A Wasted Trip

Football (soccer) fans will often travel tremendous distances to see their team play .....

Match Abandoned -Wasted Trip

 ..... this is illustrated by Andy Bebbington, who had worked as an English Language teacher in Suzhou, China for about five years.

 When the Chinese national holidays on the New Year came around, he decided that he would travel back to England on a two week trip home to the UK to watch his team, Bolton Wanderers (currently languishing in League One - the third division of the English football pyramid system), but once a premiership side having fallen on hard times, even dropping to league two at one point.

The trip was an 8,000 mile (12,875km) flight in order to watch them, not at home in Bolton, but in the east of England, where they were due to play Cambridge and as he settled down to watch the game on the 6th of February 2024, he hoped for victory. Bolton were doing well, sitting fourth in League One, just one point behind second-place Peterborough in a promotion spot.

But after just nine minutes of the League One game at Cambridge the referee called the two managers after the rain had continued to pour, with standing water starting to form on areas of the pitch which impacted the roll of the ball .... the game was halted, and despite the best efforts of Cambridge groundsman and his team, the surface was deemed unplayable following a further inspection at 8:10pm - around 25 minutes after the match had started and it was abandoned.

Mr Bebbington's trip was a washout ..... "It was a bit of a nightmare to be honest," said Mr Bebbington who tweeted "Gotta laugh or else I'll cry. I looked at the fixture list and this popped up I thought Cambridge in February what could go wrong - it was just my luck. but worse things can happen. I'm hoping to go to the home game with Wycombe next week."  

Football fans are hopeless breed .....