Gearing Up & Slowing Down

Ladies and gentlemen. Madames et monsieurs. Damen und herren... it's that time of the year again: the start of a new season.

Unless of course that is you support a club in something other than the Evo-Stik or Zamaretto league's because your season began at the very least a week ago. If so the optimism a fresh campaign brings may have already been replaced by the gnawing sensation in the pit of your stomach that your weekends are continually going to be ruined over the coming months by a squad of players whose sole ambition in football is to rise to a level where they're only described as inept.

But this isn't a posting that's going to be about hopes and dreams. It's about something else entirely.

The few remaining regular visitors to this dark corner of the world wide web won’t have failed to notice the lack of reports during the recent spell of friendlies and I'm sorry to say it's a situation that's not going to change much over the course of the coming season. There will still be the odd musings on what went on at matches, just not as many of them as there has been in the past.

I started the blog because writing about Mossley and the football world the club inhabited was fun. For a multitude of reasons though - none being any greater than the other - that is no longer the case. Some of them I'll explain, others I won't.

Detailing the on and, at times, off pitch events at Seel Park has become a chore and looking back over what I've written during the course of the past six to twelve months it shows: as my apathy has grown, the standard of my writing (not that I'm big-headed enough to believe it was great in the first place) has dropped. It could turn out that the decision to cut back on postings may get the creative juices flowing once more, making the staid run through of games which have cluttered the blog lately a thing of the past. Or it may not. Only the future knows for certain.

I appreciate that some of you may be thinking that's a sorry excuse for not doing match reports but there are other factors involved as well as I've previously mentioned. Such as it's hard to write about games when you're not there to see them and this season I won't be at as many of them as I've been in the past.

For years Mossley AFC (and I'm fully aware of how sad this confession may – nay, will – make me sound) has always seemed to come first in my life. Anything I did would be based around whether or not the team was playing and if there was a chance I could make it to the game. It’s time though other things started to take a priority, not least my health which I've neglected on far too many occasions over the last few years in the pursuit of seeing a game of football. A President's Cup fixture on a cold winter's night is no longer worth the three or four days of acute back pain it has previously caused.

And those are just a couple of the reasons why. As I said there earlier there are more but I have neither the time nor indeed the inclination to share them here.

Maybe taking a step back will allow me to rediscover my love of the game and, more importantly, watching Mossley. I want to recapture the excitement I once had when I stood on the terraces; I want to go back to enjoying matches again and maybe something as simple as being nothing more than a fan, rather than a real supporter, will allow me to do just that.

Like I said though the blog will continue to tick over with the odd report on home games, as well as the occasional video or two (it's not being mothballed completely) so there's still a reason for popping by occasionally. Maybe just not quite as often as you may have done in the past!

Anyhoo, I'll end by going off on a complete tangent and wishing the players and management of the Lilywhites a successful season. If and when a full and normal service resumes on here I hope it's to help document one of those all too rare successful periods in Mossley's history.