Well, that didn’t quite go as planned. This was meant to be one last bit of filler to effectively sign us off for what’s looking more & more like a complete bust of a season, for us fans at least, after the National League decided they were going to start the season anyway and went cap in hand to the government for a hand out to pay for it all. But even then, the mob in blazers up in Brum had other ideas and put the kybosh on what we had planned as well.
As you may know, we basically generate most of our material through travelling all over the shop, getting beered up and creating idiocy all in the vague name of watching a football match. And with the current ban on fans in the National going absolutely anywhere to watch their team, we are bollocksed quite frankly. Travelling is frowned upon, you can only get 6 of you in a pub at a time (if you can find one you don’t have to pre-book for) and we can only watch games on a fucking laptop.
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| Colours on show |
Now we’re well aware most if not all of our audience doesn’t read this nonsense for the football, they come for beer, swearing and fuckwittery. And whilst we’re pretty experienced in the idiotic aspects of life, even we’re going to struggle to get that from an internet stream watched at home or in the bar over a couple of cans. So, we had an emergency editorial meeting of the Gandermonium staff and it was quickly and unanimously agreed by us all that until us herberts are able to, at the very least, attend home games, stand on the Shoebox once more and loudly question the lino’s eyesight/parentage like we did in the old days back in 2019, we’re done.
After 8 years and over 400 games (we’ve actually not missed a 1st team match between us in that whole time), Gandermonium would officially be going on hiatus. With the decision made, I’d sort of planned, as a bit of a laugh and to also help illustrate the fact that watching games purely online is shit, to cover the opening day clash with Maidenhead over beers in the bar at GGL with all the usual dickheads there present as sort of goodbye. A farewell for now. A placeholder if you will. But sadly, like much of the plans everyone’s made for 2020, that went right out of the window when at lunchtime on the Friday the National League ordered clubs planning on streaming home games to their own licenced premises not to do so. Halted. Denied. Verboten.
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| The closest we’ll get for a while… |
Of course, no actual simple, valid reason was given for this, but it doesn’t take a genius to work out that the league were probably shitting themselves a little bit over their 10 million quid funding grant from the government when they had member clubs like Wealdstone, amongst others, openly stating in the national press what a fucking load of nonsense it was that they could screen games going on outside, barely yards away, to people sat in their bar but weren’t allowed to admit those same people to the ground itself to watch. And they were right, it is fucking nonsense. It is illogical horseshit of the highest order in fact. However we’re sadly hampered somewhat by the fact that our government are, to put it quite simply, cunts. And whilst they quite like to spout all sorts of bollocks on a regular basis, they really really don’t like it being pointed out to them in clear, plain queens English that it is, in fact, bollocks. Which is quite often with this bunch of fucking absolute charlatans, so I can sort of see why they’d get a bit bored of it.
So, let’s just say the cancelling of clubs streaming their home game in the respective bars had a definite air of some Westminster suit dashing off a “You fucking peasants should pipe down or you can whistle for your money” kind of email to National League HQ about it all and leave it at that shall we?
So, yeah. That decision kind of inserted a broom handle up our bottoms as far as last hurrahs go. Which is why you’ve got this load of tedious nonsense rather than some slightly drunker, vaguely more amusing nonsense instead. But then again, this was all probably even more Gandermonium than we could probably have ever planned for ourselves, so….
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| All the precautions, none of the crowds… |
Fear not, we’ll try and get the odd thing chucked up on here in the meantime to remind you we’re still alive, our social media will of course remain online and we’re still more than happy to accept any guest submissions that you might have and think people may find interesting, but from here on in, Season 2020/21 is done as far as we’re concerned. However, with DCMS’ current funding only guaranteed for 3 months, it is likely that we could be back in watching after Xmas. And if that’s the case, you can bet we’ll be back on our crap non-league blogging horse quicker than you can say “World beating track & trace system”.
Thanks for reading. See you when we see you folks.
Taz
w/Totts, Dukey & Robbo