Far have I travelled, much have I seen...

Fifty observations from completing the 92.

Finally. After my first game at Forest sometime in 1982, I have seen a competitive football match at all the current 92 football league grounds.

The rules are labyrinthine regarding what exactly constitutes the 92 (do friendlies count? Must one see just one club playing at all these grounds? What if a match is abandoned?) Rest assured, this has been much discussed, and no doubt will continue to be for a long time. There are some stats at the end for you to peruse should you wish. But for now, here are some things I have witnessed and learned from this ridiculous odyssey. Some are serious, others quite trivial.

---

1. Parking near lower league grounds tends to be very easy, as long as you are prepared to walk a mile. Some online guides will have you believe that only pre-paid official car parks exist. But generally speaking, it’s always worth a punt and as long as you don’t mind – or are able – to walk 750 metres, you’ll probably have some joy. This works for larger grounds too as with careful research, one can park within a 30 minute walk of Everton’s new ground.

2. Club shops vary immensely in size and scope. Some are basically a few shelves housing some hats and scarves. Some are portacabins. Others are megastores flogging you anything and everything you could possibly ever want, like a Colchester United branded tape measure.

3. Some clubs put care and thought into their pre-game playlists (Accrington, Rochdale, take a bow) and are often tailored to celebrate artists that emerged from their area. It would be nice to hear more of this. Other clubs just stick some songs on. So, it’s pleasing when some thought goes into such small things and clubs resist the urge to blast out Sandstorm or Sweet Caroline.

4. Surrounding residential areas vary immensely. Some are wealthy and have definitely completed their ‘coming up’ phase. Others are less so. This remains a country of bafflingly huge gaps between wealth and poverty, the haves and have-nots. It’s plain to see for anyone who has spent time traipsing around a residential area near a football ground.

5. Most clubs have extremely friendly matchday helpers knocking around these days, which may on the surface seem superfluous and a bit American, but is greatly appreciated when you want to buy a mug from the club shop, but owing to the aforementioned club shop being inaccessible from the part of the ground you entered, you will need such a helper to escort you through various no entrance areas. This is a welcome development.

6. Anyone who has been to more than 20 or so grounds will have almost definitely navigated the trans-Pennine bit of the M62. Despite the inevitable hold-ups due to a crash or a particularly busy day at the Birstall Shopping Park near Morley, it maintains its capacity to amaze. Whether it’s the farmhouse seemingly plonked in the middle, the view over Scammonden Water, or the eerie bleakness of Saddleworth Moors, there is usually something that makes you wonder whether a big old motorway should even be here, while remaining deeply grateful that it is.

7. Radio 5 Live is not what is it used to be (and I fully realise that this sounds like a precursor to some angry middle-aged bloke moaning while simultaneously outing himself as a bloke struggling to adapt). Admittedly, the 12.00 intro music still slaps hard, as does the 17.00 Sports Report theme tune. But in-between and after, it is dominated by Fantasy Football blokey chat to the accompaniment of braying laughter of blokes called Denno or ABB. On one occasion, rather than run through the EFL scores, we were treated to an unfunny anecdote about a co-commentator throwing sweets at a commentator because he was watching what he eats (to braying, blokey, performative laughter). And the less said about the 606 phone-in show, the better. This is the cue for ‘Enough. Let’s have a bit of quiet time now’.

8. The sheer variety of chips available these days is baffling: cheesy chips, pepper and chilli chips, salt and pepper chips. Just ensure that if you are selling cheesy chips, you offer to melt the cheese, otherwise what’s the point? The variety of condiments on offer at snack bars around the grounds is pleasing too. Stoke City remains elite in this area.

9. It is increasingly common to see groups of teenagers going to their local games, albeit in the lower leagues. Girls comprising such groups is commonplace too. This is absolutely not the case the higher up you go. Lower league clubs need to embrace this and be as encouraging as possible. Higher league clubs need to think carefully about where their future fans will come from, and not fall back on the easy response to this – abroad.

10. Identifying the fans who have been every week since 1972 is a pleasant game. They are easy to spot. Those around always ask how they are. They invariably sport excellent headwear with copious amounts of pin badges. They should be protected and cherished.

11. In the lower leagues, it is commonplace and easy to get close to the away team coach. They don’t tend to be parked far from prying eyes. Sometimes, the team disembark and walk the same pavement to the ground as mere punters. On one occasion, I have been able to amble casually past an unattended open team bus, allowing easy access to the training balls, cones, bibs stored in the undercarriage. It is rather tragic that a small part of me felt I was experiencing a rare glimpse behind the curtain of professional football that few ever see; a larger part of me told myself to get myself together ­– you are [supposedly] a grown adult for god’s sake.

12. Away days tend to be big days out. The anachronistic sight of a group of Grimsby fans spilling out from a minibus into the leafy residential streets of a well-heeled suburb clutching a flimsy cardboard box of bottles of Madri before finding a bush to pee in is something one will probably only see in Britain.

13. There is always an elderly, friendly steward whose job it is to welcome the away team and fans – and they are universally and unfailingly polite and upbeat. They’ve seen it all before and greet every question, inconvenience and request with a smile.

14. How wonderful it is to go to new grounds and recreate those famous goals you’ve seen there on telly in your head: that goalmouth is where Jimmy Glass scored that goal to preserve Carlisle’s league status. There should be virtual blue plaques for this kind of thing.

15. Trains are hard work. You know this. This is nothing new and you don’t need me to point this out to you. So many things are wrong. It wouldn’t hurt for train companies to glance at the fixture list once in a while and consider the implications of this. I’m not interested in fancy seats or buffet carriages. I just want to get to and from a game without drama or delays or standing all the way to Ipswich and back, for a reasonable price. I’ll happily buy a railcard, but there simply isn’t one for me, no matter how much you plough into advertising railcards. Get this right and you’d get some cars off the road and we’d all benefit.

16. Some grounds afford stunning views from the stands: Burnley, Accrington, Fulham (before they filled the corners in), Millwall (from the back of the upper tier of the ways end), take a bow. Such views help when the game is one of those really tedious ones.

17. There are some weird gaps in standards of football to be experienced. The gap between League Two and the National League is sometimes barely discernible. The gap between teams towards the foot of League Two and the top of level 7 sometimes seems small (apart from fitness). Yet there is a chasm between the Premier League and the Championship, and it’s getting wider. This is not healthy.

18. Behaving as a neutral should be straightforward: clap and show disgust at the right moments. But showing the appropriate amount of cheer and disdain is a fine tightrope to tread. Showing either too much or not enough runs the risk of drawing attention, which in turn means questions and conversation. Excellent for the extrovert; less so for the introvert. Consequently, just the right side of performative emotion is required. Yet we naturally accommodate emotions to those around us and are never really neutral. If with home supporters, we find ourselves applauding a goal more enthusiastically than we imagined we might, and generally agreeing that the opposition’s left back is indeed a dirty bastard and should be sent off.

19. Lots of football teams play in red. Red is fine. Nothing wrong with red. But perhaps too many teams play in red ­– there is maybe just too much red. Just a little more variety in club colours would liven up the palate. Green and white stripes are up for grabs if anyone wants them.

20. You can still find many terraces behind a goal to stand on. And higher up the leagues, safe standing is now commonplace, which begs the question, how hard was it to implement in the first place? The period between safe standing seeming weird and fantastical to it being ubiquitous was brief. Football fans can have nice things without breaking them.

21. It was once the case that you could identify a ground from its distinctive floodlights, or at least, you’d approach a new ground not knowing where it was and walk around for a bit looking for a sign to guide you. Not so much these days. At large and modern grounds, the lights are attached to the monolithic stands and lower down, floodlights are pragmatic and perfunctory. There is a glut of generic one pole affairs.

22. The ritual of tying a St. George flag, resplendent with post code, supporters’ branches and poppy logos, to a terrace or draping it over the advertising hoardings is still alive and well, irrespective of the level of football. Some people just really love their flags, I guess.

23. We all know about Griffin Park and its famed pub for each corner of the ground. But by the time of the last throes of Griffin Park before it went to the ground graveyard in the sky, not all of them were still open for business. The pub nearest the ground – like pubs up and down the country – have been closing at an alarming rate. Meanwhile, football clubs have become increasingly preoccupied with footfall and asking themselves how they could possibly squeeze any more money from their fans. The solution? Get them to buy their beer inside the ground. Thus, the modern stadium builds a bar into the fancy new stand. Some of which are quite good, especially when there are no pubs within walking distance, which brings us neatly back – in a chicken and egg style – to the question as to why pubs around grounds are a rare commodity.

24. The modern ultra is here. And they are everywhere. For so long, we have envied German supporters for their flag-waving, constant chanting, and sense of identity. But rather than taking the best bits and moulding it to their own club, some fans have simply copied and pasted it. Of course, anything to bring a bit of atmosphere to the game is welcome. Yet the practice of some sort of uniform, invariably all black clothing, to assert your own fandom seems odd. It has a whiff of superiority about it, as if to say that we are the proper, true, most loyal and generally best fans of all the fans, and you can’t be in our club or as ultra as us until you wear all black and jump up and down a lot. And you may even have to be questioned by us in a pub if you want to join to see if you are the right vibe. It seems like most clubs have their own baby squad – Barrow’s are clearly visible, especially when their team scores a goal at the Holker Street End and they surge towards the away fans to their right. By all means, wave a flag, sing songs, do all of that, but is some sort of uniform really necessary? This is not Asda.

25. Big flags are waved everywhere. Supporters wave them. Clubs have official big flag wavers too. It looks great when a huge flag surfs from end of a stand to the other while flags are being waved in the other stands. But like safe standing, why were we told for so long they were not welcome? They were frowned upon and discouraged and anyone daring to wave a flag to show their support was pounced upon by eager stewards. In fact, it is still difficult to get such a flag into a game without prior permission (although it can be done – there are ways which involve a truckload of Gorilla Heavy Duty thick tape and a thick winter coat). It seems that clubs want to have such a spectacle, but want to own it too, to make it official in some way, as if fans can’t really be trusted to wave the flags correctly, so we’d better take charge of the flag-waving ourselves. Regardless, more big flags and keep them coming; just let the fans sort it themselves.

26. There is delight to be found in losing track of the game by instead of watching, googling Percy Ronson (Fleetwood), Eric Whalley (Accrington) and Ray Wilkie (Barrow) in order to find out why they are so revered that they have a stand or bar named after them.

27. A lot of people are employed by clubs on matchdays. You have your external stewards welcoming and guiding fans unfamiliar with the ground. There is the surly bloke on the entrance to the bar in the stand. The turnstile attendants, the programme sellers, the security staff who pat you down, the club shop staff, the stewards, the refreshment staff, the emergency response workers, the hospitality staff … and all the others not listed here. One wonders how football matches happened when policed solely by a moody steward and an equally truculent copper back in the day.

28. Pubs around Goodison Park and Anfield seem to be Carling loyalists. Anyone looking for an alternative pint of ale or craft beer will be struggling – not even a pint of the now ubiquitous Neck Oil. One wonders what Merseysiders have against beer, and the nature of the weird stranglehold Carling seems to have on them. And how the hell did Madri corner the market so quickly in club bars and pubs? One week it’s Neck Oil, the next it’s Madri. Still, a little win is to ask for a pint of the rarely drunken local ale, and in doing so, receive a curious but pitying look as the friendly bar staff pulls your pint. And I’m still smarting with Barnet for charging me £7.50 for a pint of Guinness in a plastic pot.

29. The matchday uniform is part of the match-going ritual for some. Take a look down next time you are stood on the terrace and count the number of Adidas Gazelle trainers. Then scan round and check out the amount of Barbour coats, zipped up jackets, and of course, the Henry Lloyd/Stone Island badges. This is not a new phenomenon, or indeed to be sneered at. It’s more to say that casual culture is as strong as ever.

30. Saturday afternoon shopping in a town or city centre isn’t a thing anymore. Even if the vast majority of your Saturdays have been spent watching football, there will have been the odd one, usually in the build up to Christmas, where you found yourself ambling round some high street shops before having an overpriced fancy coffee in a well-known chain of overpriced fancy coffee shops. But this type of thing seems to be declining. Walk through a provincial town or large city to a ground and there seems to be fewer Saturday shoppers than ever. No doubt, this is down to various economic factors which in turn have reduced the average high street to a barren wasteland of consumerism featuring a vape shop next to a charity shop next to an empty unit. It feels unwise to punch down on the Saturday shopper; it’s more that it feels quite sad that town and city centres are no longer an attractive proposition for many.

31. The universal awfulness of service stations continues. There isn’t really much to add. Yes, of course I’ve stopped at Gloucester Services and sure, it’s lovely and all that, but not if you just want a sandwich and bag of crisps for a reasonable price. And after around 20.00, there is hardly anything worth eating for sale anyway. Not that this excuses the two Forest fans I watched lift a bottle of wine each from a display outside M&S and brazenly stroll to their car without paying after the away game at Burnley on the final day of the 2023/24 season. Poor form, chaps. Very poor form.

32. Bargain bins in club shops towards the end of the season hold treasure. You can pick up all kinds of unusual memorabilia, and it’s the perfect time to bag a shirt as the club tries to divert all eyes towards the new shirt for next season. Kudos to Walsall for selling their shirt for as little as a tenner, and extra bonus for it having POUNDLAND emblazoned on the front.

33. Listen in to local fans’ conversations and it will universally be about the last game.

‘We were terrible at Carlisle on Tuesday.’

‘Awful, weren’t we? We couldn’t pass the ball to each other.’

‘Even club player legend X had an off day.’

‘And new signing Y looks to be a dud. He doesn’t even look fit.’

We’ve all had these conversations. But at least the general rubbishness of our team’s last performance holds us together like glue and gives us something to talk about. We don’t go to the game for political discourse or workplace problems; we go to forget about such things and indulge in football small talk about our respective rubbish teams. Just leave us alone and let us get on with it – we aren’t hurting anyone.

34. It always strikes me how local residents near to a football ground exhibit general indifference to living near such an important and storied geographic feature. Every fibre of my being wants to shake them and loudly enquire, ‘How could you possibly be painting your fence or hoovering your car when an actual league game is about to start a mere 300 metres from you?! What is wrong with you? Don’t you even know about Jimmy Glass? Don’t you even care…?’

35. Organised fireworks displays are definitely an event in the lower leagues. Who knew they were so heavily advertised? Who knew they were a thing? (Oh, you all did, did you? Fair. It just somehow utterly passed me by.) Such events are advertised more than Elton John gigs in provincial, small, football grounds.

36. Another way to alleviate a tedious game of football is to note the weird and random advertising hoardings: Betterwave – what do you do? Is MFR Motors trustworthy? How much do EBay pay for a small board at Accrington? What exactly prompted Kellogg’s to pay for a small board? What the heck is Britcon and why are Scunthorpe so at the mercy of it? And scan hard enough – especially in the northwest – and you are never far away from a Rainham Steel advertisement.

37. The price of mugs from club shops varies dramatically from £4.99 - £12. (Reader, I have an infuriating habit of buying a mug from new grounds I go to; just lower league ones, mind, if that makes it any easier to understand, which obviously it doesn’t. On one occasion, I had the rather discombobulating feeling of being helped to buy my silly little mug in the club shop by one of the American cryptobro co-owners.) There should be a nationally agreed ceiling price on club mugs.

38. The strength of local pride and identity of away fans who mark their territory remains unshakeably strong. This manifests itself in a number of ways, but the favoured approach appears to be – upon exiting the train, minibus, car – loudly assert where you are from, be it postcode, county, general area (this is also displayed on the St George flag) in a shouty-sing-song manner.

39. When driving to a game, it used to be that one displayed your allegiances by carefully trapping a scarf in the rear or boot window, so it fluttered violently outside the car all the way up the M6. This has been replaced by the executive car sticker or personalised number plate to assert club loyalty, and our society is much the worse for it.

40. Gaining entry into some Premier League grounds as an away fan is akin to travelling through a particularly stringent airport. It is not unheard of to be required to empty pockets entirely into a tray, or to be told to open your wallet so the security guard can check the contents, or to be told to pull your trousers down to your ankles, or be patted on your head ­­– without consent – to check you have nothing under your hat. These have all happened and been witnessed. While at some grounds, you are given a friendly smile and a ‘welcome to the game’. I much prefer the latter method.

41. Each home crowd consists of approximately 58% of sixty-years of age and over blokes who come week in, week out on their own. They are always in sensible clothes, sensible raincoats and quasi walking shoes, which are probably waterproof too. There is fun to be had working out which of these will make a seemingly uncharacteristic and sweary outburst towards the referee at some stage, which is a symptom of watching yet another frustrating performance from their team.

42. Driving to a new ground never fails to be exciting, but at some stage, you find yourself wondering how you actually managed to get anywhere successfully – never mind on time – before the age of satnav/maps. It’s a miracle so many grounds have actually been visited by so many.

43. So rare are they these days that to visit a ground within walking distance of a town/city centre is delightful – it feels like a big day out. More significantly, it encourages a sense of place: you know where you are, you have a sense of being somewhere, which you don’t get from walking through an industrial estate on the ring road or a science park. (Apologies – of a kind – to Colchester, Oxford, Shrewsbury. Hat-tip to Luton, Peterborough, and Sheffield United, to name just a few.)

44. Like ultra-culture, flag-waving and safe-standing, murals around grounds has finally entered the football mainstream in the UK. Like all the above, it took its sweet time, but such art makes the traditional walk around the new ground an enticing one. You may even actively seek out a mural you have seen online. Such things engender a sense of identity to the area, and not in a threatening way, but in a warm and inviting ‘come and see who our heroes are around here’ way. And you invariably stand there agreeing and nodding and thinking, ‘Yeah, he was some player, wasn’t he?’

45. Half time entertainment varies. Sometimes there is none. A modern classic of the genre is kids playing small-sided games. A quirky twist is when some punter has to kick the ball into a skip or the boot of a car. A slightly left-field option is when kids run with a ball around the edge of the pitch. All well and good but bring back demonstrations of police dogs attacking a would-be criminal wearing a suspiciously heavily padded jacket around the forearm.

46. There is a very distinctive shade of dusk that you get at around 16.45 on a Saturday in November. It’s the shade of final scores on the radio, of steamed windows in cars, of a tea of chip shop chips, of childhood.

47. Drums. We need to talk about drums. Especially single drums. They sometimes authoritatively lead the cheer; on other occasions, they are played by a drunken youth who was regularly kicked out of music lessons at school and add nothing. On such occasions, they diminish the whole atmosphere. Some achievement that. Think about your single drum and what it adds.

48. Whatever ground you are at, you’ll hear the same chants, but ever so slightly recycled. The current one doing the rounds is the one that goes And that’s the way we like it, Woah-Ah-oh-oh-oh. It’s crushing when you hear what you think is an original song then adapted and used by every single other fanbase. Do better, everyone. It’s difficult, but do better. At least try. Better to try something different and original than rehash at the rate of a MCU film.

49. Late autumn and you enter a ground in hazy sunshine. You exit the ground into a dark, wintry blackness and it makes you feel you’ve achieved something with your Saturday and can respond with something vaguely interesting to the universal work colleague question, ‘Do anything nice at the weekend?’ Yeah. Yeah, I definitely did.

50. How little all of this matters in the big scheme of life, but at the same time, how much all of this matters in the big scheme of life.

Some Stats

As an away Nottingham Forest fan: 67

As an away Rotherham United fan: 9. They are:

AFC Wimbledon

Cambridge United

Chesterfield (and a Forest friendly)

Crewe Alexandra

Exeter City

Mansfield Town (and a Forest friendly)

Notts County (and numerous Forest friendlies)

Stockport County

Tranmere Rovers

As a neutral: 16

Accrington Stanley

Barnet

Barrow

Bromley

Cheltenham Town

Colchester United (old ground with Forest)

Crawley Town

Fleetwood Town

Harrogate Town

Newport County

Portsmouth

Salford City

Shrewsbury Town

Stevenage (and a Forest friendly)

Walsall

Wrexham

Oldest visits:

Leyton Orient V Nottingham Forest 30 Jan 1988

Crewe Alexandra V Rotherham United 27 March 1989

Stockport County V Rotherham United 6 May 1989

Tranmere Rovers V Rotherham United 9 Sep 1989

Most recent visit:

Everton v Nottingham Forest 6 Dec 2025

---

Looking for a Christmas present for that weird Forest fan you know?

You could always consider buying the book below. And if you enjoyed this book, part two is coming soon (March).

Available here: