Day 15 – Stoke-Crewe Alexandra-Shrewsbury!
I got a question for you, What have me, Wayne Rooney and Christiano Ronaldo got in common?
A) Unlike most of the premier league forwards, we were all able to handle a rainy Wednesday night in Stoke.
Nice stadium the bet 365.
This guy, is the real deal when it comes to football nostalgia.I didn’t get to go inside the Bet365 but heres a general layout of the stadium.
Just in case you thought your eyes were playing tricks on you, yes, that yellow sign below the ground map does say that.
Touting for business on street corners has changed since I was a nipper.
I made my way from the delights of Stoke onto Great Road, home of league ones Crewe Alexandra. A club steeped in history when it comes to former players. His this for a list, David Platt, Bruce Grobelaar, Danny Murphy, Dean Ashton, Neil Lennon, Robbie Savage and the legendary Fred Keenor, who has a statue outside the Cardiff City Stadium for captaining Cardiff to their 1927 FA Cup victory, discovering penicillin, stopping the great fire of London, inventing the wheel and defeating the argonauts. True legend.
I knew I was going to love this club straight away.
The girls on reception were incredible. They took me out pitchside and let me take pics with the opening line of “bet you didn’t get this welcome at bloody man utd. Its OK, you’re at a real club now”.
Beautiful pitch been laid for the new season, its stunning. Another proper old school stadium where the fans are right up close to the pitch. They also have the GREATEST stand sponsor in the entirety of the football league. Man U have the sir Alex Ferguson stand, Liverpool have the Kop, Ipswich have the Sir Bobby Robson Stand, Crewe Alexandra?
As the steward told me-and get this, 95% of the UK ice cream vans are made in Crewe. Dont say i don’t teach you anything. In this blog, every day’s a learning day. I had some incredible pics taken there by said steward. Except when I looked at them later, all I got was 18 close up pics of his confused face.Then I moved on to sunny Shrewsbury. To say the ride down was hell would be an understatement. Nearly 40 miles of hills. You know how i feel about hills. The idea was to travel from there to Wolverhampton the next day so the Montgomery Waters Meadow Stadium is where I headed.Now, I’m not judging. I’ve loved the different quirks from all the counties I’ve visited. Although I’m trying to work out the Cheshire/Shropshire divide. Because, somewhere between the two, this is the garden furniture that I saw.
If you own this and the Boris Johnson scarecrow riding a bike, if this is your house, your garden, then fair play. Last night must have been incredible, gutted I missed the party. Im assuming when you recover from your hangover, when you look into your garden you’re going to be just as confused as I was.
So onto Shrewsbury before conquering Birmingham. The pics will follow in tomorrow’s blog, for now, keep spreading the word of why I’m doing this. You at ground level are just as important as me when it comes to helping erase the stigma with mental health. It starts with all of us.
Together we got this
Laz x