One more time for Stoke City
My match for today wasn’t until the evening, so I thought about taking a train to somewhere on the south coast, just for kicks, but decided to spend the day wandering London. Especially once I realized my ticket for The Postal Museum was good for a year. After being too worn out to appreciate it, I went back and got to enjoy it for real this time. I highly recommend it if you like mail and/or unique museums, and find yourself in London.
Today’s match was my last Stoke City match. I originally was going to be moving from a hotel in London to one in Birmingham for my second weekend, but my plans changed, which means, to catch the last train back to London from Stoke, I’ll need to leave the match early. I hate this, for the record. But it’s either that, or don’t go at all, because I don’t think I can afford a taxi from Stoke to London. It’s 160 miles between the stadium and my London hotel.
My train to Stoke gave me plenty of time to get to the stadium, so I walked the distance, about two miles, along the city’s canal, which led me to finally google the weird boats I’d been seeing along the canals everywhere. They’re called “narrowboats” I learned, and their unique size makes them suited to navigate the UK canal system that, before the advent of trains, were crucial for the transport of goods and people. Which explained why I kept seeing these canals often along the same routes as the trains I was riding.
Once the trains took over, the narrowboats fell out of use and nowadays are more often used as houseboats or for the occasional tourism bit. At the spot where the canal reached the stadium grounds, there was even a bar on one of the narrowboats, populated by Stoke supporters. If I drank, I definitely would have popped in for the experience, but they didn’t have anything for me.
I got my tickets this time on the opposite side of the pitch, still near the halfway line. I didn’t chat with those around me much this time, which meant I had no distraction from what ended up being an extremely frustrating match.
Remember when I said we were relatively safe from relegation? Well, a few surprise results around the league changed that and we really needed a result from this match, meanwhile our opponents, Sheffield United, didn’t need anything. They couldn’t move up to the guaranteed promotion positions, and couldn’t fall out of the playoff promotion positions. But they were clearly ready to play spoilers to our needs.
They were falling over left and right, and generally time-wasting wherever they could, right from the start. For much of the first half, it seemed like they weren’t even interested in winning, just in ruining our chance of winning. There was one moment where they won a throw-in and the player just stood there waiting for the ball to appear in his hands, like his legs didn’t work. A Stoke player had to walk the ball over and put it in the man’s hands. It wasn’t fun to watch as a Stoke fan, but I think it would have been pretty uninteresting as a neutral as well.
The performance from Stoke didn’t help matters either. I’m not sure if the players were in their heads, or had broken confidence from the previous six-nil drubbing, but despite having good possession and counterattacks, they couldn’t make anything happen. Throughout the match, they kept getting into the 18 yard box and then just…nothing. Over and over again, promising attacks just petered out without any results.
It seemed to only get worse after Sheffield scored just before the half, as we needed a goal even more, to at least get a point from the match. Stoke suddenly seemed more desperate and less effective. Things got choppier and more frustrating from there.
Then, at the half, my anxiety about having to leave early started to spike. There are people who feel that leaving a match early is disrespectful. And I’m unfortunately one of them. I started to half-hope that Sheffield would score again, so that grumblers would leave the match and I could blend in with them, but no luck there.
In fact, the momentum shifted to Stoke, and we started to look a little more promising. Then my “you really must leave now” alarm that I’d set before the match went off, and I had to make a whole row stand up to get out.
I understand that it actually doesn’t matter that much, it happens at every match. And none of these people know me, nor would it matter if they did. But that didn’t help me feel any better about it. I was breaking one of my own rules. No matter how much I tried to talk myself out of it, I felt so uncomfortable as I found my way out of the stadium. It didn’t help that I was starting to feel feverish, like my body was fighting off a cold.
I pulled up the Stoke app and got the radio broadcast playing when I got into the concourse, so I could follow the rest of the match like I normally do, on the other side of the ocean. It was different, listening to them on my headphones while I could still hear the crowd from inside the stadium. Normally when I’m listening to the matches like that, I’m cleaning my house, 3,140 miles away in Boston.
I had pre-booked an uber back to the train station, but chose the wrong pick up spot, finding that the exit closest to my seat was closed during the match. So I had to walk all the way around the stadium to meet them. Thankfully they were delayed as well, so we both reached the pick-up spot at the same time and I got to the train with plenty of time to spare.
As I stood on the platform, Sheffield United scored again, and in the end, the match ended with a very disappointing 0-2 result. It felt even more disappointing than the 6-0 loss at Leeds. There, we had never stood a chance, never looked promising. In the match against Sheffield United, we’d looked the more promising team throughout the match, and we were more successful by all the statistics, except the one that matters: they’d gotten the goals and we had not.
This also meant that the relegation battle was not as settled as it had looked a week earlier. The following day, two of our fellow bottom-of-the-table teams were playing, Derby and Luton Town, and if they were able to win or draw, that would mean our last match, next Saturday against Derby, could have a lot on the line. It was not the news any Stoke fans were hoping for when we showed up to the final home match.
But that was for tomorrow. For today, it was one more train back to my hotel, and time for sleep. I slept through most of it, hoping that rest, water, and some immune boosters would be enough to fight off the feverish feeling growing in my body.