The whole world and his wife has commented on the return to football of fans after our little eighteen-month hiatus so I won’t bore you about it here. Instead, I’ll bore you about my return to football after our enforced break…
First up our train to Wolves was cancelled. Get the Glasgow train they said, change at Rugby and go on from there.No worries. Sat down, opened a beer…ah this feels good…bing bong. The train to Wolves is now back on, you have a couple of minutes to get your arse in gear and go get that one. In a line beloved of hack Hollywood scriptwriters, “ I’m getting too old for this shit”
After all that I think we ended up getting to Wolves on time …Wolves station has had a bit of a makeover but it’s only superficial. Yea it looks shiny & new from the outside but peeks behind the curtains and it’s still the same drab provincial railway station. Fur coat, no knickers…If it does get the full treatment though I hope they keep the exceptionally badly drawn mural that adorns the old walkway. It’s a classic of its genre…
The town hasn't altered much since I was last there although a new building has sprung up in front of The Prince Albert which is so non-descript I can’t describe it…
But the rest of the town I saw remains gloriously unchanged.The Posada wasn’t open yet but The Goose next door was and I find the most civilised way of waiting for a pub to open is go drink in the pub next door which is open…it would appear that table service in the pubs has now taken a back seat and we‘ve gone back to the jostling at the bar for drinks.To be fair if The Posada had table service they’d only get about twenty punters in…
We debated about getting down the ground early as none of us really knew how any new restrictions would pan out but British football fans are adverse to getting in the grounds too early as there’s virtually no infrastructure in place to tempt us away from the boozer.It’s all well and good clubs begging us to arrive early but they have to provide an incentive to do so.Namely good sized concourses with plenty of beer & food outlets selling good quality,reasonably priced fare…all debate was moot anyway as it turns out everything is exactly the same as it was before the Covid kerfuffle except I saw a few hand sanitizer dispensers on the wall…
I’m not very good at football analysis so this will be brief…we looked far more exciting to watch than we have for a couple of years.Bruno wants us to attack rather than protect.I like it.We dominated for large periods and continually harassed Spurs.Unfortunately we couldn’t score…fur coat,no knickers.But I fully expect knickers to be put on soon and the floodgates to open(so to speak) Nuno got a nice clap from the South Bank at the end but nothing else.A few fans were thinking stewards would be handing out the Koolaid in a mass suicide at the mere sight of the man but I’m glad to say things on the Nuno front were decidedly down beat,respectful,but downbeat…
That’s it really.All in all a pretty bog standard day at the football and after eighteen months of us fans not having a Scooby what’s gonna happen to our game a bog standard day at the football is a thing of beauty and is to be cherished…long may it continue.
