Familiar

A very familiar scene, but the light was gorgeous this evening and I couldn't resist.

I was on my way from work to my first Bradford Park Avenue fixture of the season. Monday evening football isn't that usual, and if I were keeping track of such things I might observe that I've now seen a game on each different day of the week this season.

One of the added highlights of a game at BPA is the club shop which has boxes of old programmes piled up on all sides, with most in no particular order.  The sort of second hand bookshop that you dream about, except for football programmes.

I haven't actively collected programmes, other than of matches I go to, since I was in high school. Of course, neither have I got rid of any of the programmes that I collected during high school (mainly Everton & Wales home games).

I had a fun twenty minutes sifting for treasure and came up with a couple of obscure 80s Welsh fanzines which at 50p a pop couldn't be resisted. And a smart 63/64 Wrexham v Notts County, and...  How long they'd been sitting in their pile waiting to be liberated by a fan of Welsh football is anybody's guess.

We kicked off under towering formations of lenticular clouds, but the dark soon encroached. Boston took the lead mid way through the first half and Bradford soon equalised. Thereafter Bradford had the better of the play, Adam Boyes got his and Avenue's second and 2-1 it finished, leaving them in a heady 5th place in the table, albeit having played one more game than all the teams around them.

Notable in my bus journeys to and from the ground were several groups of Scandinavian visitors, which in this particular bit of Bradford was a phenomenon in itself. Going to English non-league football might seem an obscure pastime, but it is being increasingly valued as an authentic experience in comparison to the more corporate (and expensive) world of the Premier League, and people travel in from all over to indulge. It's perhaps ironic that the cultural phenomenon of non-league football, which is often presented as quintessentially little England, is such a big draw to our European friends and consequently matchgoing becomes a cosmopolitan experience.