The future is unwritten, but some of it is already pencilled in.
To my way of thinking, League One was definitely the place to be throughout the whole of last season; during which time I attended fifty-two third-tier games; which more often than not, featured either Birmingham City or Charlton Athletic… or both of them together at the same time ‘twas thrice so, including a League Cup tie.
My one-hundred and thirty-seven game long 2024-25 journey, took in numerous other matches involving these two sides over the course of the campaign as well, including their respective women's teams, in all manner of different competitions and age group guises. And of course, I also saw them both playing at Wembley Stadium (on separate occasions). Besides witnessing Birmingham City officially clinching promotion, then the League One title, I was also present for all three of the Addicks (ultimately successful) promotion play-off games, even though it had meant flying back to the UK from Dubrovnik on the afternoon of the first one of those.
As the season reached it's climax, it came to pass that the two clubs who provided my main pivotal narrative source for the 2024-25 season, were both promoted. Who could have guessed that was going to happen back in August? When one of them was newly-relegated to the third-tier of English football and being told almost universally that they would be in for a bit of a shock in League One (and weren’t they just? ๐). While Chris Davies took charge of first team matters, in what was his inaugural managerial post. For their part, Charlton had been (seemingly) anchored in that very same League One pit of despondency for the last half a decade.
As the Addicks made a fairly inauspicious start to the campaign, the only likely looking exit route from out of the ‘third division’, didn't necessarily appear to be in an upwardly mobile direction. But hey! That there Nathan Jones wasn’t about to let that happen. He has his critics, but in my humble opinion, he's doing a bloody marvellous job and is well-worth the long-term contract he has been given, the financial implications of which will keep other suitors at bay. On yer bike Cardiff City!
For the record, Birmingham drew their first game of the season 1-1 against Reading at St. Andrew's. A score I predicted correctly before the game kicked off, even though my friends were all sure that the newly assembled home side would win handsomely against the Royals. “It's Blues innit!?”, I said, before, during and after the game, by way of an explanation for my time-honored (very) guarded optimism. AKA ingrained realism, pessimistic leanings and recognition of the fact that: if anything could go remotely wrong at St. Andrew's, it invariably will do; or Murphy's Law to give this phenomena it's correct title.
However it transpired that Birmingham moved on (very quickly), from that uninspiring opening day result, with a win in the League Cup at Charlton in the very next game, before smashing their way through just about everything and anything that had ever gone before and creating the kind of new records that are probably going to stand forever. Many people were nonplussed by Blues success, even claiming that they were nothing special as the majority of their wins were by only by low scoring margins. But, in the final reckoning, they were still the highest goal-scorers in the division, so go figure that one out.
I guess if you can't understand, or simply don't want to afford any credit to the basics of ‘Davies-ball’, don't like the passing game and are unimpressed by the possession retention blue-print (or ‘blues-print’, I suppose you could say) employed by the League One champions… and you still yearn for a bygone age, when managers like Dave Bassett and John Beck earned a decent living out of the game; then Blues 2024-25 template might look a little bit tame, risk-free and too damned organised for your sensibilities.
But, football’s moved on and evolved. A master-plan which encompasses being in complete control of games, bossing the tempo and hardly ever giving opposition sides an inch to create anything meaningful themselves, combined with a top-heavy work ethic, won an awful lot of football matches (plus a few awful ones too) and a massive 111 points along the way. Birmingham only lost three league games all season, the first one of those was inevitably against Charlton, at the Valley. They were also defeated at both Shrewsbury Town (who were subsequently relegated) and Bolton Wanderers.
My regular sidekick at St. Andrew's was wont to say: “They’ve got the quality, I just wish they would stop passing the ball to death and smash a few of these f*ckers four or five-nil sometimes!”. Putting a fresh spin on an old adage I would remind him, frequently: “It's new Blues innit!”. Sadly, he wasn't around to see his beloved ‘boys in royal blue’ return to the Championship at the first attempt. And it was bloody tough sitting in our usual spot towards the tail end of the season, after he passed away. Taken in his prime, quite unexpectedly. He’s very, very sorely missed and it pains me deeply to even write about the subject.
While still reeling from the blow of a shock bereavement, I received a call from a young lady in Sheffield, thoughtfully offering her condolences for the death of one of my inner circle cohorts. As our conversation progressed, it became apparent that she was actually talking about another one of my closest friends, who I’d shared numerous madcap adventures with on many a lively escapade over the years.
Nooooo! Two of my all time favourite human beings, both gone within the space of 24 hours. Ouch! That hit me really fucking hard! The combined grief and loss took it’s toll and subsequently left me both physically and mentally exhausted. It was a case of needing to get on top of things, before they got on top of me, so I dived headlong into my top-heavy schedule of football duties. Although this meant I was ridiculously busy, I wasn't even slightly perturbed by the time-consuming aspect of all those long (and often lonely) hours and far-reaching logistics that all of that kind of stuff entails. Because it provided me with the distraction, focus and clarity that I needed, as I struggled to shake-off the whole heap of spirit-crushing despair.
Besides, I owed it to two people who can no longer indulge in our lifestyle of choice, to keep right on, doing our usual (and unusual) stuff and making sure that it all gets done properly and to the highest standard possible. A lot of people must've thought that I'd either vanished off of the face of the face of the earth, or was deliberately avoiding them. But keeping my own counsel and side-stepping social situations as much as I could, was/is my coping mechanism, it’s how I have been coming to terms with the gravity of what happened. So apologies if anybody feels ignored, neglected or left out, that wasn't my intention, I’m just negotiating my way through a maze of very dark places and have a whole heap of serious shit to deal with.
Anyway, now I’ve spilled my guts, shall we have some more football related stuff to lighten the tone of this epistle a little? Using what I’ve been watching for (far too) many years now, as a guide to what the 2024-25 campaign might hold for both Blues and The Addicks (and, of course those loveable Stags); didn't exactly inspire a great deal of confidence or optimism in me. But all’s well that ends well and though things have been a thoroughly grim on a personal note, it turned out to be one of the most intriguing, eventful and interesting football years that I can ever recall.
Moving forward, Birmingham City and Charlton Athletic will still feature heavily, though not exclusively, in next season’s THE66POW ‘tales of the unexpected’, when they will enter the fray in the Championship, along with Wrexham, who also went up… just in case that fact had somehow escaped your attention. Mansfield Town will always have at least a walk on part too, when the opportunity arises.
Regardless of any sort of expectations on the part of either Championship club, it's never simple or straightforward to immediately adjust to new surroundings… and that applies whether you’ve gone up or down a division. I hear told that Birmingham are among the favourites to do well during the 2025-26 season, while the vibe surrounding Charlton indicates that they are somewhat less fancied. Y’know just like they were for the first-half of the campaign that has recently finished.
Blues might only have spent a season outside the second-tier, but they’re a different beast to the one that slid unceremoniously out of the Championship just over a year ago, while the Addicks will represent a completely unknown quantity and that could well work to their advantage. However, we shall have to wait and see, because although some of it is already pencilled in: the future is unwritten.
“And all the world is football shaped” ๐⚽ Several misguided people suggested to me, that I’d abandoned Non-League football entirely last season. And they might have had a point, if it wasn’t for the fact that I’d actually attended twenty-nine games of that particular ilk, as well as several more Non-League v. Football League cup games and friendlies too. I wonder if any of those making the claim that I’m not interested in football outside the top four divisions in England, saw that many games themselves, at any kind of level, across the course of the season?
Each to their own innit!? I'm more than comfortable with how I conduct my own football watching habits. There occasionally appears to be a madness to my method n’ all that, but I know exactly what I'm doing… and why I'm doing it. International contests, Women's football, European Champions League games, Development team fixtures, off-piste games in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales; Premier League matches, games in all four tiers of the Football League… and carefree afternoons at grounds that had no facilities whatsoever (not even so much as a rudimentary fence around the pitch), were all included in my season’s total, as I attempted to cover all, or at least most, of the available bases.
Spending time in Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia and Montenegro towards the end of the season was quite timely and uplifting. All of that touristy stuff is okay, as long as it doesn't clash with my fixtures schedule. Football is football, wherever and however it’s played. There are so many different variants out there, that you could be forgiven for thinking that some of them don’t even really belong to the same code as each other.
Spice is the variety of life. And the more tangents, tributaries, off-shoots and deviations one can find to explore, the better your understanding of this wondrous sport in all of its multifarious forms will become. Unless, like me, you actually hit upon the realisation instead; that everything you ever thought you knew about the ‘beautiful game’ is actually only an amoeba sized dot tucked away somewhere in a fairly insignificant corner of the (much) bigger picture.
Plans for 2025-26. There’s a bucket list on the old version of THE66POW blog, of grounds that I’d like to visit during the coming season, along with a itinerary of forthcoming fixtures that I will be attending (so much for my spurious claim that my interest in football is neither about list-ticking and/or number-crunching). Those posts will be amended as and when the need arises and I’ll endeavour to keep both of them up to date (sort of). However I must stress it’s probably good practice to check that any games you might have been tempted to attend after spotting them listed on the blog, are actually going ahead. Alterations, cancellations and postponements seem to be getting more and more commonplace nowadays.
I’m visiting a couple of my bucket list teams during pre-season. There are those who would say that I can’t claim to have visited a ground if I’ve only watched a friendly there and not a ‘proper’ competitive game, in an FA affiliated competition. Two of my pre-season trips entail round-trips of 320 and 516 miles respectively… and if anybody wants to tell me that I can’t claim to have been there because I’m “not doing it right!” well, knackers to ‘em! Incidentally, one ‘outpost' I will be heading to, shares the same postcode as my house so it's not all planes, trains and automobiles.
That said, I’m squeezing in a trip Paris at the start of the season, before heading to Krakow for a week in September. I succumbed to the temptation, because there are six clubs in the city, not just the big two of Cracovia and Wisลa. Since patiently waiting for my escape plan from a job that I thoroughly detested to reach it's fruition; Poland will be the ninth overseas country I’ve visited, following my ‘Jailbreak’ in October 2023, or the tenth, if you include Northern Ireland in that total as well.
THE66POW will remain active throughout the 2025-26 season, mainly via Substack; however it’ll still be linked to my old blogspot site, as a kind of belt and braces back-up plan. I won't be blogging about every single game I go to though. As regards my social media presence. I truly despair at what an unsightly mess that medium has become. Just when you think things can't get any worse, it plunges even deeper into the brown stinky stuff.
I’ve tried various alternatives, but they all become pretty much of a muchness eventually. Is the good craic’ with mates on there, worth persevering with all of the polarised propaganda for? Or has it become too top heavy with the latter? I’m thinking that might pretty much be the case. Cataracts are the third biggest cause of blindness, religion and politics occupy the first two spots. Anyway, who’s going to get along to some football this coming weekend? I know I am.
