved in the creation of a recent white paper about the guiding ethos in the NHS, and whether its founder, Aneurin Bevan, would recognise it. I found it fascinating to write it and maybe you'd find it interesting.

While we're on the subject of work stuff, I had the privilege to direct some information videos about work being done to prevent falls among elderly and infirm people back in May. They're now online, so if you want to rate my ability as a documentary film-maker, you can watch them here. I suggest the ones filmed in Cardiff and Llanidloes - if you like dogs you have to watch the one from Llanidloes. (I was helped massively by a very talented cameraman / editor - this is his website.)

Newport County v Wrexham

I had an article published on When Saturday Comes' website previewing the Newport v Wrexham game I went to yesterday. (Read it here)

I didn't realise that the game had been switched to a Sunday (for TV broadcasting purposes, no less) so had an abortive round trip to Newport on the Saturday. Doh! At least it meant I knew where the stadium was the next time around.

I really enjoyed the game. Two goals, a comical missed penalty when the taker slipped and spooned his spot-kick onto the bar, some decent passing football in patches, standing on an old-style terrace where people could smoke, the vulgar witticisms of the crowd.

Trivia notes... Both teams had goalkeepers who used to play for Shrewsbury - Glyn Thompson who was sold as a youngster but didn't make it in the big time was playing for Newport and Scott Shearer was in goal for Wrexham. Newport's reserve goalie was also ex-Shrewsbury and also called Glyn.

Neil Ashton, another ex-Town man, gave away the penalty and got sent off early in the second half. Despite the miss, having the extra man meant Newport were the better side in the closing stages. (Yet another ex-Town player was on the bench for Shrewsbury, one-time Wales under-21 international Jamie Tolley.)

Both the managers were called Dean, both had been strikers and played in the Premier League.

Former Chelsea defender Frank Sinclair, now 38, was playing for Wrexham. They say that pace is temporary, but class is permanent. You don't get to be a top-level defender for most of your career without having some nous. He read the game well and it seemed every time a Newport player turned around in possession, big Frank was there to boot the ball away.

All in all, a good day

Fed up with the glitz and gloss of modern football?

Do you long for the days when players had personality and really said what they think?

Well When Saturday Comes' weekly email newsletter included a link to just such a player's profile, Sam Farthing of Tadcaster Albion. He seems to have a lot of dislikes...

Ha ha, Liverpool assumed too much!

I actually caught the last few minutes of the FA Cup replay between Reading and Liverpool this week, and held my breath as Reading held on for an "historic" win at Anfield for the first time ever. I don't know when we started calling such events "historic" but it's become the de rigueur thing to do.

Anyway, it was a great win for Reading. And then today I got the weekly email from When Saturday Comes and, boy, did I laugh when it reported this:

"With online and automated purchases the days of queuing up outside ticket offices are long gone. So well done to Liverpool for organising their FA Cup fourth round tie so promptly. This message was sent out before Wednesday's home defeat against Reading:

As a valued member of the Auto Cup Scheme, we'd like to confirm details for the following FA Cup match:

FA Cup
Liverpool v Burnley (4th Round)
Saturday 23rd January 2010. Kick Off: 12.45pm
The Ticket Office will begin taking payments for the above game from Thursday 14th January.

Ha ha ha! My buddy Matt always say that 'when you assume you make an ass out of u and me'. I bet someone at Liverpool FC feels a proper plonker now!

If you like football and you don't get the WSC Howl from When Saturday Comes, then really you should. It's free and frequently hilarious. Sign up here.