Where are you going?

Oldham a new ground on Saturday, that'll take me up to 72/92 and 257 over all. Pretty sure I can get to 300 before the end of 2017 quite easily. Going to have to get to Dublin again next summer to tick Tolka Park and maybe a couple of others. Hoping to get to the Women's Euros in Holland for a little bit as well.

Crawley away on Saturday, staying down there for the night so picking up a new ground in Lewes's Dripping Pan on Sunday!

I went there in January while I was working in Manchester. Due to the swirling wind and near horizontal rain, I didn't really notice a lot about the place!

I've been watching East Thurrock United a couple of times this season as they play a 15 minute wall from my house.

They're in Conference South and standard is reasonable and you can see they want to try and play on the ground and not all kick and rush.

Up to 260 now after Chesterfield at the weekend and Redditch last night. Christ the "Proact" was a bloody boring ground.

What a soulless place the Etihad was. Design wise, it looks good from the outside and inside, but it's like a designer football village. It has bars and stores, and everything you would think would make it a good place to visit, but it all feels just so manufactured. THis is probably exactly what the Premier League wants from it's clubs, but I thought it was horrible. I have been to two other top flight grounds this season, Old Trafford and Stamford Bridge, and both places have more than their fair share of 'retail opportunities', but at least it still feels like you are going to a football match when you go there. I have a horrible feeling it's the sort of place that must clubs aspire to- Rovers included.

It's just dawned on me, then when/if I do complete the 92 , it will be at a recently built stadium (West Ham, Brighton, Sunderland or Middlesbrough) , which is kind of disappointing.

I completely agree with all of this assessment.  It's so unbelievably sterile.  It's like somebody exported a football stadium direct from a computer game.  I always think it's a shame that my time living in Manchester didn't overlap at least a little bit with the Maine Road era.  Not least that I live less than half a mile from where it was but also Etihad is such a terrible matchday experience.  I could go quite regularly if I wanted to - I just cannot be bothered.  You go in on the tram - queue up for what seems like hours, then you are 'nudged' by the architecture to make sure that you walk through all the corporate bulls**t around the stadium.  There's no escape because it's in the middle of nowhere and all the other pubs shut years ago.  It's just a ghastly experience and, yes, I think it's exactly what clubs aspire to.  Because you are trapped in a place where you have no choice but to offload money to the club and it's corporate partners.  The fact it's in a post-industrial wasteland is an absolute positive from that perspective because it's the only sign of life for miles around - ironically, 15 years previously a lot of the pubs would still have been open and it may have been quite an interesting for a stadium but all the stadium really does is stand out like a sore thumb.  I know many City fans who have stopped going purely for this reason.  People often take the piss out of Man City for their empty seats - hardly surprising when the matchday experience is so dreadful.  Contrast with Old Trafford, which has been designed in a very different way.  Lots of independent businesses and pubs around the stadium that have been there donkey's years, there's no monster TV big screen or false atmosphere.  They've evenly deliberately positioned the corporate boxes so they are not visible from many parts of the stadium which is interesting.  It's still full of tourists and the atmosphere is a shadow of what it presumably once was but at least you feel like you have visited a football ground not a shopping mall.

Yes  well the problem is that the 'casual fan' is everything so grounds are designed mainly for the benefit of them because that's where the money is.  I remain convinced that we are 0 years behind on this though. In the 70s US Sports Teams nearly all moved out of their traditional inner city stadiums to out of town ones on the basis that they were car friendly and people wanted easy access.  Quite quickly though the novelty wore off - fans disliked the identical (cookie cutter) stadiums which lacked character, they didn't really like spending all their time in car parks and the cheaply built stadiums aged very quickly.  They have been steadily replaced by a wave of 'retro' stadiums that are once again in city centre areas and are deliberately (if somewhat gimmicky) built to contain unique features.  I could see us going the same way.