Carrow Road memories: My stint as a Carrow Road cleaner

The old South Stand at Carrow Road - I swept every row of it back in 1993

Ever wondered who cleans up after games at Carrow Road? Back in the summer of 1993 I was about to start my last year at school and saw an advert in the EDP placed by a cleaning company to supply part-time cleaners at Carrow Road.
With dreams of free tickets to games, mixing with the players and probably having a say in Mike Walker's team selections, I headed off down to Carrow Road on a mid-August Friday before the first game of the season against Manchester United.
As a I brushed past Chris Sutton (two years older and probably on slightly more than the £2.50 an hour I was coining in) in the car park, my dreams were slowly starting to be realised.
They were soon shattered when I saw the motley crew of a dozen others who had also turned up outside the River End to start work.
Our first job was to take a bucket and sponge and clean all the seats in the South Stand and River End which wasn't too taxing. On the following Monday after each game we all assembled at 7am and swept the terraces for 6-7 hours until they were clean.
The joy of being at the ground on a Friday was immense, there was a real buzz about the place and I got to go all over the stadium and sit in places I'd never sat in before which was great. Duncan Forbes, who was working for the club at the time, used to come over and chat to us, we got free tea and biscuits on our morning break and sometimes a glimpse of some players on the pitch.
Alas, as the summer turned to autumn and then winter, it wasn't so good. A dead pigeon spent most of that autumn towards the back of the River End lower tier and every fortnight I had to sweep rubbish around it.
Fans that tore up huge sections of the Yellow Pages before a game and threw them like confetti when the teams came out were the bane of my life as the Carrow Road wind that swept around the ground every post-matchday Monday made the clean-up job nigh on impossible.
The upper and lower tiers of the Barclay and the upper tier of the River End, which had been purpose built with seats, were easy to clean, the lower River End which had seats placed over the original terrace was harder. The South Stand with its hotch potch of red and blue seats was a nightmare. I must have snagged my trousers on a damaged seat on a weekly basis.
There were the joys of finding a programme and I started to pick up used match tickets and the occasional 20p or 50p. One of my co-workers found a purse one morning which sparked a big debate among us as to whether he would hand it in or trouser the cash inside.
The absolute highlight was the day after Bayern Munich had been at Carrow Road for the big UEFA Cup, which was live on BBC1. It was a Thursday morning, November 4 1993, and I was supposed to be in a sociology lecture.
Rather than sit and listen to the theories of Karl Marx and Auguste Comte, I headed down to Carrow Road and started work on getting that River End terrace spic and span.
Suddenly a camera crew from Anglia TV turned up to film the tempoaray TV studio being taken down and to do some general ground shots for that night's reaction to the match.
I was called over and they asked if they could film me sweeping up. Wary that I should have been at school I directed them to put the camera on the terrace and I swept into it and urged them not to film my face.
The clip made the news that night and, realising that it wouldn't get any better than that, I quit within a few weeks to concentrate on my A-levels!

Book review - Got, Not Got

League ladders, World Cup Willie, Subbuteo, World Cup stamps, Sport Billy, inflatables, fanzines, Corinthian figures - whatever was the football fad that accompanied the era that you got into football, you'll find it all revisited in the wonderful book Got, Not Got.
With an alphabetical layout featuring the biggest 50 or so teams in English and Scottish football, there's a pretty good chance that a piece of memorabilia that means something to you or your team will be photographed and recalled in a superbly designed book that's feels like flicking through a massive 224-page football programme rather than a serious football text.
The book harks back to that golden era far away from Twitter, kick-offs being moved for TV, court cases and obscene wages, when Mark Lawrenson was just a Brighton defender and Gary Lineker worked on his dad's market stall.
The authors are big Leicester City fans and there's plenty of Foxes memorabilia across the pages. Norwich fans will be excited about page 132, half of which is dedicated to City's finest match, the 1993 win against Bayern Munich in the Olympic Stadium.
Before the Premier League and the wall-to-wall coverage of Sky, before mobile phones and tablets gave us goals around the clock, there was a time when the beautiful game was harder to access - a time when it didn't just flow over everyone and fill every corner.
That time when you had to go to a game to follow your team, you had to buy a programme, read a magazine or phone a Clubcall hotline to get your club's news, a time when the game we all love had collectable items that meant something to every young fan and a time when catching a five-minute glimpse of your team on television was a once-a-season event.
It's a great book, every page has a throwback memory for any football fan over 30 and you'll dip in and out of it for months on end as I have done.
Even though a lot of the references and pictures are slightly before my time, I still loved it and, hey, any football book with a picture of Brighton's Steve Foster in his early 80s headbanded glory will do for me!

Bradley, Cav and the Tour of Britain 2012

Bradley Wiggins, third, and the rest of the Sky team approaching Snape
on the first stage of the Tour of Britain

Early start today, leaving Bury St Edmunds at 7.10am to head off to Snape to catch the Tour of Britain 2012.
My new love of cycling, which I must state started before the Tour de France and the Olympics, has taken me far and wide in the last six months, but two weeks after a huge 84 mile ride from Hessett to Aldeburgh and back, I was back on the saddle again today to cheer on two famous Olympians.
Last year, when Mark Cavendish whisked past Nowton Park I was more keen to record the event for posterity rather than watch it for the cycling aspect, but wind on 12 months, I subscribe to two cycling mags, have six cycling jerseys and am considering shaving my legs.
Today's ride was my biggest ever, 96 miles in the hot August sun with my mate Steve, a London-based triathlete.
We were planning to ride to Snape to watch the riders burst through but stopped half a mile short to a small hill climb. Four riders powered through seven minutes ahead of the peloton, which eventually shot past us containing Cav and Bradley Wiggins at the front.
That was it, we headed back to Bury St Edmunds to complete our seven hour ride.
Back in the Tour of Britain world the day ended badly for Cavendish, crashing out just outside the Royal Norfolk Showground with less that a mile to go, having ridden almost as far as the Manx Missile today, I know how I'd have felt to finish my ride injured and on the floor.

Hooray hooray - I've done my first 10k

Myself, left with my dad Colin and brother Andrew after the Reepham 10K

Blisteringly hot August morning, probably the last thing you'd want to do today was go for a run, but today was the day I completed my first 10K.

For someone who has had asthma for 26 years, the thought of running more than a football pitch has normally filled me with dread, but a year and a half after starting work outs with Bury-based bootcamp Liberte Fitness, I took up the challenge of a 10K.

My dad, who is 65, is a fitness fan and regularly fills his recently retired days with hour-long jaunts around the streets of Norwich, so it was always going to be a challenge to beat him and my my brother, 38, in a six-mile stretch around rural Norfolk.

I signed us all up for the Reepham 10K and after a bit of training we were all set.

The weather was glorious - beach weather in fact. Not running weather at all. There was no air and it was too still - we were advised to take water at every stop and there were six of them, one at every mile.

Even after the minimum of training a 10K is still not that hard. Sure there were times when I felt weak and tired and wanted to stop, there were times I did stop, usually at the water stops to cool myself down. There were times I could feel my nipples hurting (they eventually started bleeding - hooray, jogger's nipple!) but it wasn't that exhausting, just boiling, boiling hot.

I was fired up to finish the run in an hour, and I was gutted to have completed the race in 61 minutes and 31 seconds, 12 minutes behind my dad, 10 minutes behind my brother and 251st out of 300.

The rest of the field were club runners, so to beat one six of them did me proud.

The time may be a bit on the slow side, but this sports junkie may have found a new sport to fall in love with.

Book Review: Tailgate to Heaven

Adam Goldstein and myself at Wembley in 2009

Back on a dull, wet and pretty damn miserable October Sunday in 2009 I met NFL super fan Adam Goldstein just outside the entrance to Wembley Park station in London.
I was handing out cards to NFL fans ahead of the third match of the International Series between New England and Tampa Bay plugging my book, Touchdown UK, when I spotted Adam's famous Chicago Bears hat.
We had a quick chat and I got to meet his lovely girlfriend Steph and that was that, he mentioned his book that he was writing about what will one day be his legendary trip around the NFL in the 2008 season and that was it, he had to go off and speak to a Sky TV reporter.
Adam was actually doing a similar trip that following season and that Wembley game was just another match for him.
As I took my seat high up behind one of the sidelines and waited for kick off I saw Adam do likewise just in front of me. I naturally contrasted our journeys to Wembley that day. I'd traveled about 100 miles for the game, Adam had jetted back to the UK for it. It was my fourth NFL game ever, the price I've paid for taking too many trips to American in baseball season, while for Adam he'd equaled my small  number of games in just a few weeks. This was what he did.
Fast forward three years and the book, Tailgate To Heaven, is out.
Adam's amazing and unique trip - I wonder if one day there will be similar homage trips - certainly set the bar high. An 18-week trip, 40 games, 65,000 miles of travelling. Surely it will never be repeated?
The book breaks down the trip on a week by week basis, not only do we get the details of each game, but more importantly the journey between venues and the inside track on the 'sport' of tailgating.

Great book, certainly enjoyed it.

The book really tells how Adam embraces the world of being a fan of different teams and the best part is how Adam develops from being slightly apprehensive about pitching up at different stadiums and trying to fit in with different fans to being a full out master tailgater.
Early on Adam tells the story of attending a Packers/Vikings game and being asked outside Lambeau Field if a cameraman could film his ticket for an opening segment for the TV coverage in exchange for Adam being caught on camera.
"He showed my game-day ticket to the world, while I was somewhere in the background, bobbing up and down like one of those fans."
Fast forward an NFL season and Adam's sharing a jar of Branston Pickle with some hardened Cheeseheads.
"They nervously spread the black gooey goodness onto the cheese and took a small bite. They winced with the vinegar kick. I was surprised at just how much I cared and wanted them to like my addiction."
In a book that started as a dream, a challenge and then a quest, it's the bonding and exchange of cultures that  warms the heart more so than the actual action on the field.
For anyone who has ever taken a trip to an NFL stadium in America or for anyone who wonders what it would be like to throw it all in and jet off around the US for nigh-on six months, this book is for you.
Even if you haven't, you can't help but laugh and smile at Adam's brilliantly written story of how something we'd all probably dismiss as a silly idea, turned into the trip of a lifetime.

Brazil's Olympic dream in ruins in the Wembley sunshine

I've lost count of the number of people I've heard over the last couple of weeks slating the Olympic football tournament - the usual comments are something about not caring less about this aspect of London 2012 and the fact that footballers already have their own World Cup.

Fair enough, but football has been part of the Olympics since 1896, it just doesn't get the same profile in Britain as in other parts of the world as we don't usually take part.

Over in Brazil, the Olympics are obviously a big deal, partly because they host the next football tournament in the Rio games of 2016, but also because they've never won Olympic gold.

Today against Mexico at Wembley, the feeling was they simply had to turn up to right that wrong, but they didn't vouch for the Mexican wave that hit them like a first minute sledgehammer.

By the time Mexico's Oribe Peralta struck a goal after just 30 seconds, most of the 86,000 fans were still settling down to watch the game - it came as such a surprise that plenty of people, myself included, didn't see it.

Brazil's illustrious forward line of Neymar, Oscar, Lendro Damiao and Hulk, who started the final on the bench, hardly threatened Mexico's goal in the first half which was a shame as it was the end at which I was sitting.

The game was there for the taking and that's exactly what Mexico did, Peralta smashing home a header from a corner late on.

Brazil's Rafael squared up to a team mate before being substituted and after Hulk pulled one back in the last minute, Oscar had a golden chance to head the winner, but blazed his header inches wide.

That was it - the final whistle, Mexicans all over the pitch and Brazil's players slumped to the floor.
After watching the lengthy medal ceremony - have you ever seen 69 athletes on a podium? - it was time to say goodbye to Wembley and to my Olympic experience.

As I walked down Wembley way with chanting Mexicans and Brazilian samba drummers I actually felt like it was a pretty unique experience and although two of the tree events I saw were football, I really enjoyed it all.

My Olympic journey from Coventry to Wembley via Eton Dorney only showed me a tiny bit of the Games, but I'm glad I made the effort, it's something I'll always remember.