About this blog

After 55 years watching football I finally start a blog about it

Gayfield Park, Arbroath in July!

I've been going to football matches since I was a boy back in the early 1970s, growing up near Dundee and then outside Edinburgh in Scotland. I've been to hundreds of matches, mostly in my two home countries, Scotland and Sweden, but also in many other countries around the world from Morocco to Indonesia. My interest in football is not about the stars and the headlines but the charm of visiting new grounds, the team's place in the community, football as a meeting place and the hope that some day we will win something (anything!). Although it is a thrill to go to a big match in a packed stadium, my football soul belongs to the sparsely populated terracings and basic facilities of the teams down at the bottom of the football food chain. 

My first love is Arbroath FC, at present enjoying the dizzying heights of the Scottish Championship but are generally found in the lower leagues. Despite living only a few miles away from Arbroath I was the only boy in my school who supported them - everyone else supported Celtic, Rangers or one of the Dundee teams. Glory hunters! I'll write more about Arbroath later but their main claim to fame was that they still have the world record score for a senior football match when they beat Aberdeen side Bon Accord 36-0 in a Scottish cup match in 1885. They play at the slightly modernised but still old-school Gayfield Park, right on the shore of the North Sea and famed for its bracing sea breezes (soft city dwellers may say hurricanes). Having lived in Sweden for the last 40 years I only manage one or two Arbroath matches per season but I love the feeling that the ground feels almost the same today as it did when I first went there in 1970. There are not many senior grounds where you can say that and although I see the necessity of replacing the ramshackle grounds of the past most modern stadia look roughly the same and I miss the quirks and charm of the old grounds. The main stand at Gayfield was rebuilt but kept the old design and dimensions so that you hardly notice the difference.

In this blog I hope to write about the grounds I visit from week to week interspersed with posts on great games from the past. Over the last couple of years I've been trying to visit all the lower league teams in my region here in south-east Sweden and will continue to do that as well as a few visits to Scotland and maybe elsewhere, for example to Poland with Gdynia/Gdansk only a ferry tirp away from here. Of course I should have started this blog many years ago and most of my most interesting football journeys are probably behind me but I will try to alternate between the past and the present.

Most of my posts will be from matches here in Sweden with occasional excursions abroad. There are plenty of groundhoppers in Sweden and I thought about writing this in Swedish but that would restrict the limited readership, so English is the obvious solution.

Otherwise I have been a prolific blogger over the last 15 years with two blogs on my work, online education. My English blog, the Corridor of Uncertainty, is still going though less frequently today, and the other blog, Flexspan, in Swedish came to an end when I retired in September 2022 (the blog is still there but no more posts will be published). 

Tvärskog v St Sigfrid, play-off to Swedish regional div 5 (tier 7), Oct 2021

Map of all the grounds I have visited over the years 

Click on a marker for information and photos. You can also zoom in on the map or view it full-screen.