Published 09/05/23.
To the Memorial Stadium, then, home of Bristol Rovers and the culmination of a 25-year journey. Last summer, it dawned that I had visited all but six Premier League and Football League grounds, known as “The 92”. Quite how, after 15 years as a footballer in the lower leagues and five penning a column in The Times called The Journeyman, I’d never made it to The Mem, was beyond me. Yet in truth, despite a deep attachment to the English pyramid, my arrival at this juncture — after visiting 89 of the present 92 as a player, journalist or both — feels like one big glorious accident.
I’m no groundhopper. I’ve never owned a copy of Simon Inglis’s Football Grounds of Britain (historically, the groundhopper’s bible), a Rothman’s Football Yearbook, or, indeed, an anorak. I remember almost nothing of my first visit to an English ground — Blackpool’s Bloomfield Road during a visit to Lancashire with Celtic Boys’ Club in the late 1990s — other than how impressive the attendance seemed for an unglamorous Third Division game. (How little did I know.)
As a child growing up in Edinburgh, Scottish football was my thing. Thanks to my dad, Celtic were my team. (With painful timing, the very notion of support dawned just as Rangers were in the thick of nine consecutive league titles.) My first game was an Old Firm clash: the 1990 Scottish League Cup Final at Hampden. I would have been six. My abiding memory, other than the pain of defeat that day, and the entrepreneurial Glaswegian kids who offered to protect my dad’s car, for a fee of course, was the brutality of Terry Hurlock’s tackling.
Playing was my real passion. So for the first half of my life, my only real awareness off all but the most storied English clubs was hearing their (to me) exotic names — Accrington Stanley? Rushden & Diamonds? Crewe Alexandra? — during final scores on a Saturday.
And yet here I am, two decades on, on a patch of land that has been hosting Bristolian sport — aside for a brief spell of use as allotments during the First World War — for more than a century, plotting the story of much of the second half of my life across a map of 92 Football League clubs.
One of the great joys of becoming a journalist, and of visiting a different club each week to write The Journeyman, has been to learn about the complex histories of these proud old institutions; how each club emerged from, and became deeply woven into, its surroundings.
For example, if, like me, you never got the chance to visit the Eastville Stadium — of their seven former homes, the one where Rovers stayed the longest, but now an Ikea store — you might not have known that the club’s nickname, “The Gas”, derived from the smell wafting over from an adjacent gasworks.
The Memorial Ground, named after local rugby players who fell in the war, has been Rovers’ home for only 27 years. The club’s itinerant history, and plans for a new stadium in the east of the city, underlines the chameleonic, restless nature of The 92.
Fittingly, though, the official 92 Club was founded by a Bristol Rovers fan, Gordon Pearce, in 1978. What started with 39 members has blossomed to 1,302 — and, as Mike Kimberley, who took over as secretary after Pearce’s death in 2010, tells me, for a £20 joining fee, membership No 1,303 (along with a tie, lapel pin and membership card) is ready and waiting for yours truly.
Pearce completed his own journey, at Darlington, in 1966; Kimberley, 63, at Carlisle United in 1996, six years after he realised he had visited about 70 of The 92 following his beloved Crystal Palace. For me, the journey began in earnest in February 2001, on the day I travelled south to sign for Nottingham Forest. The frisson of excitement when I first laid eyes on the City Ground, sitting there proudly on the banks of the River Trent, is a feeling I still remember vividly.
When I departed five years later, the playing career that unfurled — with Rotherham United, Chesterfield, Crewe, Northampton Town and Grimsby Town — was not the one I dreamt of. But by the time I came to hang up my boots in 2016, it was clear to me how valuable — and precious — each of the 92 clubs, and many more besides, are to their communities.
Each one has an associated memory. Tranmere Rovers, September 2003. The giddy excitement of my professional debut for Forest, the sense of one journey ending as another was just beginning. Everton, March 2002. An FA Youth Cup quarter-final in which a 16-year-old Wayne Rooney scored the winner with a spectacular overhead kick, a month before his first-team debut.
Walsall, November 2003. A flu-ravaged Forest side taking a 4-1 beating by a team spearheaded by 35-year-old Paul Merson, and fists flying in our dressing room afterwards. Crystal Palace, December 2003. The feeling of being shot in the hamstring for the first time as I tried to keep pace with a young Wayne Routledge. Swansea City, April 2006; Mansfield, September 2007 — rare goals, the latter of which was scored direct from a corner.
Some memories are about the bones of a place. That raking stand at Bradford City; the fans’ proximity at Luton Town, Portsmouth, QPR and (in smaller numbers) Accrington Stanley; the stairs from the changing rooms down to the pitch at Sunderland, as the Stadium of Light rises before you.
The sounds. Millwall’s din at The New Den; Sheffield United’s greasy chip butty; Forest’s rendition of Mull of Kintyre moments before kick-off — what I wouldn’t give to hear and feel those songs wash over me from the centre circle again.
Some no longer exist, of course. Appearances at Upton Park and Griffin Park, among others, have been replaced by a seat in the press box at the gleaming new homes of West Ham United and Brentford. Moreover, in plotting this journey, I was struck by how many have dropped out of The 92 altogether.
Memories of visits as a journalist are less personal, but often leave as deep an impression. The sight of Blackpool’s supporters, for instance, in the fourth year of a campaign to rid their club of their wretched owner, Owen Oyston, boycotting outside Bloomfield Road before a plum FA Cup tie against Arsenal in January 2019, was as sad as anything I’ve witnessed at a football ground. Their triumphant return three months later, the cathartic roar, the tears and the pitch invasion from the biggest home crowd in 40 years when Blackpool scored a 96th-minute equaliser, was among the most joyous.
Battles against injustice or mismanagement — at Blackburn Rovers, Bolton Wanderers, Charlton Athletic, Coventry City, Leyton Orient and others — have been too familiar. Yet seeing AFC Wimbledon’s emotional return to Plough Lane, the club’s spiritual home, in 2020, underlined the remarkable resilience of these places.
Schleps to places such as Barrow and Plymouth have been worthwhile to hear uplifting stories of revival. As was the journey to Carlisle, in 2016, to meet the enterprising young fans who spawned a song — and a flag — about their then-manager, Keith Curle, to the tune of Peter Andre’s Mysterious Girl, (I wanna play 3-5-2), which went viral on social media. (Hard-hitting journalism, I’m sure you’ll agree.)
I’ve been fortunate enough to report on some rollicking action inside these places too — and, when all’s said and done, it’s the football we congregate in our thousands for each weekend. My first visit to Brighton & Hove Albion’s Amex Stadium last summer — for the Lionesses’ euphoric European Championship quarter-final win against Spain, thanks to Georgia Stanway’s 96th-minute screamer — was the first of five Premier League grounds I had left to tick off. Arsenal, Southampton, Manchester City and, only a fortnight ago, Liverpool — I know, how on earth had I never been to Anfield? — were the others.
All in all, I visited 62 of the current 92 as a player, 70 as a journalist, and only three solely as a neutral. One of those, my visit to Newcastle United, in March 2002, coincided with an all-time great Premier League goal. Jermaine Jenas, who had recently joined Newcastle from Forest, got a couple of youth-team pals, Craig Westcarr and James Biggins, and I some comps for the visit of Arsenal. I’ll never forget the look on Westy’s face in the moments after that Denis Bergkamp goal — the pirouette around a bamboozled Nikos Dabizas, before slotting the ball past Shay Given — when what we had just witnessed eventually registered.
Another, to Manchester United in 2003, was to see the Champions League final between Juventus and AC Milan. The chance to see Paolo Maldini, Andrea Pirlo, Alessandro Del Piero, Edgar Davids et al at close quarters was a thrill; 120 goalless minutes less so, before Milan triumphed on penalties. And I must confess, my visit to Tottenham Hotspur’s new arena 18-months ago, with a Spurs supporting pal, left me cold. Perhaps two decades working in the Football League, rather than the Premier League, will do that to you.
Yesterday’s visit to a sun-kissed Memorial Ground, then, where Rovers and Bolton fought out a five-goal thriller in Bolton’s favour, before a 10,000 sell-out crowd, in English football’s third tier, felt like a perfect place to finish. From the press seats high up in the East Stand, the Bristol skyline and Gloucestershire’s rolling hills unfurled. The Mem, as it turns out, is also home to one of The 92’s most sweeping vistas.
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