“I think had we appointed Steve Bruce in the summer we’d have had a much better chance of making the top six”

Matt from Mitch Cook’s Left Foot sums up Blackpool’s season for us

May 29, 2025

Thursday 29 May 2025

If you’d like to write an article for The Scarf My Father Wore, share a few snippets or photos, or advertise your business, please email thescarfmyfatherwore@substack.com.

THE SCARF MY FATHER WORE 2025-26 CALENDAR: Having been to all 56 County games this season, I’ve taken thousands of photos. I’ve put together calendars for next season, featuring some of my favourite photos from the last year, plus some other County bits and bobs. £10 each. Get in touch if you’d like one.

DESMOND’S COMEDY CLUB: Friday 30 May at The Fingerpost. Show starts at 7.30pm. Tickets £15. Line-up includes Freddy Quinne, Kie Carson, Will Smith (pictured below) and Eddie Fortune. Drop me an email if you’d like to join us!

Dear County fans, Stopfordians, Blackpool supporters, and anyone else from The Football Family joining us today, a very warm welcome to your Thursday edition of The Scarf My Father Wore.

For Blackpool fan Matt, editor of the excellent Mitch Cook’s Left Foot, the worst moment of his 2024-25 campaign was seeing his side turned over at Bloomfield Road by Dave Challinor’s rampant table-toppers in August. Fortunately he didn’t reply to my email with a load of expletives and agreed to write a brilliant piece for us, with the Seasiders not a million miles off the play-offs after Steve Bruce took charge.

As you can see from the photos above, I was at Bloomfield Road in August as 3,911 County fans invaded the seaside town. I was also at Edgeley Park in March to see Benoný Breki Andrésson’s first couple of goals for the club. In fact, for the first time in my life, I’ve been to every single County game this season – all 56 of them! I’ve written a book about my adventures this season. If you’d like to support the publication by having your name printed in the book (along with a signed copy and a ticket to the book launch) drop me an email.

Today’s edition is sponsored by The Flower House. A big thank you to Zoe.

Finally, I’m currently walking every street in Stockport to raise money for mental health charity Mentell. If you’d like to make a donation to help me reach my target, please click here.

Total distance so far: 253.75 miles

Total steps so far: 418,084

Total raised so far: £2,312

Total completed streets so far: 474 (Click here for the full list, which includes reports and photos from every day of the walk.)

Further information on the walk can be found by clicking here.

Des Junior

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Best moment of 2024-25?

It’s not an obvious one, but winning at Blackburn in the League Cup was probably my favourite match. A warm August evening, Richard Keogh at the wheel, and we turned in a surprisingly mature performance. On the way out, there was a real buzz around the possibility of appointing Keogh. We didn’t, and I was (eventually) really happy with Steve Bruce, but for a few days it seemed like we might do the fairytale thing and appoint one of our recent cult heroes whose philosophy appeared to be ‘attack’ then ‘attack’ and if that didn’t work ‘attack some more’.

Worst moment of 2024-25?

That 3-0 defeat at home to County. Although we’d done OK in the sense we’d just missed out on the play-offs the season before, the football had been too often stale and unadventurous. I’d hoped that a pre-season and some signings would shake things up and we’d see something more akin to the battling and at times entertaining side of Neil Critchley’s first spell at the club. We basically just stood aside and let County smash us. It was pathetic and I’ve rarely left as thoroughly miserable and pissed off as I did that day.

County battered Blackpool in August (Photo credit: Mike Petch)

Funniest moment of 2024-25?

Generally Ash Fletcher being both our best and worst player, often inside the space of a few seconds. There ain’t nobody better than Super Ashley Fletcher but sometimes, there also ain’t nobody worse. That said, his transformation from laughing stock to burgeoning cult status is also one of the more joyous aspects of the season.

The Birmingham Boasters and the Wrexham Wazzocks seem to have annoyed a lot of fans in League One this season. Which one are you most glad to see the back of?

Definitely Birmingham. I think I’m in a minority in that I don’t particularly mind Wrexham – yeah, they’ve bought success and yeah, it’s all a bit nauseating – but Birmingham’s spending was off the charts and you feel as if they’ve sunk a fortune into just getting themselves where they probably should be anyway.

Wrexham is a crap town (I say that from a position of love having lived in crap towns all my life) and I don’t begrudge them something to shout about, and lifting the club from where it was to where it is is an achievement and something that could have gone wrong along the way, whereas Birmingham felt like a sledgehammer cracking a nut.

Reform have been making a lot of noise recently. Based on this season, what’s in most need of reform at Blackpool, on or off the pitch?

Happily I think we’ve got a bit of that in progress at the moment – ticket prices have been a bone of contention this season and they’ve been adjusted with particular focus on cheaper kids pricing. We’ve also launched a rebuild of the East Stand which should hopefully offer much better facilities and the ability to manage the crowd much better. We’ve been in a ludicrous situation where we can’t use sections of the ground unless we turn it over entirely to away fans because of limited entrances to the stand and this should address that. Our relationship with the owner probably hit a low this season, but it seems that we’re addressing some of the concerns of the fanbase and hopefully showing some intent off the pitch again.

Positivity aside, we do need more or less a new squad! We’ve relied on a core of 13 or 14 players that fit with our setup now, so we need to a) replace those who are leaving, b) really address the lack of depth that has been a problem, and c) get a midfielder who can both run about AND tackle. There’s a sense that Bruce knows what he wants and we can only hope we go and get it.

Four Four Two had you down to finish 7th, EFL pundit Gabriel Sutton thought you’d finish 8th, while the Opta supercomputer predicted you’d be 6th. You finished 9th. Discuss.

I think had we appointed Steve Bruce in the summer we’d have had a much better chance of making the top six. A false start to the season saw us playing catch-up and our signings and squad didn’t generally fit the Bruce plan. We then suffered more disruption due to the tragic circumstances in Bruce’s family. Our record with him actually physically sat in the hotseat is play-off form; our record without him is relegation form.

Overall, I’m not unhappy with this season. Our finish is below par, but we’ve finally rinsed Neil Critchley out of our hair. I wish the bloke no ill will but his return was an uninspired and conservative choice. I’ll be frank, I also thought Steve Bruce was a terrible appointment, but he’s turned out really well and his football is surprisingly enjoyable in comparison to the often poorly executed ‘Pepball’ we’d been watching previous to this. There’s a sense of togetherness that hasn’t been felt for about three years on the back of some excellent performances. We look committed and there’s a general sense that Bruce has a plan, knows what he’s doing and is capable of a bit of tactical nous.

Blackpool 0 County 3 in August. County 2 Blackpool 1 in March. Thoughts?

I’d rather not revisit that August game again. See above.

A game of two halves at Edgeley Park. We were all over you in the first and then didn’t come out for the second.

Best and worst away days of 2024-25?

Despite being robbed by an absolute stinking penalty decision, I really enjoyed Wrexham. A full ground, both sets of fans right behind both sides, pea soup fog and an absolutely terrible set of away facilities. It wasn’t the best away performance by a long shot (we were generally pretty good away from home) but it was the experience that stuck in my mind as an all round ‘day’.

Sorry County, but you were probably the worst for the horrendous stewarding which needlessly created aggressive flashpoints and was pretty much a textbook exhibition of how not to handle football supporters.

Bolton was pretty crap too. It pissed down, it was a crap game, we weren’t very good, they weren’t much better, we lost.

Which Blackpool player is most deserving of his couple of weeks on the beach this summer?

It’s a tricky one, because we’ve not really had a spectacular standout player. Odel Offiah (on loan from Brighton) has been really good, Rob Apter has played a hell of a lot of games for a first season in the league (and done OK whilst doing so), Ash Fletcher has turned his career and life around during the season, Albie Morgan has been really committed week in and week out in midfield despite being diagnosed with diabetes very early on this year, but I think it’s probably fair to give the award to Ollie Casey who has been like granite at the heart of the defence and very rarely put a foot wrong. Definitely his best season so far.

Never mind Welcome to Wrexham on Disney+, a TV production company have just made Blackpool: The Story of 2024-25. Which channel would it be most suited for?

I’d like to make an arty black and white film where Steve Bruce is the hero. He’s shown in quirkily framed shots going through a range of emotions to an ambient soundtrack but the point of the film is that he’s falling back in love with football after his bruising experiences in the last few years. I’ll stick it on some avant-garde cinema channel on one of the high freeview numbers. There’s enough ‘fly on the wall/talking head’ football documentaries that promise ‘insight and access’ and deliver nothing but a range of clichés. The world needs more TV where a single shot is 90 seconds long and just shows a close-up of the pitch with a blurry lawnmower moving up and down in the distance whilst all that can be heard is the wind and the cry of seagulls.

And finally, apologies for darkening the mood, but you’ve only got 30 seconds to live. Putin’s pressed the red button and we’re all about to die. You can have one last moment of pleasure, watching a single Blackpool goal from this season. What you sticking on?

Easy, it’s a Sonny Carey moment. I’m going to be contrary and pick a moment where we didn’t actually score. A thrilling run from Sonny against Reading in a game where it felt as if we might actually sneak into the play-offs felt as exciting as anything, like a little flash of Gazza at his pre-injury best. At the time, I wrote about how I could relive forever, so it seems the apt choice here…

“Carey then has a run that I could relive forever. His quick feet at the start make me think of a kid leaping across rocks on the seafront, all momentum and balance, all fearlessness and self belief. The run that follows is direct, it's like watching tissue paper burn as the defenders melt away in an instant – Carey the flame, them the ash in his wake, the shot at the end a cannon fired from the deck of the navy's flagship. Their keeper again though, is not sunk, saving at full stretch and then, remarkably, rising again, swaying on the tidal wave of Pool pressure, but somehow stopping Fletcher at virtually point blank range. This is what we do this for. Fuck everyone else.”

We may or may not keep Sonny but since January (ish) he’s been great to watch so I very much hope we do.

➡️ Any Blackpool fans joining us today? As stated above, I’ve written a book having watched every County game home and away this season. There’s obviously two big chapters on Blackpool included (home and away). Also, as I celebrated my 40th birthday this season, I’ve written about my four decades as a County fan as well, which I’m hoping will be an enjoyable read for anyone who supports a lower league club. There’s memories of beating four Premier League clubs as County reached the Coca-Cola Cup semi-finals in 1996-97, the club’s rise from the National League North to the brink of the Championship over the last few years, and the tale of a trip to Blackpool 20 years ago when me and my mates had a run-in with armed police after a day on the ale…

If you’d like to support the book, click on the link below to become a paid subscriber and I’ll post you a signed copy with your name printed inside once it’s published.

A few words from Zoe at The Flower House

Marple's The Flower House was started by myself in October 2023. I decided to take my passion for floristry and make it into a business where I could provide the local areas with a flexible service. This service includes free delivery in the local area and a tailored service for those with any special requests.

I am ably assisted by my husband who provides fantastic moral support as well as doing so much work behind the scenes that nobody really sees. He also does the vast majority of my deliveries and you will only really see me delivering when he is unavailable.

The Flower House started at our home but quickly progressed into us requiring a shop. So, the decision was made to open up on Market Street in Marple and from there we look forward to supplying you with your fresh flower needs.

➡️ Visit theflowerhousemarple.co.uk to view Zoe’s full range of flowers, bouquets and gifts.

Photo(s) of the day

Here’s 10 of my favourite photos from November!

Having been to all 56 County games this season, I’ve taken thousands of photos. I’ve put together The Scarf My Father Wore calendars for next season, featuring some of my favourite photos from the last year, plus some other County bits and bobs. £10 each. Get in touch if you’d like one.

Today in SK

🍺 Food and drink

The Nelson Tavern (SK1) have a great range of offers throughout the week, including £5.50 for drinks off the Doubles Bar, a comprehensive range of shots for £1.50, and 3 for £7 on Jägerbombs. Also, double up for £2 on premium spirits.

Bitter £2.30 a pint all day at The Cross Keys (SK8).

A number of venues are featured on The Scarf My Father Wore such as The Crown (SK2), The Dog & Partridge (SK2), The Alexandra (SK3), The Crown Inn (SK6), The Steelworks (SK6), The Three Tunnes (SK7), Flute & Firkin (SK12) and The Ram’s Head (SK12). Support them this month by popping in for a few drinks and a bite to eat.