Distant Exiles: Canada calling

If you remember I invited Distant Exiles to get in touch having received a piece from Jonathan Baker on Christmas Day that I posted on Cherry Chimes. Well, we now have our second contributor. Jon Crofts has kindly offered to share his memories and love for AFC Bournemouth from his outpost in Canada. Jon has included a few pictures of his sons as well. Over to you Jon.

I remember becoming slowly aware that Bournemouth had a club of its own from around 12 years old. My family was never very sporty, but I loved football and managed to persuade my dad to take me in October '82. I remember the excitement of watching the players warm up, the smell of cigarette smoke drifting around the new stand, and arguing with my dad about how good Milton Graham was, a point Milton helped me to win by scoring twice (this was his debut). I was hooked.

From then on I wanted to go to every game, and it helped that we were in a promotion season. I remember the pitch invasion when we played Sheffield UTD, Stockport County playing in Argentina's colours (pre-Falklands) a cup game against Reading in front of 7000 or so, and promotion against Hereford Utd.

The first game I went to on my own was Cardiff City, we won 3-1 and I remember watching drunk Cardiff fans smashing in the side of a bus before using me for a game of pinball as they passed the bus stop on Holdenhurst Road, the wonderful yellow bus driver having closed the doors and left me to it!

I was in the south stand by the time of the Man Utd FA cup game, (I'd also been at the Milk Cup game when Phil Brignull broke Ray Wilkins cheek bone with a loud crack in front of the main stand) something I will never forget, along with Ron Atkinson's accusation that our fans were trying to get the game halted by invading the pitch! (They were in fact, trying to escape the Man Utd fans who had invaded the back of the stand).

I was at Fulham for promotion, and remember the 15,000 or so (officially anyway) for Middlesborough at home and many memorable away games from the mud of Devon to the smokestacks of up north.

Tom on the pitch (thanks to the groundsman at DC letting us in!).

Tom before the Charlton game.

Luther Blissett's hat-trick against Hull City stands out also, as does the day I met Brian Tyler outside the ground after a reserve game and became the first (I think) to hear that we had sold Carl Richards. (Brian seemed very happy with the deal, 30,000 I think!).

I moved to a little know Western Canadian town in 2002 (and have since met three other Cherries fans here) and have seen a handful of games since then, always timing my visits for maximum home games. On my last visit in October I was astounded by the progress of the club on and off the pitch. I have always believed that the club has huge potential if allowed to grow, and still find it annoying when people in the town suggest we are not big enough and somehow don't want success.

I now have three young sons, and they are all cherries fans who watch games with me on the net when they are being streamed live and at Dean Court when we are visiting.

Jamie Jack and Tom stopping for coffee on their way to '
Soccer Camp'.They were the only kids in Bournemouth kit!

If you wonder what Jon does in Canada here is his website.

To make these items a regular feature, I need more of you to write in from distant places. So if you are in Timbuktu, North Korea or somewhere stranger and follow AFCB we want to hear from you. If I receive four more articles we will have enough to the end of the season.

 Email me at bellp2103@gmail.com and please send in your picture too.

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MatchDay programme is a Champion read

It is very satisfying to hear that AFCB have the best SKYBet Championship MatchDay programme. The award is further recognition of how hard the club is striving to be the best and while the price has remained at £3 the pages have gone up. More importantly, I think the content is very strong and there is a good mixture of fan comments, player interviews and Junior Cherry Fun.

Come and get your Match Day programme.

I do wonder if the skipper, Eddie Howe and Jeff Mostyn are often scratching their heads over what to say that would be different from each other at the start of each programme but I usually see fans with a copy of the book under their arms on a match day. When you consider that there are a lot of ways to receive information on AFCB now it is quite a credit to the media department that they still make the MatchDay programme a must read piece of the jigsaw. My favourite was the Liverpool FA Cup programme and I look forward to seeing big clubs in the programme next season.

Whether other parts of the media coverage on the club are as good I don't know. I think the experiment with YouTube has worked really well and the Spotif posts seem to go down well. As for Cherries Player, which is a football league device that all the clubs use, I find it of less value now. My main need for it comes with listening to some of the away matches that I can't make but most or parts of the interviews now are available by other means.

I do find twitter and facebook a great way of keeping up with what is happening at AFCB and for those who don't yet follow these types of Social Media I advise you to jump on board. At least we all know that the club values its paper based communication through MatchDay programme and it will be of interest to see how it changes to look of some of those pages next season.  

You can check on how AFCB has been doing with its social media growth on the Nineteen Eighty Four Website. The site records hits for the official club social media addresses on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Google+. We could do with more people tweeting and facebooking to start climbing these leagues.

Michael Dunne will be releasing another All Departments' podcast today with Milton Graham. He was always good value to bang in a few goals, find out what he is up to now and what he most remembers about his playing days. I'll post the podcast on Cherry Chimes when it comes out and the All Departments' website is the first place to check.

Media coverage of Cherries set to escalate

It should be good news for all league fans who can get their hands on internet access that the SKYBet leagues have done a deal with the football clubs and YouTube to bring even more video coverage and news of the game to supporters. We are in an age of fast communication and social media is booming. There is more information and news coming out of the clubs and I suppose Cherry Chimes is just another product of that.

I am pleased that information about AFCB has grown so much. Back in the 1970s all we had was a few bits of news in the match day programme and if you were lucky a match report in the local rag. I used to fill the time by reading comics like Roy of the Rovers or enjoying the glossy pictures in Shoot. I am not sure my bedroom wall ever recovered from the blue tack that was supposed to come off without peeling off all the paint as well. I also still miss those cardboard league ladders that took hours to update. 

I confess that most of the posters were of Emlyn Hughes or Kenny Dalglish, but you would have found it hard to get many pictures of John Impey or Milton Graham. As a nine year old, I did always wonder why AFCB were not as good as Liverpool. 

The digital media age has changed all that and fast download and video content have us all captivated. In fact, I wonder where some of the players find the time to train with the amount of interviews they have. Such open access is now giving fans more chance to get close to their heroes and to understand them better.

Our appetite for news grows stronger and I expect you can probably watch football 24/7 if you really did have the time to do it. Well, I'll try and keep us as best we can at Cherry Chimes by adding our own bit of gossip and you'll notice that we have now teamed up with NewsNow to get our news articles listed along with most of the other major news sources on AFCB. Hopefully, we will still get seen in and amongst all the new traffic.