One trick is to tell them stories that don’t go anywhere – and in that spirit we kick the 2026/27 set of Awaydays off with a convoluted journey from Portsmouth to Blackburn via Hibs’ ‘win and in’ Europa Conference League play-off.

Hot tin roof

There’s a lovely island in the middle of the pond in the park over the road from our house. The ducks go there at night to sleep and lay eggs. All full of bread. Or, at least, they did, until the pond dried up. Now the foxes go there at night to sleep and have noisy intercourse. All full of duck.

The whole southeastern corner of the country is parched, but London is baked. There has been no prolonged rain here for months now. I take artsy landscape pictures as I run past Blackheath Church and pretend to friends I’m on holiday in Tijuana. Grass has long since dried up and retreated to its root system turning open spaces into dust bowls. We thought a cloud had blown in at one point, but it turned out to be a solar eclipse. Even that was at least some blessed relief.

You spend all night sweating the pains of hell on top of the covers, electronic fan making the noise of a troubled 747 for the sake of moving the suffocating air from one part of the bedroom to another. You wake more tired than you went to sleep, with a mouth like Ghandi’s flip flop, and spend your day trying to work while perspiring out of your tits. Thames Water have sent us a letter - they reckon our house has got a leak. Like me writing to Iain Duncan Smith about his hair loss. Cheeky fucking bastards.

Over in W12, there’s some suggestion Christian Nourry is cooking too (see what I did there?).

This is, to be fair, nothing new. The permanently online part of any club’s fanbase are so quick to declare victory after each transfer window they make Donald Trump look demure. Warbs Warburton’s Gray/Austin/Johansen intake would lead us to glory, not bankruptcy. Taylor Richards and Tyler Roberts were ‘ballers’. QPR ‘win the transfer window’ a lot, and midtable always beckons in May sure as Hamlet’s death at the end of the play. You start to think Erling Haaland might have to settle for 15th if he played here (might bloody have to soon). The curse is real. Still, Pierce Charles and Glen Kamara, Dennis Cirkin and Tariq Lamptey… this looks like serious gear. And right in the positions Rangers most needed to strengthen as well. Positive, proactive, purposeful recruitment, all tied up by mid-July. Who are you, and what have you done with my football club?

You never know though, do you? You’ve listened to all the podcasts, and contributed to some yourself. You’ve read all the season previews, and written a behemoth of your own. You’ve mulled like a stand at the Manchester Christmas Market (£8 a cup) and you’ve conjugated until the words Millwall, Lincoln and Southampton have lost all meaning. Sporting Life say QPR will be relegated, Gab Sutton says they may go up. There’s widespread love for Middlesbrough (who, spoiler, start well) and Norwich (who do not). There’s widespread ignorance of just how well stewed the shit that Burnley are in really is. But until it kicks off, nobody knows. Heard about your Blockbusters, you’ll need more than that today.

Well, Andy knows. Sitting outside The Old Custom House on Portsmouth Harbour (a pub that could comfortably host 1,500 people with a bar big enough to serve almost three of them at a time) he confidently tells the Awaydays podcast Rangers will win their opening match 3-1. Like printing money.

The away end at Portsmouth’s Fratton Park has calmly slipped into the Kenilworth Road role of “what would we do in a fire?” soothing half time chat. Leaving calmly, well after the final whistle, it takes us a good ten minutes from the far side of the Rangers’ allocation to negotiate the back gangway and escape into the narrow alleyway which runs behind it. You do you but I smell smoke in there and I’m heading for the green.

To be fair if it was ever going to burn down I’m surprised it wasn’t during our visit. Said unrelenting sun beats down on a corrugated iron roof, slowly roasting the travelling 2,000 in what Delia Smith might have called a “cool oven”. Sweat from your head, running right down your spine, and into your crack. Gooch like a tropical rainforest. And by full time I’m a stone lighter. Get Richard Kone in here with us, that’ll soon sort him out.

To our right… spot the lads that fancy themselves. What you doing Saturday? Well, I thought I might go down Pompey, and stand as close as I possibly can to the away end, and take my top off, and have a bit of a flex. We’re not going to shag you mate. I often struggle to master the mentality of somebody who goes to the football to stand as close to the opposition fans as they can get. If I was going to do it I’d be clothed, and it would be supporting a club that wins more often than not. In Portsmouth, neither is the case. Instagram has a lot to answer for. And steroids.

Minder’s own Terry Devlin causes momentary joy among the tribal tats, and familiar doubt deep in the air fryer – what was a worse idea, wearing an all-black kit or playing without a midfield? Shades of Blackpool 5-0 being cast. Never mind, 20 minutes later it’s 3-1 to the Rangers and we’ve got a song about Tequila you might enjoy. Hey, maybe this is Tijuana after all. I think my skin is starting to prune.

The train home is… too cold, if anything. My nipples could cut glass. Stick an air con unit like this in my gaff I wouldn’t have a problem. Alright Goldilocks, steady yourself down. The R’s are one for one. And there’s 47/48 to come.

Easter time

A week later, immediately after a highly frustrating 0-0 home draw with Bolton, I am attempting to make it to the Isle of Mull by train, which is a very silly idea indeed.

Not because the Isle of Mull isn’t spectacularly beautiful – swim in the crystal clear waters off Calgary beach, pull out a spider crab as big as your first car, have it with chips and mayonnaise for dinner – but because getting there after a Saturday home game relies on traversing the length of the country on Avanti West Coast’s last train of the day, where the only safety net is a rail replacement bus or the dreaded ‘taxis from Lancaster’. This is British railways’ Strait of Hormuz – the week before my trip it runs 128 minutes late, the week before that it didn’t run at all. Between 7-11% of Avanti trains are cancelled altogether depending on the route, and they paid out £1.4m in delay repayment in the year to March 2026 – a £1m increase on the same period five years prior.

For a (long) while everything is fine. Four nearby Bolton fans take it in turns to phone home and say how well QPR played (awww) and how happy they are with their point (bastards). A Scottish lad claiming to be Dennis Cirkin’s best mate is here and keen to chat. He says he was surprised Dennis ended up at QPR. I say I was surprised too. Night starts to fall, the train begins to empty out, beer supplies dwindle, but we continue to advance, and that really is all you can ask with this thing. There’s even a replacement driver for us, right where they’re meant to be at Preston, which was a hurdle I was glad to clear and soon the sun sets over Morecambe Bay as we continue north and I drift off into a fairly boozy state of unconsciousness.

Round about Penrith it occurs to me through foggy dreams of Richard Kone’s various misses that we haven’t moved for sometime. I opened my eyes at one point and we were in Penrith, and then I opened them again a while later and we were still in Penrith. Dwell time? Hmmm, we’re dwelling a hell of a lot longer than I would like. Dennis Cirkin’s mate heads for the buffet, time ticks past 11pm, Dennis Cirkin’s mate comes back from the buffet, and we’re still in Penrith. Still dwelling. I’m starting to get that Avanti West Coast sinking feeling again. Sure enough, the chimes of doom, “good evening ladies and gentleman”.

The news comes through from the front cab that the driver “thinks he might have hit something”. Whether it’s a human or an animal, or whether this has actually happened at all or not, is shrouded in some doubt and so we wade through the manual looking for the checklist for what to do if the driver might have run over a human, might have run over an animal, or might have run over nothing at all whatsoever.

This checklist, it turns out, is two hours long: it requires the British Transport Police and a crew of fitters to make their way to Penrith in the middle of the night; it requires a total shut down of the West Coast Mainline in both directions so they can conduct an inspection of the entire train front to back and underneath; it requires scrapings to be taken off the front of the train for a series of science experiments conducted on the platform – weary passengers staring out of the window as police officers play animal/vegetable/mineral with gunk they’ve found around one of the headlights.

Every 15 minutes we’re treated to an update over the public address system in which the guard takes somewhat for granted that he’s sure “we all understand why this is necessary”. Now, perhaps the weight of the world has finally just crushed my soul completely, or perhaps this is the product of spending so little time in Glasgow Central’s very finest Premier Inn that night it worked out at something like £1.80 a minute (may as well have slept in the back of a black cab), but… is it?

I’ve written at length on here previously about the tragedy and scourge of suicide, particularly in young men, the last time some poor sod jumped in front of one of our trains so no letters please, but when the gathered throng on the platform decides somewhere just after 1am that in all likelihood we’ve hit nothing at all and can continue on our way I’ve got to wonder whether that really, really was… necessary? Was that not something that could have been dealt with in Glasgow? I feel like there’s a lot of these ‘motorists were stuck on the M25 for eight hours while investigations took place’ incidents now where we’re told that there was absolutely no other alternative way of dealing with the situation and “I’m sure you understand” and I think… do I?

Descent into grumpy old man now complete and “automatic” delay repayment back in my account 27 days into the 28 day limit, by the end of the week I thought I might have an actual suicide on my hands.

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Turns out my very fine £450-worth of student accommodation (and sometimes the keycard even worked) for this year’s Edinburgh Fringe/TV Festival was in the Leith end of town (sunshine optional) and so on Thursday I decided to take a leave from all the television execs stopping to talk to their mates on the stairs and walk five minutes to the other side of the Easter Road and watch Hibernian’s ‘win and in’ Europa Conference League qualifier at home to Gent.

Now, we have occasionally been quite disparaging about Scottish football on LFW. Quick kids, if we don’t catch the 12.15 Old Firm Derby we might have to wait until the 12.30 Old Firm Derby... that sort of thing. And I did once accidentally publish an off key joke about Rangers in The Daily Telegraph that sparked a message board thread many dozens of pages deep where the "Union Bears" were trying to find out my home address. This, week, though, the jokes wrote themselves.

The annual footballing highlight that is the big Glasgow clubs dipping out of European competition in mid-July after a two-legged disaster against some Lithuanian cheesemakers was in full swing. Listening to the BBC Radio Scotland Breakfast crew on the way to the Craignure ferry they seemed perplexed at Martin O’Neill’s downbeat tone (“I think we’re capable of scoring a goal, which is a source of some optimism, but it’ll be a very tough night for us”) heading to Austria’s third biggest club with a 3-0 aggregate lead. Sure enough, they lost the return fixture 5-1. Derek McInnes, meanwhile, kicked off his Ibrox reign bowing out of the Europa League at the hands of Jagiellonia (north east of Poland), then seeing a parachute into the Conference League swiftly cut to ribbons by Jablonec (Czech Republic). Goodness knows what’ll happen when they move onto the K’s.

The footballing public of Glasgow are notoriously chill about these things and took it all in their stride. Apparently, it’s largely the fault of the “diddy clubs” for not providing enough of a challenge across a nine month season of fortnightly meetings with Kilmarnock. This rather ignores the fact that whenever some idiot scum like St Johnstone get anybody half decent on the pitch or in the dugout the Old Firm immediately hoover them up – observe what happened to Hearts’ manager and top scorer after their near miss last season.

I would have thought a clear and obvious lack of youth development in a country that has built on something of a golden generation (Robertson, Tierney, McTominay, McGinn) with Ben Gannon-Doak and little else, leaving them to go to a full blown World Cup with a 50-year-old goalkeeper, would be of interest to the coroner in this particular inquest. Celtic’s bravely beaten side in Austria was made up of players from Finland, USA, England, South Korea, Germany, Sweden, Denmark and Colombia with just three Scots at a club that should have every possible advantage going for it to run a highly productive, world class youth programme both here and in the Republic of Ireland.

Not so. It's St Mirren's fault.

Hibs’ team was pretty instructive. A mixture of six-figure purchases from weird and wonderful corners of Europe – Austrian goalkeeper, Zambian midfielder via Switzerland, Australian forward via Croatia – and cast offs from the EFL. A lot of SPL sides are structured this way – lots of ‘oh, that’s where he ended up’. Stoke’s Nathan Lowe led the line on loan and missed two sitters. Ex-Reading and Wycombe Jordan Obita is here.

Still, it had been enough to knock out Kosovo’s Malisheva and Macedonia’s Shkëndija (and they’ll all be signing autographs) in the prior rounds. It also got a 0-0 draw in Gent against a side that usually lavishes a good €10m on its team each summer, and sometimes more (but has, nevertheless, ended up with Portsmouth’s Christian Burgess at centre back).

Win and in, then. Just don’t fuck it up. Sounded intriguing enough to me and, by some miracle of coincidence, this peak in interest happened at exactly the moment Hibs’ Ticketmaster-powered website – which had hitherto given the strong impression you actually have to be in the fucking Proclaimers just to be able to log into the bastard thing – was willing to cough up a brief for the upper tier behind the goal. A quick skip and jump between the sandstone terraced housing and three pints of Tennent's later and there I was. Sandwiched between a worried looking man wearing shorts, who informed me Hibs had fallen at the qualifier hurdle in each of their last ten attempts at European football, and a loud ginger gentleman, who had apparently taken All The Cocaine in preparation for the big night and continued a throaty rendition of ‘Hibee Hibernian’ long after the song had finished.

What followed would be easy to look down upon, and not least because my vantage point was about as high as this more modern, greener version of Loftus Road affords. The teams were keen, this clearly meant a lot to both; but incompetent, with the chances of retaining the ball diminishing in returns equal to the number of touches they took to get it under control. There was a lot of running into each other. I’ll tell you what, though, it was incredibly watchable.

The desperation of both, coupled with an almost chronic inability to defend on both sides, made this a better tribute to Kevin Keegan than any minute of applause. They went at each other at a pace and tempo that seemed completely unsustainable to me, and indeed resulted in the near total exhaustion of the home side before the end, but was nevertheless maintained almost throughout. A full house crackled, tifo’s promising the HFC are ‘going international’ stretched the length of the home end, one banner implored “stop hoping, start believing” and as the sea fret shrouded the distant dock cranes the whole place gleamed in floodlit green. I was very, very into this.

The football itself was exactly the sort of chaotic nonsense that used to define all leagues either side of the border. Before Pep and his petro-chemical-doped snooze-fest, before goalkeepers playing out from the back, before xG. Get it in there and get after it. I can see why Russell Martin didn’t last long up here – “it was quite a big deal that he was a vegan”, one Hibee told me, “they started calling him Terry Vegetables”. This is the sort of football I used to get excited by. Not something designed on a spreadsheet. Not something over-coached to within an inch of its life – in fact, to watch it, you’d question whether any coaching had taken place at all. Arsenal v Chelsea used to look like this and was all the better for it.

My ginger friend pounded the back of the stand with fist, and later face, while my pal in shorts shook his head and muttered “no, no, no” into upturned hands. There was a screaming child. These people were living it. Gent led at half time, Hibs equalised immediately afterwards… but no. My first live experience of VAR. The referee ran off the pitch to consult with a portable television somewhere out of view at the bottom of the main stand. An interminable delay. Zero communication. He emerged and pointed to the centre spot. Everybody went nuts all over again. Then Gent took a free kick and it was still 1-0. I’d look at the BBC live feed to find out why, but thanks to the unique way British infrastructure is financed and maintained the only place my iPhone gets signal is if I sit on top of the Crystal Palace mast with the transmitter wedged up my arse and the handset held in the air. I do that once a fortnight to ring my provider and complain.

Hibs then scored a legitimate equaliser. Non-the-wiser but no longer caring. Ginger coke fiend facetimed what one would presume was his girlfriend, who was in the bath, and unimpressed that we could all see this. Whole ground on its feet. Corner of blue Belgians with a drum. God, this was good stuff.

What should have been - and what for now we’ll call - Hibs’ winner was a special goal. Felix Passlack, a German who even Mr Tickle in the shorts was at one point moved to hail as “quite good, him”, made to cross from right back but instead played a line ball and purposely sprinted inside to search for a return. Josh Mulligan read the intention splendidly and reversed a perfect pass back into his path. In the penalty box, and in space, Passlack got a head and knee over the ball and drilled a low cross shot through a crowd of bodies in front of the goalkeeper. The ball smacked off the base of the far post, flew right back across the goal and nestled into the net on the other side with a satisfying crash that caused the absolute total dissolution of all the humanity and society around, underneath, in front and to the side of me. I’ve rarely experienced a football crowd celebrate like this. It was Oldham at home with the gloves off.

They’d have heard that one far out to sea and with ten minutes left the job was eight tenths of the way done. I’m going to hear it, I’m going to hear Sunshine on Leith, I’m going to see them do it. And these guys, where are these guys going? Back to that pub conversation about your dream Europa League group. A Spanish island. A big name from the past. A Scandi side. And some moody Eastern European nonsense reached via many convoluted trips in a rented Jeep. Emergency credit card, break glass in case of European campaign. Go well Hibees, enjoy, boy have you earned this. So incredibly jealous.

Now, if I tell you, in the remaining eight minutes of normal time, Hibs’ stone cold refusal to mount any defence whatsoever to any Gent corner ever taken cost them an equaliser, you'd perhaps think that unlucky but fairly inevitable. If I also told that you that, in the time added on for those celebrations, a push for a winner - overloaded to what I would describe as cavalier extremes - left them facing a three on one counter attack the other way, during which the only thing they had left remotely qualifying as a central midfielder came across to diffuse but accidentally put through his own net, you’d find that pretty unlikely I reckon. If I then tell you that in an attempt to retrieve a 3-3 from the wreckage the same player (Chaiwa) committed a foul so heinous he was then also sent off by the referee, and that it wasn’t even his first fucking own goal that week, then perhaps we can agree a kindred spirit has indeed been found. The most QPR thing I ever did see without QPR involvement. From 2-1 up and through to 3-2 down and out in the blink of a bloodshot eye.

To stand amidst such a sea of utter, profound disappointment while having no skin in the game reminded me of my local newspaper days where we’d have to quietly sit in the back of the church for the funerals of particularly newsworthy victims. They all just looked… stunned. Got promoted at work, had a few after hours, came home at the end of a great day, rounded the corner and found out your house has burned down. They just stood, to a man, and stared at it. All the hands on all the heads. A painful, lasting silence. Cocaine Ian did not take the setback well. At all. And as I followed a pair of friends back across Easter Road and the abandoned railway line from the docks one raged into the night at the wide-open approach, the tactical numbskullery, the over commitment to those late counters, and manager David Gray. Thursday night, going nowhere, all the lights changing green to red – eight minutes from achieving everything these people wanted, he was sacked in the time it’s taken me to write this column. The quieter of the pair estimated it would be 30 years before Hibs would be in a position to try again. Scotland’s comedically awful week leaves their UEFA coefficient languishing somewhere between Andorra and the Vatican City. Situations running through my head.

And my man in the shorts? Who’d attended alone and at full time looked like somebody had put two bolts in the back of his dog’s skull while he watched? I could only offer sympathy and ask if he was at least going home to somebody. “Aye. You get used to it.” Hmmm, don’t you be jumping in front of my Blackburn train tomorrow chief. Had quite enough of that for one week.

Football, the most important of the least important things.

An old shoe

I thought a lot about those Hibs fans on Friday as my TransPennine “Express” dodged damage to the overhead electrical wires back down to the Manchester Radisson, where the swimming pool costs extra and the reception was being used as an elaborate racetrack by a group of eight-year-olds while the parents sat to the side and supped Madri. Hibs is a club which competes in a league it can never hope to win. They last did so in 1952 and if you play the SPL for another 1,952 years I doubt they’d do so again. There's a pub here called The Persevere. It's the Leith motto apparently.

Is it better to go through experiences like that, just to feel something? Like a footballing self-harm? On the off chance one day it goes right - 114 years without a Scottish Cup win, ten failed finals, but what a moment when the spell is finally broken? Or just to plod along in midtable forever and ever amen, convincing yourself it’s about the belonging rather than the achieving?

By pure coincidence, the following morning I found myself trundling hungover out of Manchester Victoria, through the glamorous surroundings of Rochdale, on to the wonderfully named Todmorden and finally Blackburn. Nothing says Championship like this place. QPR’s recent spell of purgatory in this division – an 11-year stint in which they’ve never finished higher than ninth – has required ten visits to Ewood Park yielding two wins. Since football was invented in 1992 the R’s have been here 21 times, winning three. You can hear Simon & Garfunkel as the train brakes on the approach.

We had a pre-match curry here last year in a place called Thira, a small Goan restaurant specialising in seafood in the middle of the country and having difficulty keeping the place warm judging by a grid-sapping collection of fan heaters and de-humidifiers assembled through many years’ enthusiastic attendance at local car boot sales. The food was surprisingly sensational. Certainly, a good deal better than a rival that shall remain nameless which we found strangely empty after watching Leroy Fer score in a midweeker here once and later learned via several reports in the Lancashire Telegraph that all may not have been as it seemed with the meat. So that’s what happened to that guy’s dog.

It is one of those many places in this country, including the places I grew up, that existed for a thing and then they took the thing away. Nice new bridge over the railway though, and an ice skating rink for the kiddies. Wind in their hair, they love it. At the Premier Inn you can request a “market place view” should you want a view of Blackburn Market Place, and if you happen to be staying there on the receptionist’s last night we’ve found him prone to leaving the Peroni fridge open and turning a blind eye. Which is just as well, as this is one of those places where the best pub is absolutely the Wetherspoons. We used one by the station for a while, which had English Defence League stickers on the mirrors and a seat under the dartboard. A landlord well the other side of 30-stone presided over his kingdom in a grey tracksuit which did sterling work. We marvelled at how his heart kept going then, when required to return here a few weeks later in the FA Cup, noticed he’d been replaced by a small black and white photograph behind the bar.

That place, like much of the town, like much of any provincial town in this country, is now closed. You’re told to report to The Fenhurst, behind the away end. When you do as you're told you find they’ve only got two people serving. Phil goes to get a round in a little before half one and returns just after the second reading of the classified football results. The glass is plastic and in protest at the playlist a local sits in the corner and blasts Now 42 That’s What I Call Irish Folk Music through the tinny speaker on his phone at maximum volume.

QPR win, again. For a second year running at Ewood Park, and a second away game to begin 2026/27. They look pretty decent doing it as well, despite falling behind in the game initially. It’s good news. I’m ready to feel again. Even if it means crushing disappointment in the end.

Scores on the doors

Portsmouth:

On the train >>> Journey 6/10 >>> Cost 7/10

Blackburn:

On the train >>> Journey 3/10 >>> Cost 3/10

Totals, Portsmouth 91/140, Blackburn 67/140

2026/27 >>> Vienna

2024/25 >>> Sheffield/Luton/Derby >>> Plymouth/Hull >>> Perpignan

2023/24 >>> Austria Pt 1 >>> Austria Pt 2 >>> Wimbledon >>> Oxford >>> Watford/Cardiff/Middlesbrough >>> Birmingham/Leeds/Huddersfield/West Brom >>> Preston/Sheffield/Ipswich >>> Stoke/Bristol/Leicester

2022/23 >>> Blackburn/Sunderland/Charlton >>> Watford/Swansea/Millwall >>> Bristol/Sheffield/Luton

2021/22 >>> Hull/Boro 21/22 >>> Reading/Bournemouth >>> Fulham/Peterborough >>> Cardiff/Blackpool >>> Bristol/Birmingham >>> Peterborough/Coventry/Millwall >>> Barnsley/Blackburn >>> Luton/Nottingham >>> Sheffield/Preston/Huddersfield

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Photo: Action Images via Reuters

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