7pm 6 July 2011
Strathspey and Badenoch Welfare League
Kingussie 4 RBL Aviemore 1 (att 20)
Ten years ago tonight Kingussie beat RBL Aviemore. It was the first game of my 2011/12 season, and the first game to be featured on this blog.
The blog began life as a season-long experiment. I enjoyed reading a few other groundhopping blogs, but at that time most focused on fixtures in the higher tiers of the non-League pyramid. Most games I went to were much lower, so I thought I could offer something a little different.
Kingussie was my 3,611th football ground. Last night's game at Plungington was number 4,980. The blog continued beyond that first season, and every new ground, or pitch, I've been to since has been covered in a post.
Regular readers might spot that sometimes match reports are short. Not every game or ground is memorable, and it can be a challenge to write more than couple of paragraphs.
That said, I rarely read long reports on other blogs, preferring instead to skim read and look at the pictures. Hopefully readers of this blog will often do likewise, and perhaps miss most of my typos.
When the blog started I had no expectations of how many people might read it. I certainly never imagined it'd exceed half a million, even over a decade. The current total is around 526,000.
Unsurprisingly most visitors - 288,000 of them - are from the UK. Second in the list is 111,000 from the USA, then 34,000 from Russia (probably plenty of state-sponsored bots among them). Germany, in fourth, probably has more actual humans among its 11,000.
The blog post that's had the most hits is TEK United v Drogheda Town. I've no idea why, unless Google searches for information about the battle of Tel-el-Kebir also point people towards a groundhopping blog about a Leinster Senior League team named after it.
The most common search term that leads people to the blog is UE Santa Coloma. Maybe there's a dearth of online information about football clubs from Andorra.
Neither Kingussie, RBL Aviemore nor the Strathspey and Badenoch Welfare League have yet re-emerged after the Covid-enforced shutdown. Hopefully they will, as for one thing I'm yet to visit the ground in Aviemore and would like the chance to write a blog post on it.
For now though I'll look forward to covering the new grounds I visit during 2021/22.
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