Wednesday 20 March 2024
NEXT HOME GAME: MK Dons – Saturday 23 March, 5.15pm
NEXT AWAY GAME: Forest Green – Friday 29 March, 3pm
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.
Dear County fans, Stopfordians, and anyone else from The Football Family joining us today, a very warm welcome to your Wednesday edition of The Scarf My Father Wore.
Exeter City fan Matt Riley worked as a journalist in Thai football for many years, appearing regularly on the Fox Sports Central nightly show beamed across Asia, before returning to England as a lecturer in Business Management at the University of Exeter.
Today, Matt’s kindly provided us with an exclusive extract from his new book, Kit & Community, which digs beneath the surface of inspirational and meaningful designs to reveal the incredible causes that use football shirts to spread their message.
Starting with Stanno's Shirt (extract below), we meet Gig and Roger, the parents of Exeter City legend Adam Stansfield, who was cut down by cancer at the heartbreaking age of 31. Gig and Roger share how their son's shirts meant, and still mean, so much to them.
Then there's York City photographers Kieran Archer, Chris Payne and Tom Poole, who designed the club's stunning centenary shirt, celebrating the city's heritage of chocolate making, illustrated by outstanding images. The trio describe every step of the design process. Plus, in a joyously inspirational interview, Tania and Jayme from Football Shirts FC (for charity) discuss their mission to use shirts to support cancer charities close to their hearts.
As these and other accounts in this innovative book show us, every shirt has a unique story to tell.
Our first live event of 2024 is taking place next month. ‘Flynny at the Finger’ – an evening with County legend Mike Flynn – is at The Fingerpost on Wednesday 17 April. Start time 7.30pm. Over 60% of the tickets have now been sold. If you’d like to join us, please email thescarfmyfatherwore@substack.com. Tickets are £10 (or £5 for paid subscribers plus anyone who’s written an article for The Scarf My Father Wore). That includes a full colour souvenir programme, and even a little bit of stand-up comedy!
Today’s edition is sponsored by Parkers Solicitors Ltd. A big thank you to Adam and all the team. If you’ve been injured in an accident and would like to discuss the matter further, call 0161 477 9451 or email info@parkers-solicitors.co.uk.
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: 136.36 miles
Total steps so far: 217,174
Total raised so far: £1,666
Total completed streets so far: 271 (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
Stanno’s Shirt
‘Sing a song for Stanno.
We will never let you go.
You’ll always be.
At City with me.’
When Adam Stansfield arrived at Exeter City in 2006 after spells with Yeovil Town and Hereford United, very few fans realised the seismic effect his four year spell would have on our team’s fortunes and how his footballing DNA would course through our club for decades to come. He was our very own Steve Bull (one for the kids there) in attitude and hairstyle. Both men gave every ounce of energy for every minute of every game for the shirt. Not in some vacuous crest-kissing way for monetised social media, but drawing on determination underscored by battering, battling skill. Stanno’s footballing passion was passed down from his dad Roger, a huge Forest fan. His description of his son as someone who ‘just kept plugging away’ was one of the many reasons why The Big Bank took him into our hearts and never let him go.
Adam didn’t even turn professional until he was twenty three, by which age Bull had been playing for Wolves for a couple of years in Division Four against Exeter before going up as champions in 1988. Adam would go on to grace the City shirt for four years, playing one hundred and forty two times and scoring thirty seven, often barnstorming, goals. He joined us while we were in the Conference and was in the team that won a return to league football after beating Cambridge United 1-0 at Wembley in 2008. But, in April 2010, he would be diagnosed with colorectal cancer. Then, despite surgery and chemotherapy, he died four months later at the heartbreakingly young age of thirty one.
Fast forward to September 2nd, 2022, and the bipolar platform of Twitter was lurching from City desperately needing new blood to what seemed like delusional fantasist talk of Adam’s son Jay choosing to leave Premier League Fulham for our little trust-run club in sleepy Devon. Claim and counter claim ricochetted around this often fact-free environment and, by the evening, there were even those wearied by the talk of Stanno 2.0 joining us. We are so conditioned to players, once in the hermetically sealed Premier League universe, preferring to warm substitute benches rather than leave for The Championship or, heaven forbid, League 1. Stockpiled talent carelessly collected by state-owned behemoths kick their heels and kill careers while collecting outrageously expensive tat for Instagram to gorge on. But then, at 4.51 the club sent out a ‘nine minute warning Tweet’ teasing a new player we all knew could only be Our Boy. The video showed the shirt (that had been retired by the club after Adam’s death), the number nine and a dozen years of chanting for Stanno melded into one pure moment of joy. Like a street corner born-again Christian, seeing that shirt I knew it was him. I had to tell someone: anyone. ‘Have you accepted Stanno into your life?’ I know you are only here to deliver the post, but this was Stanno’s will.’ Every week as I stood on the Big Bank basking in the sunshine or stamping my frozen feet, we sang our ode to Stanno. When the Adam Stansfield Stand (financed by the Ollie Watkins sale to Brentford) was still under construction, the house-sized Stanno shirt would often be hoisted across the emerging structure that also followed us to our three heartbreaking visits to Wembley play-off disaster (at least only our cardboard cutout selves were there to witness the hat-trick of heartbreak). When it was placed over us on The Big Bank, there was something collegially spiritual about reaching up to touch his shirt together and move it on for other fans to commune with. There always seemed to be onions sliced in the pie shop to our left on days when that happened. Strange…
That number nine shirt teased on a Friday evening by our amazing media team of Craig and Scott had been retired for nine years. Suddenly we knew. No one else would wear it other than Jay, who had left us in 2020 to join Fulham where he made four appearances, was capped for England under 18 and 19 and, displaying his dad’s Steve Bull-style shaven head and furious tenacity that drew his dad to our hearts, now one of our own was coming home (admittedly on loan) after maturing through our academy system.
Talking to The Athletic’s Peter Rutzler in January 2022, the inspiring memories Adam forged wearing the City red and white allowed his family to cope with his death by creating the Adam Stansfield Foundation that could help save the lives of others. As well as educating people on the insidious signs of bowel cancer, it also makes magic happen by focusing on one simple mission statement that changes lives for the better. As it declares on its website:
‘The foundation is committed to providing charitable funds for young people/youth football teams who would benefit from the assistance.’
Underscoring this understated declaration comes a legion of stories. Young players who can’t afford transport for training or trials. Those who love to play but wear glasses and need them protected with expensive covers. Children who can’t afford boots. All of them are referred to the foundation for assistance and every act of support becomes a hat tip to the memory of Adam. When he passed, the family was inundated with previously unreported stories of his kindness, but it was the shirts filling up their postman’s sack that gave those memories a place to breathe. As his mum, Gig shared with Rutzler:
‘At The Cat and Fiddle, Gig has a brought bag of vintage Exeter shirts to be passed on, ready for auction. From signed shirts to jockey breaches, all kinds of equipment have been sent their way. “The poor postman,” says Jack {Vickery, who is a key driver of new income through tireless fundraising}. “The stuff just piles through the letterbox.”
‘I suppose in a way, for us to be doing this foundation, it’s always there. They have seen that their dad played a lot, they have all got their phones and see social media. But the ongoing stuff with Adam, with the foundation, you are conscious of it, it’s almost like he’s still with us.’
Sky Sports’ iconic presenter Jeff Stelling, who in 2017 used Exeter’s St James’ Park to start his March for Men to raise money and awareness about prostate cancer by walking fifteen marathons in fifteen days and visiting forty football clubs before finishing at the other St James’ Park in Newcastle spoke for us all on September 3rd 2022:
‘So today (assuming he starts) he will run out for the club his dad graced, he’ll play in the shadow of the stand named after his dad and he will wear the number nine shirt that had been retired: the shirt that his dad graced.’
Stanno’s oversized shirt and his name that many of us carry on the back of our replica kits have sustained us for these dozen years. So many players have come and gone, often without leaving much of a mark apart from creating obsolescence for their shirts (I always used to chuckle seeing shirts from 2016 with former Spurs reserve Troy Archibald-Henville on the back. A man who was to make twenty appearances for the club…over four years). More than most clubs, the cream is often removed either before we have had a chance to enjoy it (Alfie Pond to Wolves and Ben Chrisene to Aston Villa being dispiriting examples) or made us dream of promotion before being picked up by lowballing Premier League clubs (Ethan Ampadu to Chelsea) or respectful ones willing to pay a fair price with empowering add-ons (Ollie Watkins to Brentford) but Stanno stands for stability. Despite leaving us in the worst way imaginable, our shirts carry the memories, aspirations and stories of a man who, like ‘Bully’ were of his place and never lost the feeling of wearing a shirt that gave him an invitation to enjoy what he loved more than anything. To play his beautiful game.
For visitors to City’s Cliff Hill training ground (lovingly called by old codgers like me the Cat and Fiddle), there is a constant reminder of Stanno. Draped over a tailor's dummy is a classic red and white striped home shirt of his above a pair of boots and team sheets, matchday programme and also shirts from Stanno’s two other clubs of Yeovil and Hereford. Part commemoration, part inspiration, these artefacts speak to a man steeped in the club and whose spirit continues to watch over every young hopeful or grizzled old timer passing through the training ground gates. Jay also has his dad’s shirts on the wall of his hallway alongside his own at home in London.
In late 2022 I spoke to Stanno senior’s infectiously enthusiastic parents Gig and Roger (known as ‘Rog’). I had ordered some foundation merchandise and, in a mark of their character, they came round to my house to deliver it. You don’t get that with Jeff Bezos. They told me more about what their number nine means to them:
‘Right back to the beginning when Adam was born in the 9th month we lived at 9, Exeter Street, Launceston (born in Plymouth hospital as was nearest) so Devonian, not Cornish! So, there was a number 9 and Exeter path already starting. There were only a few times from getting his first 9 shirt at the age of 9 that he didn’t have 9 on his back. So when he signed for Exeter and was given the 9 shirt it meant so much to him. He was very proud to be Exeter's no 9. It just seems so right to see Stansfield 9. Adam’s three sons Jay, Taylor and Cody have all worn 9 for Twyford Spartans. So now for Jay to be at Exeter wearing that same shirt with such pride but in his own right, well that written path continues.
‘After Adam passed, we thought The Foundation we started in his name would last for about 6 months until we had donated all the money raised immediately after his funeral, but here we are 12 years later and it is bigger than ever. This is down to Adam’s fans who proudly and emotionally display the giant Stansfield 9 shirt and sing his song at every game. Not only are they paying a great tribute to Adam but they are keeping his name alive, so the charity thrives. There are so many young people who we help in grassroots football who weren’t even born when Adam was playing, but they know who he is!
‘Jay will wear that number 9 shirt with the same pride as his Dad and also with the same desire to give his all and do his very best for his team. And we continue to drive our car with reg no EX09TER now with a current Stansfield 9 playing for Exeter.’
But then, in a heartbeat, it was May 7th, 2023: the last time we would see Jay wear the red and white at St James’ Park. The Big Bank faithful trooped into SJP bluffly diffusing the emotion to come by distractions about the season behind us and what we had in store next time around, but we all knew there was bottlenecked emotion in need of cathartic release. This is not a sentence you usually write for a home game against Morecambe. Two hours later, Jay had scored a magnificent hat-trick (unfortunately at the away end) and ran to his dad’s stand to pay homage to him and be engulfed by his team mates. On that day, somewhere in Gloucestershire, a Sprocker puppy was being born. After two dogless decades, we went to see him and instantly fell in love. So now, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our Stanno.
You’ll always be at City with me.
If you’ve been injured as a cyclist, see how Parkers Solicitors can help you
Parkers Solicitors have decades of experience in winning accident claims for injured cyclists. They understand that being knocked off your bike can be very traumatic and can provide a full service, from getting your bike repaired and recovering the repair costs to funding private physio and scans recovered from the other side, whilst assisting with obtaining a replacement bike if required. Parkers will also help you recover any loss of earnings and other expenses such as travel and medication costs as a result of the accident.
Cyclists are vulnerable road users and often accident victims of cars not seeing them or cutting them up. If you get the registration of the vehicle who collided with you, great, but often people don’t realise they can also claim for other incidents, such as your bike being damaged by a pothole, or being involved in a hit and run without obtaining the registration of the car, or getting hit by an uninsured can. You can still claim in all these scenarios.
If you’re ever knocked off your bike, get in touch with Parkers and they will assist you through the whole process.
Personal injury is a complex area of law. You need people who are experienced and aware of issues that may arise in order to get the outcome you’re after. The solicitors at Parkers are specially trained to help you. They understand the claims process which means they’ll talk to you in language you understand, not lawyer jargon.
It’s their job to do the hard work so that you don’t have to. They’re willing to take on the stress to make the whole process as hassle-free as possible for you. They understand that such processes can seem complicated and even intimidating, but with an expert team to support you, there’s nothing to worry about.
Hit and run claims
Don’t worry if you didn’t get the registration or any details of the vehicle that knocked you off your bike. Parkers can still claim for you from the Motor Insurers’ Bureau (MIB). This is a special body created to ensure that those who are injured because of somebody else’s fault still have the chance to claim compensation.
Uninsured driver claims
Don’t worry if the vehicle that knocked you off your bike was uninsured. Parkers can still claim for you from the Motor Insurers’ Bureau (MIB).
Pothole and poor road condition claims
Bike accident claims resulting from road quality issues require the involvement of local authorities, such as city or town councils, which Parkers are used to dealing with regularly. It’s good practice to report it to the council as soon as possible and also to take pictures of the defective road, such as the pothole or grid which caused the incident.
Transfer from another solicitors firm or claims company
If you are not happy with your current solicitor, you can get a second opinion from Parkers and transfer the case. They pride themselves on their knowledge, attention to detail, speediness and being contactable. If you aren’t receiving this treatment, give them a call.
Visit parkers-solicitors.co.uk for further details.
Photo of the day
Roker Park, Sunderland
Brett Angell in action for Sunderland, in between his two spells at Edgeley Park.
Today in SK
🎬 Cinema
Two films at The Savoy Cinema (SK4) today. American Fiction (15) at 2.30pm and 8.30pm, and Bob Marley: One Love (12A) at 6pm. Click here for tickets.
🍺 Food and drink
The Nelson Tavern (SK1) have a great range of offers throughout the week, including £4.50 for drinks off the Doubles Bar, a comprehensive range of shots for £2, and 3 for £6 on Jägerbombs.
If you find yourself in Stockport today, pop into The Petersgate Tap (SK1) for a pint or two.
There’s a new craft stout at The Dog & Partridge (SK2) this month. Euphoria is a 4.5% ABV dark, easy drinking kegged stout with a subtle punch of coffee, chocolate and a deep, rich malt flavour.
Fish Meal Deal at The Friary (SK3). Lite bite fish and chips with peas, curry or gravy. Plus tea or coffee. £9.75. Open till 7.30pm.
❓ Quiz night
Flying Coach (SK7). 9pm. (Chicken wings available for just 25p before the quiz!)
Random County fan of the day #76 – Dan Driver!
One final thing before you go… if you’re in need of any of these products or services this month, get in touch with our brilliant bunch of sponsors!
🎨 Art & Gifts: Kate O’Brien Art
🪟 Blinds & Shutters: Bauhaus Blinds & Shutters
📚 Bookkeeping: Eleven Accounts Services Ltd
🧱 Builders Merchant: MKM Manchester South
🍰 Cake Maker: Claire Green Bespoke Cakes and Catering
🧽 Car Valeting: Rub A Dubz Detailing Ltd
🏠 Carpets & Flooring: Kingsway Carpets & Rugs Ltd
🐈⬛ Cat Sitting: The Crazy Cat Ladies Cheshire
👶 Child Health: The Sleep Nanny
🤹♀️ Children’s Entertainment: Stockport Hero Hire
🧹 Cleaning: Beespoke Cleaning
🚙 Coatings: Colourtone Ltd
🗣 Counselling: Time and Space Counselling
🦮 Dog Training: Paws High Peak Dog Training
🚘 Driving School: CFN School of Motoring
💷 Financial Services: The Mortgage Mill
🔥 Fire Protection: Radial Fire And Security Limited
🍸 Gin: Hatters Gin
🛁 Grout Refresh & Recolour: GroutGleam Stockport
💇♀️ Hairdressing: C West Hairstylist
🛠 Home Improvements: Menzies Develop & Build
💻 IT Services: Bridge Computer Services
🪚 Joinery: SAW Contracts Ltd
👨🍳 Kitchen Appliances: SW Appliances
🔑 Locksmith: APL Locksmiths Ltd
🚐 Minibus Hire: Westfield Minibuses
🧤 Oven Cleaning: That Oven Girl
🖌 Painter & Decorator: BGM Decorators
🎈 Party Supplies: Step Into Fun Events
🚑 Personal Injury: Parkers Solicitors Ltd
📸 Photography: Holly Dwyer Photography
🎹 Piano Tutor: Sophie Grace Piano and Keyboard Tuition
🚰 Plumber: GTG Gary the Gasman
🦶 Podiatry: SK Podiatry
📕 Publishing: Victor Publishing
🛖 Roofing: ADM Roofing Services Ltd
☀️ Solar Panels: Malbern Solar Ltd
👨💼 Solicitors: B.J. McKenna & Co
⚽️ Sports Coaching: UK Sports Coaching Ltd
🪨 Stonemason: LM Stone Creative
🖊 Tattooist: Heatons Tattoo Club
🪵 Timber Supplies: Portwood Timber Division of Illingworth Ingham (Manchester) Ltd
☀️ Travel Agent: PTF Travel Ltd
👨💻 Web Design: SITEZO
⚖️ Weight Loss: Slimming World Reddish & Bredbury with Shlean
🪟 Window Cleaner: R ‘N’ B Window Cleaning
🏋️♀️ Women’s Fitness: Sophie Pavey Fitness
🧘♀️ Yoga: Greenshoots Yoga