Give 2024 a sporting chance with The Ink
Introducing our new sports coverage with STFC writer Sam Morshead
As we wake up from our New Year stupors and blink into the early dawn of 2024, you will be pleased to know The Ink has some very ambitious plans for the year ahead.
First of all we would like to thank every new reader who has embraced this new concept of a paid-for news subscription service. It is definitely something that Swindon has needed. An independent long-form news platform that is sent directly to your inbox.
The Ink is going from strength to strength and we now have 289 subscribers, which is pretty significant for us, especially as it’s only been six months. But to make this work we need more of you to sign up.
We believe passionately in what we’re doing. Providing a service for Swindon that highlights the main issues of the town.
Local journalism has been suffering over the past few decades as newspapers have swapped print pounds for digital pennies. They have sacrificed quality for quantity in their never-ending hunt for clickbait stories just to get eyeballs on their websites.
Newsrooms have been cut to shreds and decentralised to anonymous industrial estates with editors now overseeing three or four publications.
And this is why we see the need for The Ink, where we can do a proper deep dive into the issues that are facing Swindon - highlighting the negatives as well as the positives.
At the moment paid subscribers get four Ink briefings a week at 3pm on Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. This includes the Thursday focusses - where each month we look at Business, Education, Heritage and Food & Drink.
On Fridays, we send out The Ink in its entirety to both free and paid subscribers.
And starting this year, Mondays will be our weekly Sports Focus, and leading this will be Swindon Town Football Club writer Sam Morshead, who will be offering insight into what’s what on the pitch as well as behind the scenes at the club.
We’re also in the process of organising more community talks which will truly enlighten and inform anyone who is interested in the town.
2024 is going to be a good year for Swindon and The Ink.
Being a paid subscriber costs £5.99 a month, which is only £1.50 a week (less than a 500ml bottle of Diet Coke per week).
At the moment we are still running our Winter Offer, giving new subscribers three months free on a paid subscription. The ultimate try before you pay anything.
What is Swindon Town to you?
Sam Morshead's career in journalism began with the Swindon Advertiser as a trainee reporter in 2009. He joined the Press Association as south west Football League reporter in 2011 before returning to the Adver in 2012 as chief sports writer. In that role he covered Swindon Town during a time of promise and upheaval, during the reign of Paolo di Canio and the club's subsequent ownership issues. In 2015, Sam left alongside two other Advertiser journalists to form Total Sport, and grew the website from scratch to become a major competitor in the local media arena. He moved to Mail Online and the Daily Mail in 2016 before becoming digital editor and later head of digital at The Cricketer. At the start of 2024, Sam opted to jump into freelance life.
By Sam Morshead
For different people, football clubs mean different things: thousands will visit the County Ground on a matchday, led there by thousands of motivations.
Some treat those trips as emotional releases; some are bonding with family; some are learning the game; some think they know it all, and want the opportunity to show it. Many are experiencing Stockholm Syndrome.
Whatever the reason, Saturday afternoons at the football retain a remarkably personal quality. They have their own traditions: the same pint in the same pub; the same shirt – even though, if we’re being brutally honest, it’s now two sizes too small; the same route from home to the stadium. The same seat. The same pain. The same elation.
Typically, we only create traditions because something has special emotional significance – we’ll argue furiously about how to do Christmas right but no one is going to get in a tizz about the ceremony of filling in a tax return – and football has the capacity to generate traditions.
My own traditions have shifted over time. For years, as dad introduced me to Swindon Town, every Saturday was the same.
They would start at Burger King at around one o’clock, before the short walk down Queens Drive to the newsagents for a packet of Wine Gums and a matchday programme. As we crossed the road and zoned in on the Don Rogers Stand, dad would make a lousy joke about the player he considered to be the worst in the Swindon squad (though, after Kim Heiselberg’s short stint in red around the turn of the millennium, he developed a curious fascination with the poor Dane instead).
We’d get to our seats as the Rolex showed 2.30pm (not that you could be sure that was actually the time). In the early days, we’d tick off the starting XI on the back of the programme. At the end of whatever tortuous hour-and-a-half we’d been presented with, dad would summon his inner gazelle and start striding at extreme pace back to the car to catch Sports Report.
We’d pre-empt James Alexander Gordon on each away side’s goal count, moan about whomever dad considered that year’s “Heiselberg”, and stop to pick up a curry in Wroughton on the way home. For all the losses we saw, and all the goals Swindon conceded, those four hours on a Saturday carried so much formative energy for me as a child and teenager.
And they ended up defining the direction of my professional life.
After university, my relationship with my club shifted. And so did Saturdays. Now, Swindon Town was work. Swindon Town became 5am starts and 2am finishes.
Swindon Town was writing 3,000 words about a 0-0 draw. It was ingratiating myself with agents, learning the way around Companies House, and – latterly – translating legal jargon. It was live blogs and interviews. It was the owner tweeting tell-all statements in the middle of the night. It was breaking the news of the superstar manager’s imminent exit from a backwater Warminster pub.
A little later, it was my club ostracising and trying to publicly humiliate me.
I gave up on Swindon Town. I resented the way it was run and the man who ran it. My professional circumstance changed, too. I was fully detached.
A couple of years ago, I bought a season ticket again. And I am starting to form new traditions, re-engaging with a remarkably resilient fan community.
And now an opportunity has presented itself to blend all three phases of my relationship with Swindon Town.
I’m very grateful to The Ink for giving me the space to write about the club I love.
What do I want to do?
I want to write about themes which matter to Town fans, without fear or favour, and without the need for access.
I want to remember the good old days, and ask what needs to be done to get them back.
I want to provide a platform for informed, detailed, interesting analysis of a club which continues to punch so far below its weight it is a wonder the BBBC hasn’t opened an investigation.
I want to write about my team again.
After all, your football club is for life.
Happy New Year,
Sam
PS – I am determined that The Ink’s Swindon Town coverage be determined by its readers, so please let me know what you want to hear about via theink@positive-media.co.uk
The Swindon Link Magazine Archive
Over on The Ink’s sister publication Swindon Link’s website you will find an impressive archive of the past 45 years of Swindon Link magazines, giving you a huge glimpse into the town’s recent past from the beginnings of West Swindon to now. You can find the archive here
The latest magazines
For the North West Swindon Link Magazine click here
For the South East Swindon Link Magazine click here
REF What is Swindon Town To You
Hmm! With less than 300 subscribers at the moment, I suspect you're going to find it difficult to get a whole lot of engagement for the time being, though I hope this changes as the readership grows. I think the INK's 'early adopters' probably don't tend to be of the football fraternity type (though I await a stinging rebuke, should that prove to be wrong!). In the meantime, here I am, a slightly cynical non-footy bloke, sticking my oar in.
I think perhaps one of the hurdles to leap is the way the club's brand and recent difficulties so closely mirror the malaise of the whole of the town and its wider community, a community simultaneously fracturing as estate after new estate gets nailed onto its bloating, corpulent body and pushed ever further from the atrophying heart which once gave it any sense of shared life or identify.
After more than 20 years here, I can safely say that Swindon is a place of ever more beige mediocrity, a place where if dreams don't exactly come to die; they come either to put up with a bit of so-so and a rest, or in the hope that a chance of success earned as a prospective bigger fish in a shallow pond will give a chance to escape somewhere better. From the little I've gleaned about the club over the years, it would appear that many of the owners, managers players may have a similar attitude over the years. Still, at least Di Canio put a bit of old fascist-ioned passion into proceedings for a bit (if you'll excuse the bad pun). Although his propelling Swindon into league one seemed as temporary as his hero's advances in The Western desert.
Swindy is a place of reassuringly bland acceptance: No one really expects anything better or for any notable improvement of fortune anymore (either in sport, culture or economy), so failure, or at least non advancement, becomes easier to weather. Its the comfy norm. Despite a wider population of nearly a quarter of a million souls, small mercies can be celebrated as massive and unexpected success (see the current shrivelling Adver for evidence of the excitement every time an estate agent moves location, a chippy scores 5 in a council kitchen hygiene assessment, or MICHAEL JACKSONS body guard Matt Fiddes receives a vague apology for being treated with mild antipathy in a car show room).
Swindon's football club, rather like its culture and heritage, isn't exactly stuck in the past - but the past is basically all it has to shout about in terms of anything to be proud about. The present seems to be about an endless list of unfulfilled promises and potential stretching back to the millennium. And with no sign of that changing... or is there?
So set against that, here I am. I actually kind of like lost causes and the under-dog (to the extreme extent, I even sat as a lib dem candidate a couple of times) I also like new experiences. But like a lot of other non footy types, I've previously struggled listening to the bar stool bores with thinning pates crapping and yapping on about Premier League team X Y or Z, referring to a team of European professional athletes in their 20s and on telephone number salaries, as 'us' and 'we'. The weird tribal hatred of demeaning and insulting other pot-bellied, pre diabetic folk for supporting *other* similarly constructed teams, can be equally baffling. For the non fan, the only link between these towns and cities, and the people on the pitch, seems to be that they drive through it on their way to training or a fixture.
So maybe I AM a potential Swindon Town supporter. Maybe you can find that incipient fuse of enthusiasm and light it, and I'll take my 6 year old twins to go and soak up the atmosphere of hundreds of people shouting and singing in unison to urge their team to unlikely victory (provided the songs and chants aren't too foul, of course - ?).
At least 'our' team in this instance might actually be someone who's parents we rub shoulders with down the CoOp, or who's star midfielder has a younger sister who's kids goes to my kids school. And that aside, I also know of someone's good friend who was a lifelong Town fan. The kindness the club and his favourite Town player showed him during his terminal illness was something that hugely impressed me. That kind of altruism really can cut through the usual BS surrounding what 'your' team might actually mean in practice.
So... urrr... this ramble has ended up in an unexpected conclusion. Come on Sam. I am ready to dip a toe into uncharted waters. How does the potential Swindon Town fan go from a standing start? What do I need to know?