A hand goes up in front of me as Arsenal keeper saves penalty

A hand goes up in front of me as Arsenal keeper saves penalty, originally uploaded by Gary Socrates.

Yes: a fun evening out at the Emirates watching Cardiff's under 18s team lose 3-2 to Arsenal's lot. The most surprising thing on the night was the crowd: over 11 and a half thousand. Second most surprising was how good Cardiff's youth team were, especially as they didn't have Blake or Gunter, who instead played against West Brom tonight.

The chanting was especially fun. The 1927 club in full voice singing vartious Cardiff songs, responded to by five year old Arsenal fans shouting "Who are ya?". "We're Cardiff, we're barmy, we're cheeky to our mums". A fun night out.

Pub Quiz

Naturally when the Quizmeister at the Dartmouth Arms asked each team to choose a category for questions I made sure our team's category was Cardiff City FC. Naturally when he asked the question about where the Mighty Bluebirds (OK he didn't use that phrase, he is a Stoke City fan) originally played, where another sport was normally played, I gave the correct answer of Sophia Gardens - where Bartley Wilson's Riverside Cricket Club's football team first played in October 1899. Naturally the drunken idiot quizmaster said I was wrong and gave the answer as "The Baseball Ground" - former home, obviously, of Derby County. Why do I know these dull facts? Because I read fascinating books by Graham Lloyd and Richard Shepherd, of course, giving all these important bits of useful information. And a quick bit of reading of Graham Lloyd's Cardiff City's history (A Hundred Years of the Bluebirds) gives me the interesting information about where the confusion comes from: when Cardiff City moved into Ninian Park in 1910 they had to do a deal with the local Council so that the ground could be used in the summer off-season for baseball matches. There you go.

I knew I was right, and yet I was happy to keep my cool. Unlike another time when an idiot running a pub quiz in Highgate refused to accept my answer to his question about who had played for Scunthorpe United and captained England. My answer, Ian Botham, was both clever and correct, but he insisted I was wrong and that only Kevin Keegan was the correct answer to the question. Fool. I was quite embarassing (K tells me) in the manner in which I disputed this. But this was a long time ago.

I should add that the Dartmouth Arms is a very nice pub, with good food and a great fun quiz. The pub owner/manager who runs the quiz is actually extremely nice and very entertaining as quizmaster, despite supporting Stoke City. And I could tell from a mile off that as a kid he wore Adidas football boots. Which meant I got a point for that, even if I got none for Sophia Gardens: the correct answer. I may have already mentioned this... The image on the right is of Cardiff playing (Dirty) Leeds at Ninian Park in 1952. We hope to keep being Leeds 'bogey' side this Saturday, when we play them again at Ninian Park. I won't be there, unfortunately, but I will probably be listening to Richard Shepherd's commentary.

No Soul At The Ricoh Arena

Many modern stadiums have no soul, and the prime example of this is Coventry's Ricoh Arena. I used to like their old stadium at Highfield Road, but their new plastic stadium several miles out of town next to the motorway is a horrible place. It has no atmosphere at all, and it is very hard for the crowd to generate an atmosphere, even at an eventful game like yesterday's Coventry v Cardiff 2-2 draw. The Coventry crowd only sang their traditional Eton boating song once or twice, only bothered with a half-arsed chorus of "sheepshaggers' at the Cardiff fans (must try harder), and spent most of the 90 minutes booing. Even when they were winning. They seemed to derive particular pleasure at booing our goalkeeper, Alexander, for having the temerity to put his face into their forward's boot. Very strange. The boos stopped, strangely, after Cardiff equalised (leading to Cardiff chants of "You only boo when you're winning"), but started up again when another player pulled Alexander's shirt.

Funny really: they probably had a justification to boo a couple of things: they had what looked like a decent goal disallowed, and they have a bloody hoprrible stadium and the weather was crap - but their boos were pretty random. Although, to be fair, they did result in Loovens getting booked for sod all in the first half, as famously useless ref Graham Poll booked him under pressure from all the boos, and this ended up with Loovens getting sent off for a second, justified, yellow card, which removed our ability to defend, and meant the game was a draw, rather than the unlikely win Cardiff seemed to have stolen after Whittingham's great second half shot into the top corner of the net.

But it's a horrible stadium. And 16 year old pom pom girls don't improve the view at half time. As you can see from the photos here. Ah well, another fun day out with Cardiff City. Next its a trip to the Emirates to see the youth team lose to Arsenal's under 18s, a week Monday.

Snow in Holloway

Snow in Holloway 8/2/07, originally uploaded by Gary Socrates.

Serious snow here today. The country grinds to a standstill. I struggle on. Working at home is so hard sometimes. Tomorrow though I have to drive the car to Enfield. I hope the snow melts. I hate scraping it off. Maybe some kids will take it off for me to have a snowball fight. You never know.

Here they are

It's a bloody disgrace.

Socks away

What on earth? The good news is Cardiff winning three games on the trot, after an awful 14 match run of no wins at all. Also the legendary 52 points now achieved after last night's Sky-fesr 2-0 victory against Barnsley makes us safe from relegation. If you are wondering why a football fan is relieved his team is safe from relegation when they are only 1 point off second place, you know NOTHING about supporting a football team, and probably are either uninterested in football altogether or have spent your life supporting someone like Man U or the Gooners. Not a PROPER team.

The bad thing is our TV shame. Not our normal fighting or riots or anything like that, but our socks. Yes, thats right, our socks. As Ledley and then McNaughton lay supine on the pitch, close ups of the backs of Cardiff players legs as they stood around watching physiotherapists do their thing revealed that Cardiff have the name of the city, in Welsh, printed on the backs of their socks. But, horribly, instead of the properly spelt 'Caerdydd', there on all the players socks (all 22 plus 6 sub socks) is printed 'Caerydd'. That's right: a 'D' missing. Pretty pathetic when you can't spell the name of your own city. We're a laughing stock I tell you.

You wonder who the sock suppliers are. Did they get them cheap in bulk from some Ebay supplier? Did they get them from the club shop? Unfortuntaely, the ones in the picture above, from the City online club shop don't show the back, so it's impossible to tell whether the ones City have been selling to fans have a similar mistake. Suspiciously though, the shop indicates they are "sold out". Hmmm.

Anyway it's apparantly not true that Swansea have got socks with "illiterate jack bastards" written on them. But only because they couldn't fit it all on.