I have work to do Thurs afternoon, so make it to Shrewsbury in time for one pre-match beer. My mind is pre-occupied with match tickets. I have bought ours online and cunningly put them in an email folder marked ‘Tickets’. However, for reasons only Microsoft know, my ‘Tickets’ folder isn’t accessible when I open my emails on my phone. I have fired off an email to TNS already, asking for the tickets to be re-send, but I firmly expect my man to be too busy. It is, after all, matchday. So, while I desperately search for Wifi on my laptop at my B&B (so I can access ‘Tickets’) I check my emails on my phone. My man has come good. Well done TNS!
I meet up with Molly at the Lion and Pheasant and we have our one beer. Fine it is too, an IPA of some local kind, though the pub itself is like a quiet All Bar One. I know the ground is a journey, but last time I was here, I got to the ground 15 mins before kick-off and by the time I’d parked up and returned to the ground I’d missed half an hour and the only goal (ours!) That won’t happen again. Moll does the maths and it’s walkable. It was a very nice walk too. Everything about Shrewsbury is nice. For future reference, we also walk past 3 or 4 more pubs on the stretch from the town centre to ground.
Tonite’s opponents are Astana, who may or may not be from Kazakhstan. I think I’ve seen them before, at Spartak Trnava (Slovakia), where I had to leave at half-time in order to get the last train out of Dodge. That’s not happening this evening. Although I wasn’t getting in, as the scanner wouldn’t recognise my ticket till I’d brightened my screen. Grrrrr! I was already slightly narked at agreeing to pay a whopping 500 pence for a programme.
The club shop, AKA a counter laced with TNS products, greets us on our entry. Molly is sorely tempted by a replica shirt. Only £35, a lot cheaper than usual. I loved the snazzy green and white hooped design, but the material felt a little cheap and I didn’t fancy going up in a ball of flame. Moll deferred till half-time and thought better of it. Our stress at making kick-off was unfounded too, as it was an 8pm KO, not 7:45, a fact even the stewards didn’t know. Time for a hotdog to assuage those hunger pangs.
There was only one stand open for home fans. European football is wasted on the good burghers of Shrewsbury. The attendance of 2,022 would be approximately 1/3 of the crowd on Satdy of Shrewsbury Town v Barnsley. Hilariously, our original seats had been moved as TNS hadn’t realised the media expect to be housed too. Oh well. They were still decent seats, fairly high up…but not so high up that we were sat neat The Mouth. The Mouth was a one-man chanting machine who never stopped the entire 86 minutes he was in the ground. Expecting him to be a middle-aged character with SEN, I was surprised to find he was a handsome gentleman of about 30. Whatever, I wish I had his lack of self-awareness. He was eventually joined in by a couple of 11 year olds in a call and response. TEEEE EN ES. TEEEE EN ES. I have this chant now ground into my cerebral vortex.
The match came as a pleasant surprise. Both sides wanted to attack, but some of TNS’s moves were superb. OK, against better opposition, they’d have come undone when losing the ball with too many men committed to attack, but fortune favours the brave and they bagged two excellent second half goals to triumph. How TNS pay for players of this quality, I’ve no idea. Expecting a bunch of plucky non-league equivalents, these players are League 1 at least. Good luck to em, however they’re paid for. How many league titles have they won on the bounce?
As they say, ‘they’ll be dancing in the streets of Total Network Solutions tonight’!
The Damage:
£18 ent
£5 programme
£4.50 hotdog
= £27.50
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