The entire collection of my year-ish-long exploration of what a football club is, what it means to a community, what it means to me, who truly owns a football club's history, pies, cats, songs and wazzing about.
They're presented here chronologically. Dive in if ya like tho. I've tried to explain a bit of context to them all.
It all began in a rush of confused and bereft words. It was a fucking difficult decision to cut ties with a club I'd been part of for 35 years: WEEK ONE and the first blog was done near the start-ish of the 2018/19 season, being August 2018.
I got excited about a new non-affiliated shirt here. This one's my Barry Norman tribute. I started wavering a bit after a week or two. It wasn't proving easy to leave 35 years behind in an instant.
I got a bit poetic as August went on. And things were afoot. The shirts were being sold and the profits going to charity; I cheered up a bit. Not so, hapless manager Craig Harrison, who was quickly realising what a hiding-to-nothing he'd been handed. The margins at any level of footy can be cruel, and a missed penalty can make the difference between keeping and losing your job. Off the pitch, I was starting to interrogate the idea of 'a club'.
Then this happened and I realised my team, my Bangor City, truly was gone. The captain - the misser of the pen - also turned out to be a bad racist. Prick. As September, 2018 rolled on fans started to ask what was really happening behind the scenes. The owners defaulted to their 'come and see me anytime' position, which many felt was really not a great idea given their background. They also tried to call an EGM, but couldn't even do that properly.
I started October with a rather unwise social media argument with a friend of a friend, who turned out to be a gangster in a bad part of the States. Oops. What's safer is the competition to get your bins out earlier than anyone else in the street. Things were moving fast, now, and rumours were getting out of hand. A disappearing message board brought all sorts of conspiracy theories, none of which were true. But it was testament to the uncertainty. Message boards are funny places - you get all kinds of people and all kinds of discussions. Looking back on a defunct one from a couple of seasons ago seemed quaint in content, although it seemed very, very important at the time.
Harrison lasted til October, to nobody's great surprise. I was about two-thirds of a way down a bottle of Henry Weston's when I felt a very odd warmth. Once I'd changed my trousers, I realised that I did, at one level, admire SVJ's work, in a very specific context.
But a club is not what happens on the pitch, I don't think. This kind of thing cheered me again. Although news of another EGM/AGM/GMT/BBC made me a bit miserable again.
Lest we forget, Bangor City got demoted after finishing a very good second in the LoW, and getting to the Welsh Cup Semi Final. The team was brilliant, the future looked bright. But it all crashed down. We knew not why, not really. But then, in November, the auditors broke ranks and we all knew why it'd gone to plop. My writing had too - I was adrift again.
It seemed like things were coming to a head. Not least when SVJ pissed off to Malta to get a job with a club over there. Was this going to be the end of the regime? There was even a so-called 'change of ownership' and Gary Taylor-Fletcher came back. Was he the face of a new consortium? We hoped and we hoped.
Xmas came, and Xmas went, and Boxing Day was boring as fuck because I didn't care about football anymore.
And I nearly, nearly cracked when the news came through about a Welsh Cup game against Caernarfon. It was to prove divisive amongst fans. First, though, the game nearly didn't go ahead amongst the latest swirling rumours of non-payment. City lost 2-1, and I was upset even though it wasn't my City anymore. Cause it was, really, wasn't it. A local derby is always a local derby. It is difficult to extricate yourself from these kinda things.
January, 2019 ended with a realisation about the concept of a community football club. I was starting to have a bellyful of the bullshit and the support-the-shirt nonsense. The regime at Nantporth, by contrast, was refusing to pay any bills because their shares had/hadn't been ratified at an EGM, or something.
The Supporters' Association had gone into hibernation, in complete despair at all this. But the comeback started with a very, very progressive EGM at which a vote was taken as to investigating incorporation as a Supporters' Trust. A new club, a fan-owned club, would be looked into. Meanwhile, at Nantporth the bullshit continued with a few aggressive sock puppet Twitter accounts and a new appointment. I realised that, technically, I did actually have a different club that I was technically allowed to follow.
Things progressed on the new club front. I went to Spain and enjoyed a holiday. April, 2019 was a decent month. May dragged on, and the message boards were being spammed by a couple of regime apologists trying to deflect and divide. Yadda, yadda, yadda. I got called a cretin by one of them, which reminded me how much I loved the Ramones. Cretin or not, City were docked a whopping 42 points in May - meaning another demotion. Hilarious. There's an appeal in.
By June, we'd come more or less full circle. We are on the verge of Week One of the Phoenix Club, pending FAW decisions as to which league they're going to put us in. And it is 'us'. We are Clwb Peldroed Bangor 1876 Football Club. This is where the spirit and the content and the community is. Nantporth is full of rats. Also, I like cats a lot.
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