I was forced to grow up, and do so accepting that being a commentator, much like being in a sketch troupe, was the sort of thing that other people did whilst I was getting drunk in the kitchen. And so I let that particular ambition go, packed it up and filed it away with train driver, being on Challenge Aneka and having my picture in Tony Hart’s gallery, and never gave it another thought.
A combination of a wet tiled floor and inefficient footwear meaning I skid into the booking hall doorway like Tom Cruise in Risky Business. It takes a minute or two to locate the Hull train, eventually discovering it tucked round the corner, out of sight and out of mind on Platform 1. Thick with dirt and grime it looks as though it has sat there untouched for decades until today, the Miss Haversham’s wedding cake of Northern Rail.
Wolves fans, much like Rovers fans 16 months ago, are being told Saunders will lift the dressing room – that he brings character rather than, say, knowledge or tactical awareness. Having guided both Wrexham and Rovers to second place in their respective leagues before departing you would think he would be able to trade more on footballing know-how than that time he lobbed a throw-in off the goalie’s back. Football, however, seems determined to pigeon-hole Saunders as a personality.
My first engagement with Clem, like many of you, was through the Football League Show’s Potted History feature. A vehicle in which he would flit around a club’s empty stadium, popping up behind seats and trophy cabinets as if he’d somehow escaped from the hand of Matthew Corbett, to read us extracts from the club’s Wikipedia entry.
The delivery clears everyone, but Shane Killock hooks it back into the mix and Tom Platt is the first of the scrum to meet it, nodding it over the line to send a hitherto sleepy retirement town batshit crazy. Arms flail. Scarves twirl. And the wall of faces that framed the field until now bounces, turns and spreads to cover all available concrete, like liquid poured into a football ground mould.
Retford station is where dreams go to die. To wait there is to step into the Narnia of the rail network, you will wait hours, maybe days for a connecting train, yet when it arrives it transpires that you have stood there waiting for only ten or fifteen minutes. You can’t kill time at Retford station; you can only prolong its suffering.
Beyond the glass wind turbines wave at each other across the expanse of the Fens as Ely Cathedral takes up a seemingly permanent residency on the horizon. Across the aisle a bearded man in a plaid shirt ploughs steadily through an entire pack of Marks & Spencer’s Dutch Shortcake like a gluttonous metronome
A season of consolidation, after the circus of 2011-12, is what a significant percentage of Doncaster Rovers fans were hoping for on our return to the third tier. The football equivalent of a gap year; time spent meeting new people and pottering about in mid-table trying to find ourselves.
