He attended every home match at Penydarren Park across nine decades. Rain or shine. As a child with his dad, as a kid with his mates, as a young man with his work mates and then as a father with his children, eventually as a grandfather with his grandkids and finally one last game with his great-grandson. A lifetime spent on the terraces of Penydarren Park, he hated sitting in the seats and resisted it despite his frailty towards the end. Always in his place on the Wank Bank, leaning on the crush barrier, near Holvey’s Tea Bar. The same group of people around him over the years, ebbing and flowing as life and circumstances got in everyone’s way of their weekly fix of the Martyrs. The full circle of life on those terraces. Dishing out spending money to his son as he tried to watch the game. Keeping one eye on the mass of kids playing football on the Theatre End grass bank. The final whistle and into the Jubilee Club for a pint with pop & crisps for his kid as they watched the day’s ...
My dad, like many of his generation in the Valleys, also followed Cardiff City when he was a young man. It was the big club down the rail track from Merthyr Tydfil and in the sixties they had some great players with John Toshack probably being his favourite. The trains from the Valleys would be packed with football fans for every home game, meanwhile he would also watch the Martyrs at Penydarren Park and as he settled down, married and had kids he stopped travelling to Ninian Park and instead drove the family Morris Oxford up Park Terrace, parking behind the Jubilee Club with me in tow. As I grew up, the Martyrs flirted a bit with Cup success; high-profile games with sides like Hendon, Tooting & Mitcham and Chesha m United were lost and the league form was indifferent to be honest so why didn’t he go back to following the Bluebirds during that bleak period? I was more than old enough to travel down to Ninian Park, and a lot of my friends were already going. Eventually my dad a...
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