My Game Of Two Halves: The 50 year love match of a football fan from North East England. Este artículo no está disponible.My Game Of Two Halves: The 50 year love match of a football fan from North East England

After catching the football bug aged 7, Michael Stout has spent half a century supporting his hometown non-league team (Gateshead) and his local established Football League team (Newcastle United) – his two sides of the Tyne. Given the lack of any significant success both have had during this time, he calls it his 100 Years of Hurt (50 years each). The First Half of My Game of Two Halves chronicles the memorable Newcastle and Gateshead matches he has watched, and some of the never dull off the field events at both clubs. It also explains why he does not dislike Newcastle’s local rivals Sunderland; recounts his years watching matches in the football mad city of Glasgow where he lived and worked in the 1990s; provides some personal highlights from watching World Cup tournaments every four years since 1970; recalls some tales from what he laughingly calls his own playing career; indulges in some football nostalgia; and outlines his views on many other cultural aspects of The Beautiful Game. In August 2018, after working mainly in banking for 40 years, he retired (early) and started a new football watching routine of non-league groundhopping. Feeling like a frustrated wannabe football reporter who had missed his vocation earlier in life, The Second Half of My Game of Two Halves is a detailed account of his Mission to attend a match at every ground in the two divisions of the Northern League (the world’s second oldest league still in existence). He completed this in September 2020, after a period of stoppage time due to the UK lockdown for the coronavirus pandemic. His groundhopping was a marked change from how he watched the game before retirement, forming two natural halves of his long love match with football.My Game of Two Halves is at times serious, at times funny, at times tongue in cheek, sometimes glad, sometimes sad, depicting some of the highs and lows, and the joys and woes of being a football fan.After decades of writing reports in the world of banking, and since he retired writing about football, music and hillwalking in his blog The Casual Bystander (https://wordpress.com/home/stout-hearted.blog) this is Michael’s first published book.