The Sheffield Irvine Welsh

We don’t really go in for match reports on this blog, feeling that blow by blow accounts of actual events are best left to the purveyors of individual club sites – check out the bewilderingly excellent SmogBlog and Black and White & Read All Over for especially impressive examples of the art. Nonetheless, a new unique voice has been brought to my attention and I felt it remiss to pass up the opportunity to point you in his direction.

Sheffield Wednesday have given us the root of the England official band and Tango Man, neither of whom are we particularly grateful for, although the latter, like Princess Di, reputedly “does a lot of work for charity”, but the post-match ramblings of Beastie on Wednesday fan site Owls Alive are a thing of wonder. Far from restricting himself to the ninety minutes, this fella provides an exhaustive description of his whole day watching the Owls, with accounts of motorway service stations visited, a Doncaster Market patronised, viands consumed and beverages quaffed, all beautifully evoked in a rumbling South Yorkshire vernacular, a Sheffield equivalent of Irvine Welsh or James Kelman. Beastie’s latest tale of the long trip to Plymouth can be accessed at this link: and is an engrossing read indeed given he missed the entire first half.

Rob Langham

Rob Langham is co-founder of the defiantly non-partisan football league blog, The Two Unfortunates, a website that occasionally strays into covering issues of wider importance. He's 50 and lives in Oxford while retaining his boyhood support of Reading FC. He tweets as @twounfortunates and has written for a number of websites and publications including The Inside Left, When Saturday Comes, In Bed with Maradona, Futbolgrad and The Blizzard as well as being nominated for the Football Supporters' Federation Blogger of the Year Award in 2013.