The Dream Starts Here ...

Welcome to The Journeyman Blogger, this site is here mainly as an outlet for a guy who spends far too much time on Football Manager and needs an outlet for the niche and obscure players and clubs that that game has exposed me to, and partly as a counselling session in the hope that I'm not the only person who finds the lesser talked about leagues and players absolutely fascinating.

My love of football started when I was around 4 years old. Growing up opposite a football ground had a huge effect on me as I child I think. My earliest memories are of looking out of the front window of my house waiting for my dad to come back from the football, seeing the thousands of people walking out of the ground and past my house, often looking happy and in a celebratory mood, although with it being Crewe Alexandra more often than not they looked pissed off complaining about the “carthorse” in midfield or asking “when are we finally going to sort out our defence?”, two-issues that are still often mentioned in post match conversations over a pint.

My first game was when I was four years old. It was Crewe Alexandra vs Chester City in the old Fourth Division. Now of course I can't exactly remember the game, who played or what the score was, but what I can remember is the feeling of being carried through the turnstile by my dad, hearing the noise of the crowd and thinking that at that moment I was at the centre of the universe.

From that moment on my love affair with football or more accurately with Crewe Alexandra began. I remember for a long time not really being aware of any higher level of football and thinking that the “be all and end all” of football was Gresty Road on a Saturday afternoon. I was soon to realise, somewhat disappointingly that there were in fact better teams than us and even further along realise that my early years following The Alex would prove to be the so called “glory years” of our club.

For the first few years of following Crewe, me and my dad would travel up and down the country watching every game home and away. These experiences for me were also hugely impactful as I was seeing the sense of community that came along with supporting your team. Seeing my dad and his friends discuss the game and laugh with each other whilst often having a beer or two too many, made me see that this is a huge part of people's lives and of society.

This led to me doing the same with my friends as a teenager, when away days became huge occasions and the worse the game or the conditions the better a story it was. They were like badges of honour “Well, have you been to Doncaster on a Wednesday night, when it's pissing down with rain, no roof on the stand to see your team get beaten five nil?....No?....Well I have.”.

The Doncaster trip is one that will always stay with me. The main reason being how absolutely terrible we were on the day, but also because I had a friend staying with me from Spain. His name is Guillermo and he supports Real Madrid. Now obviously this is a bit of a step down for him, but we decided to take him to see what “real football” is. Now Guillermo is from Andalucia, so imagine in the middle of September in Doncaster, around zero degrees and as mentioned before no roof on the stand and rain pouring out of the heavens. As half-time came we were already two or three down so the mood was quite low. We decided to get a bovril to warm us up, I gave this to Guillermo as we turned to go back to our places on the terrace, as we were walking back I looked at him and he was shivering and he simply asked “Why do you do this?”. It is a great great question but the only answer I could muster was “This is what it's all about!” and I'm still not sure what I meant by that, but it felt like the only suitable answer. If you actually think about it rationally it's absurd.

But growing up along side this (relatively) successful period in Crewe Alexandra's history also had its rewards, My first trip to Wembley in 97 where I remember walking down Wembley way and seeing The Twin Towers emerging over the horizon and upon entering feeling like every person in the world could fit into that stadium. We won with a 34th minute goal from captain Shaun Smith in a game that we were surprisingly comfortable in and if anything should've scored a few more. But the moment when we scored I remember being thrown around by my dad and his friends in the chaos of the celebrations.

My next clear recollection is arriving on the coach back to Crewe and seeing my mother and her friends in the street to welcome us back waving flags and cheering, at the time just thinking that they were as happy as we were about the result. Later I would learn that they had been drinking all day and were just hammered. Some things are better through the eyes of a child I think …

We were blessed at the time to have a lot of very very good academy graduates who kept us at the First Division/Second division level for a lot longer than most would've anticipated. This has since unfortunately dropped in a fairly significant manner, whether it be down to the globalisation of the game or to the restructured academy grading system that allows bigger clubs to poach talent from smaller clubs whilst only paying compensation.

But the players I idolised as a child the majority of whom came through our academy were the likes of Danny Murphy, Neil Lennon and Dele Adebola, who when he left my mother told me on the way home from school and I cried.

Later on players such as Seth Johnson. Rodney Jack ,who I named my first pet hamster after, and Dean Ashton. These players were all great servants to the club, and apart from Rodney Jack unfortunately, all went on to achieve much more in the game with bigger clubs at a higher level.

That is where the pride is I feel for a Crewe fan. We are aware that we are a small club and cannot compete financially with a lot of clubs around us but we can point to players playing in The Premier League and say “We taught him that!”. I have always felt great pride in our academy and the fact that it puts us on the footballing map.

As I grew up I started to become more and more aware of The Premiership and European football, especially The Italian Football show on Channel 4 on a Sunday and finally seeing these elite players with huge stadiums that seemed a million miles away from Gresty Road.

Now I remember wanting to choose a Premiership team to support (two teams? Controversial I know) and deliberating over this decision for a while. Growing up in Crewe everyone supported United or Liverpool, and that was it.

I remember my Dad saying to me “You can support anyone you want to........except for Manchester United!” and I still need to thank him for that. I finally settled on Arsenal and I can't really remember why, maybe it was because they also played in red, maybe it was because I didn't know where “Arsenal” was, or maybe it was just a tad of glory hunting, but whatever the reason it wasn't the none stop celebration I was expecting.

I liked the fact that I was the only Arsenal fan in my year at school, I liked that it was a team that seemed to have a tradition and history of being different and lets face it the fact that they won more often than not.

This period of Arsenal's history was also one of their most successful and has been written about by people much more qualified than myself, but I remember the excitement of the arrival of Bergkamp, an absolute superstar at the time, and then later seeing how great buys like Henry, Vieira, Ljungberg, Pires and many more would go on to be, after coming from seemingly nowhere or with very little reputation within the game.

Watching the double winning teams was a thrilling experience that changed how I viewed the game forever. This is the way the game should be played and this is how you hope it will continue for the foreseeable-

Then going into the Invincible season, (at the time I was around fifteen and I think I didn't appreciate it for the incredible season that it was) I just assumed that this would be us now, winning everything in our path and not a single team able to get close to us, how wrong I was. I often resort to Youtube for the goals of that season to console me after another defeat away to a recently promoted team, or a drubbing at the hands of an apparent rival.

In that time Thierry Henry became a god to me- It seemed like he was playing a different game to everyone else and that we were witnessing something truly special, whether it was the goal at Highbury where he puts the entire Liverpool team in his trail, the text book finish or dropping his shoulder and stroking the ball across the keeper and into the far corner with his right foot.

Since then both of my clubs have dropped off somewhat, Crewe find themselves struggling towards the bottom of League Two and Arsenal have found themselves being left behind by the rest of football and now battling it out simply for European football.

Now I finally mention these two teams together as I feel they have atleast one thing in common, which is that they both had visionary, long-term managers that seemed to get passed by.

When Dario Gradi took over Crewe Alexandra in 1983, people insisted that you could not get out of the lower leagues by playing attractive passing football. He changed the training of the players and brought in systems to look at statistics and he proved them wrong and had a lot of relative success, It is also down to him that Crewe have such a successful academy and most likely that the club are still alive.

Now when Wenger came to Arsenal in 1996 he also brought with him a lot of ideas that people in English football laughed at and thought were strange. This lead to his great early success and his ability or find and develop younger players was one of his main strengths, as proved with the players mentioned earlier. Now the other main thing they have in common is that they both hung on for too long and refused to move with the times.

With Gradi it was in sometimes putting too much faith in the academy and not changing his tactics to combat other teams, and with Wenger it is very much the same. His refusal to prepare his tactics specifically for a certain opponent or his stubborness to play the game one way and one way only. They had no plan B.

Moving into my love for football in general, I have tried in every city or country that I have been to, to visit the stadia and where possible to watch matches. I have been to cathedrals such as the San Siro or the Bernabeu and to glorified Sunday league pitches with a stand attached, in places like Estonia and Kazakhstan.

I find each an amazing experience as I know that every weekend there is atleast one person who cannot wait to get to the ground and watch their team. No matter the level of the football or the standard of the facilities the passion and sense of community is there and I consider this an incredibly uniting and comforting thing.

So here I want to try and bring these “Football Outposts” to more people, whilst learning more about them myself. Each week I will post an analysis of the weekends action mainly from around Eastern Europe and Central Asia, as well as special posts on the history and cult heroes from these parts of the world.