Adam Bird - My Personal Blog

The first England International I watched in the flesh was against Chile, way back on 11th February 1998 - I remember it for all the wrong reasons. Not the fact that a certain Michael Owen made his England debut or that Marcelo Salas and his Chilean compatriots showed England a footballing masterclass. But because of the pre-match warm-up; being served at 17 years old and ‘aving it large with the England ‘massive’, singing ‘no surrender’ stood upon a bar stool because everyone else was and because it seemed the cool thing to do at the time. How times change. Over the past few months Oliver has been getting into his football. He has been learning the rules and feeling the raw emotion of the beautiful game. A season ticket at the Gills has helped (strangely enough), but so has Sky and the often daily diet of Premier League or La Liga. He has also started to play too, joining a team on Saturday mornings for training and will make his league debut once his registration with the FA is ...

Next weekend the FA Cup final will be contested at Wembley stadium, the home of football, the closing chapter of another dramatic season of English league football. The trophy will be awarded to the winner of either Stoke City or Manchester City, two teams that I have no real association with other than the last time Manchester City played a final at Wembley it was against my Gillingham team, managed at the time by Tony Pulis, ironically now in charge of Stoke City, which brings to life a wonderfully scripted sub-plot to what is already an intriguing game. Since Stoke City reached the final, blog posts and online analysis have focused on Tony Pulis, that day at Wembley and a recent interview on the BBC Sport website revealed some insight into the thoughts of the man and what it would be like to avenge that day nearly 12 years ago. Feeling nostalgic comes naturally to me, particularly when looking back at Gillingham Football Club’s finest ever moment. That game, Gillingham vs Manc...

Having allowed Stephanie access to my blog and her excellent account of her weekend away it is now back to me and my random ramblings of nothing in particular. OK , maybe not nothing, but one thing I wanted to get of my chest. The FA Cup final... the pinnacle of the football season, the countries best two teams fighting blood, guts and tears to win the greatest cup competition in the world, all in front of the largest TV audience of the year and in the case of this years final, back at Wembley with 90,000 people watching from a brand new stadium. With Stephanie off out practicing her sign language with her tutors, the boys out in Prague for Mark's stag weekend, and my Dad sunning himself in Antigua my choice of viewing partners were few and far between. As it was, Oliver and I sat in readiness for our first FA Cup final together. As we sat an enjoyed our pre-match refreshments of a bottle of beer (me) and a bottle of formula (Oliver), the BBC did there best to hype up the game,...

I have not posted a blog here now for nearly a month, which by my standards, and web standards in general is a long time! Nothing of note has really happened, just been going through day to day life of commuting, working, commuting, catching up with Steph, watching Oliver sleep, sleeping myself and repeating the process over again. It may sound a little bland and uninteresting, but the reality is that work has been great! Busy, but great! Catching up with Steph has been great, not had much quality time together but the time we have has been spent in contentment as opposed to screaming at each other, which is not our style really anyway! Watching Oliver sleeping as you can imagine is the highlight of my day! Generally he is already sleeping when I get home, so I miss the best part of his day, but occasionally he will wake up and we will have a little play we have a good half hour of him bouncing on my knee whilst he watches in bewilderment as I gurn at him. Not quite sleeping throug...

Just under 7 years since Dietmar Hamman buried the last goal at the old Wembley Stadium past an equally creaking David Seaman the new Wembley re-opened it's doors for the first time on Saturday as it hosted an England under 21 match against Italy. The redevelopment programme had been beset with problems, delays and increasing cost's. In all honesty I had not been too bothered by all the stories, as ultimately once the stadium was finally built I knew we would have a stadium to be proud of. On Saturday afternoon that fact was confirmed to me. Getting tickets for the first game was a challenge in itself with the website crashing almost immediately the tickets went on sale! Determined not to be beaten I spent a good half hour hitting F5, (the refresh key) and opening multiple windows of the same page. Lo and behold I had beaten the cyber goalie and had secured the prize of four tickets to the game! Once the tickets had arrived a good week before the game itself, I tried to work...

On March 24th, after seemingly a million years in the making, Wembley National Stadium will host it's first game after being completely rebuilt. The England under 21 team, being managed on the day by Nigel Pearson will take on Italy under 21's in front of a crowd of 60,000. This match has been organised as a ramp up event in order for the FA to test the stadium before it gets its final safety certificate to host the FA Cup Final on May 19th. What makes this match even extra special is that I am going! I joined up yesterday in a virtual queue amongst the many others who tirelessly hit F5 in the hope that the refreshed page would bring entry into the FA's ticketing website instead of one of the three error pages that I seemed to get for near on an hour. Whether or not the match will remain historically as the "first game", or will be overshadowed by the FA Cup final remains to be seen. But in my eyes I will be one of the first people at the new stadium and something...