ABOUT ME My name is Dave Read and I’ve been a fan of football since the early to mid 1970s and have been a regular visitor to the non-league game since. For my sins I am an Ipswich Town fan (we all have our crosses to bear!) although I don’t get the chance to get to many games these days. I have always followed non-league football and have spent many a day following my local sides. My earliest match day experiences came from watching my two local sides, Bracknell Town and Wokingham Town and I have followed their fortunes ever since. I remember my favourite players back then were Jimmy Woodcock, a natural goalscorer for Bracknell, and Kirk Corbin, a solid and reliable right back at Wokingham. One of my treasured memories was as a twelve year old being invited into the changing rooms at Wokingham to meet and get the great Jimmy Greaves’ autograph. What a day that was! I spent a lot of time watching Ipswich and Tottenham Hotspur (my brother’s team) through the ‘80s I returned to spending most of my time hanging out at Bracknell Town again in the 1990s when a friend of my brother started playing for them. This was a very enjoyable time, getting to know the players, management and officials, too well on occasions, and going on long trips away including an FA Cup 4th Qualifying Round game at, then non-league, Burton Albion (which to this day I still maintain we’d have won if Justin Day, Bracknell’s top striker, had been fully fit!) Players and managers came and went and then the next highlight came in 2000 when Bracknell Town got through to the first round proper of the FA Cup and enjoyed a memorable day at Lincoln City despite a 4-0 scoreline! In 2000 I moved to The Netherlands for the first of my two stints working over there, working in Den Haag and Amsterdam and living mainly in Haarlem. I still indulged in watching football while there, league football at HFC Haarlem and local football at Koninklijke HFC Haarlem, the oldest club in Holland, and many other grounds in an around the Den Haag and Haarlem areas. Whenever I came over to the UK I would meet up with the boys at Larges Lane and had another memorable evening when Whyteleafe came to Bracknell and suffered a 10-1 reversal to which a song based around the 12 days of Christmas was born. Fiiiive by half time! In my time living abroad I did miss another milestone in Bracknell’s history, the 2003 FA Cup 4th Qualifying Round game at Larges Lane. Gutted! My return to the UK coincided with a downturn in fortunes with Bracknell, the all too familiar problem of a lack of finances meant many years of struggling but despite this we still had a lot of fun following the team around. Three friends of mine stepped up to the plate and volunteered to help run the club through this difficult time and without their efforts I’m not sure Bracknell Town would still be on the footballing map today. So many wonderful people threw everything they had into keeping the club going and that to me is what non- league football is all about and is one of the reasons I’ve set up this little project. Hopefully to chat to the people within the non-league community and no doubt meet some fascinating characters along the way but also have a lot of fun along the way! Since my return from my second stint in the Netherlands, my brother and I started going to Erith & Belvedere FC, our hometown club as both born in Erith, when we could. Again we have met some fantastic people and we were fortunate to witness a league and cup double in our first few years of going. Unfortunately a long term health issue has curtailed my ability to attend many games over the past five years or so. I have made the odd few games but nowhere near as many as I’d like. This is an attempt to rekindle my love of non-league football (health permitting!) and to once again experience the friendliness and cameraderie prevalent in the non-league community. I’ll be posting on my social media account @wanderintractor giving details of my planned games each week so give me a follow and, if you see me at a game, pop over and have a chat! Cheers! Dave