The decision of Bristol Rovers to scrap their matchday programme, The Pirate, is both sad and inevitable. Sad because the matchday programme has been an integral part of the experience in all of my years as a football supporter, which in my case ended in 2018. Inevitable because the printed matchday programme is dying, in common with much of the print media. According to News UK, 21% of Championship clubs no longer produce printed matchday programmes,12.5% of 104 clubs across the Premier League, EFL and Women’s Super League no longer sell printed copies and only 10%-20% of attendees on matchday purchase a programme. The writing is on the wall.
From 1999 to 2018, with a few gaps along the way, I wrote a column for The Pirate called Eclectic Blue, which was a play on words. Rovers playing in blue (and white), my writing style being, I hope, eclectic and, best of all, Eclectic Blue sounded very much like Electric Blue, the soft core porn video collection that existed between 1979 to 1987.
I started as a novice in the art of delivering articles on time and by the time I called it a day, I felt I was quite good at what I did. My writing evolved into the style, if you can call it style, that you see today in this blog, also called, coincidentally, Eclectic Blue. I learned to write to a deadline and indeed soon realised that my writing improved as it approached. The approaching deadline gave me focus and somehow my thought processes improved.
I left The Pirate at the end of the 2017/18 season, disillusioned with only club I had ever supported. The events that caused the disillusionment had started 12 years previously – and that really isn’t worth going over yet again! – and it never quite went away, but my love of writing kept me on the terraces.
There has never been a time in the last six years where I expected the football club to come knocking, begging me to return with the much-loved (by me) Eclectic Blue column. Nor was it something I desired. In 2018, I knew my departure from the programme was permanent, I was well aware that the matchday programme itself was on borrowed time and, above all, I was no longer in love with my football club. I left with no regrets, except that I would in all likelihood never write for a publication with a readership in the thousands. (You could probably put forward a convincing argument that the actual number of people who read my stuff did not actually add up to thousands!) But there is one thing I miss and that’s actually seeing my work in print.
At every home game, I would collect my free programme and my match ticket – ‘payment’ for my work – and the first thing I would do was to skip through the pages to find my article. There was something magical about it. Occasionally, people would stop me and say how much they had enjoyed my piece, which was my version of the 15 minutes of fame Andy Warhol said everyone would get to enjoy in their lifetimes. If I was to say I don’t miss that aspect of my life as a programme contributor, I’d be lying. But that’s tinged with a healthy dose of reality. I had a good run and I am very grateful for it.
I always dreamed of writing for a living. As with the vast majority of writers, I never got near it and today the average income of professional authors is around £7000 and falling. I feel no bitterness about that, nor do I feel a sense of loss. At least I managed to see my work in print during a sizeable chunk of two decades. For me, a hopeless failure in education and the wacky world of full time work, this is undoubtedly my main literary achievement, as is producing something close to 6000 blogs during the last decade. If I never made it – and of course I never made it – I gave it my best shot. I certainly did just that with The Pirate.
Everything changes, as Karl Marx and Take That so aptly put it. When I started writing for The Pirate, the iPhone was still eight years away. People were still buying newspapers. It feels like a lifetime ago. Now, we’re well into the digital age and, to quote Bachman-Turner Overdrive, you just ain’t seen n-n-n-nothing yet.
RIP The Pirate. You were so good to me and I hope, in some small way, I was good for you. We won tons of awards together. Good times.
