DARLING I'VE BEEN SEEING SOMEONE ELSE ....(11 guys every Saturday afternoon actually...)

I was with a group of friends the other day when one of them asked if any of the others had seen my Blog? A couple of them said 'yes they were following my weekly postings with great interest and enjoying reading my rantings'. One of the guys who was unaware that I was Blogging asked "What do you write about?"....
Without really thinking about it I replied "I write about life, love and relationships" to which he responded: "I suppose that just about covers everything there is to discuss for any of us, I'll have to take a look."

That conversation really set me thinking and in particular about the relationships I have in my life and I'm starting to realise that we all have so much more than the spouse, partner, romantic type relationships that I have tended to write about so far....

As well as having relationships with our spouse or partner we have relationships with our offspring, we have relationships with parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins as well as work colleagues and friends and over time I'm sure I will touch on most or all of these relationships as a point of discussion. However because tomorrow sees the start of the new football season in England (that's 'soccer' for all you American readers and not to be confused with your version of 'football' ) I'm going to share with you an article I wrote for publication in a football fanzine some 15 years ago!

'What does football have to do with relationships?' I can almost hear you ask....In fact Trudie used to ask me sometimes with great frustration: "What does football have to do with anything meaningful in our lives?"... That was until she read my piece which was a tribute to 'my team Bolton Wanderers who were moving to a new stadium after playing for the past 102 years at 'Burnden Park' after which with tears in her eyes she said "I had no idea it meant so much to you and I really had no idea that you could hold so much passion"...
She saw a new side of me that she never knew existed. She saw that I had another relationship that went back way before we even met. Most importantly she understood why I am so devoted to 'my team' and she liked the emotions they cause me to display.

So I suppose my relationship tip to the guys today is this:- Show as much love, passion, dedication and loyalty to your partner as you do to 'your team' be it a Football, Baseball, Basketball team or whatever and you wont go far wrong....Here's what I wrote all those years ago, I hope you enjoy it.  

BURNDEN   PARK

MY  LAST  30  YEARS!!!

I first went to Burnden as an 8 year old in 1968.  The following are my memories of the famous old ground in the 3 decades since then.  Memories in no particular order.  Some of them very vague, others seem as if they happened yesterday.  There are very few dates that spring to mind to pinpoint particular incidents, but I know that if you were there then you too will remember.

The Embankment;  The first place I ever stood, no Normid Superstore and massive big steps at the back about 2 feet high, railway line at the back, big wooden scoreboard like a cricket ground.  A 3^rd round FA cup tie against the then mighty Newcastle United saw a sea of black and white as 17000 Geordies crammed onto the huge terrace, the result 3-3 and Malcolm McDonald scored a hat-trick.  We were on ‘Match of the Day’!

I remember crowds of 4000 and crowds of 57000 like the league cup semi against Everton.  We drank beer on the terraces and peed where we stood.  Go to the toilets?  No chance!  It was impossible to move you just swayed with the crowd.  If you did manage to get to the loo it was a mixture of smells from the 6 inch deep river of pee and the lashings of too strong disinfectant.

Later I moved to the best kop end ever The Lever End.  Here were the boys who sang brilliant songs and wore the football fashions of the 70’s.  Doc Marten boots, Crombie coats, Skinners jeans and Ben Sherman shirts.  People wore scarves then and it was cool to wear a silk Wanderers scarf tied round your wrist.  These were the boys who got involved in the many riots and pitch invasions of that time against the likes of Chelsea, Millwall and Leeds.

The big matches down the years come to mind.  The Newcastle game mentioned earlier for one.  I also remember when as a 3^rd Division Club we hammered 1^st Division Man City 3-0 in the League Cup 3^rd round in front of 42000!!!  The top of Division 2 game against Sunderland in front of a similar crowd, when big Sam Allardyce scored “that Header”, and I saw the maestro Frank Worthington score “that Goal”.  Nat Lofthouse I’ve never seen him play but from the first years I went to Burnden I knew he was already a legend.  There were other names, maybe not all as famous as Frankie Worthy and Nat, but no doubt remembered by the people who watched them at the time.  Eddie Hopkinson, Charlie Hurley, John Byrom, Gary Jones, Paul Jones, John Ritson, Willie Morgan, Alan Gowling, Charlie Wright, Tad Novack, Gordon Taylor and Neil Whatmore.  There are many more, too numerous to mention but remembered all the same because they wore the white shirt!

Burnden also carries memories of great players from opposing teams down the years.  I’m sure I remember a 16 year old Trevor Francis scoring a hatful of goals against us for Birmingham City, 3 or 4 I think, and it might have been his full debut!!  The late Great Bobby Moor was sent off for the only time in his career at Burnden while playing for Fulham.  Yes, we knew how to wind up the opposition at Burnden.  I was there on the night Bruce Rioch incited the most hostile atmosphere ever seen in a football ground as we terrorised Wolves and their fans out of the play offs and went onto gain promotion to the Premier League.

It’s not all been laughter down the years.  I’ve seen grown men cry at Burnden when we lost out to Aldershot (of all people) in the first ever play offs to get dumped into the Fourth Division.  I was one of the grown men crying at the end of the very last game to be played there against Charlton when that Burnden legend JOHN McGINLAY  took his final bow.  He could fill a book himself with his heroics and exploits for the Whites, and it all started with ‘that penalty’, 10 minutes from the end of ‘that game’ that sent Preston down and won us promotion.  We sang all the way down Manny Road just as years ago we used to sing under the Railway Bridges outside the Embankment, but they are gone now.  We used to go into the Rose Hill Tavern for a pint, now it’s known as Churchills.  The iron bridge is still there, a lasting landmark on the route to Burnden.  I even remember the dodgy bogs just after the Waggon and Horses, a welcome stopping point after one pint too many.  Then onto Rice and Easy for the best chips in town.

Burnden wasn’t the plushest of grounds with its wooden stands and broken guttering.  The banking at Croft Lane was always overgrown with weeds, and how did that ridiculous great puddle at the corner of the Lever End and Burnden Paddock survive all those years come rain or shine??  Daft I know, but I remember little things like that, things like “The Happy Shop” as the first Club shop was known.  Things like being able to buy “The Buff”, a paper that had all the days results and reports 5 minutes after the end of the game.  It was printed and sold from mobile vans on Manny Road – BRILLIANT!!!  Things like paying 3 quid to get in, and thinking it was a fortune.  Things like going to mid week afternoon matches during the power cuts of the 70’s.  Things like the Bromwich Street Training Ground and things like trying to sign Pele as our Manager!!!

Things that make up 30 years of memories of an 8 year old boy and now a 38 year old man, but all memories of the same person.  All significant in their own little way because they are memories of a place that will live forever in the hearts of the people who were lucky enough to call it “Our Ground” a place that will never be forgotten, even when the bulldozers finally move in.

BURDEN PARK WILL REMAIN FOREVER THE HOME OF

BOLTON WANDERERS!

WSFM

Footnote : The famous old stadium was eventually demolished in 1999 thus ending a wonderful era in my life. 1999 however proved to be more significant than I could ever have imagined as my son Jaja was born on February 28th of that year and now Bolton Wanderers are OUR TEAM!  And always will be regardless of which stadium we call home.

In 1953, LS Lowry's painting "Going To The Match" won a Football Association competition. He was very surprised when he heard about it as he did not know it had been entered. Depicting people going to watch Bolton Wanderers at Burnden Park, the painting sold at auction in 1999 for the record price for a Lowry of two million pounds.

To my wife "Thank you for my life .... nuff said"