The groundstaff member drove onto the pitch with the machine without looking. The player was warming up with his back turned. He took his place on the bench afterwards, and came on in stoppage time.
A pitch roller is an old object. It flattens, it presses down, it doesn’t argue. What has changed, according to Marcel, is the hour at which it comes out.
We used to prepare the pitch in the morning. In the afternoon, we played. The man with the roller was alone out there, nobody running around him, and he had time to look where he was going. Today the warm-up lasts long enough to meet a machine. I’m not criticising. I’m comparing.
Townsend left England in 2024 after 292 Premier League matches. A short spell in Turkey, then the Thai top flight.
On Instagram he made a joke about what had just happened to him: “Looking back, those away trips to Stoke weren’t so bad after all,” he wrote, according to HLN.
So he made a joke, and it is a good one, I’ll grant him that. In my day you went back to the dressing room, you told nobody anything, and on Monday at the chip shop there was one line about it in the paper. Well. It’s the times.
It’s true, we checked: HLN.
