Five years of Narey's Toepoker

This blog celebrated its fifth birthday this month.

That's right; I have been ranting and raving and talking rubbish for five whole years on this site.

I started this blog in September 2007 with two aims. Firstly, most of my friends, particularly those from university days, were scattered all over the country, including those who I wasted hours in the pub discussing every football-related matter I could think of, and I saw this as a way of compensating for that. Secondly, I needed something to pass the time; my job at the time involved lots of weekend work and plenty of days off during the week. I wanted to find something to do that didn't involve Pro Evolution Soccer 6 (yes, I was single, as you've no doubt worked out).

Looking back at the earlier posts, what instantly strikes me is how much has changed in football over what is a relatively short time period - or, more specifically, how the complexion of the game in Scotland has been altered. One of my first blogposts was on Scotland's stunning win in Paris, part of a Euro 2008 qualifying campaign that infected fans with optimism for the future in the same way the Bubonic Plague infected peasants in the Middle Ages (well, not quite the same way, though the optimism was to die in the same way that those peasants did - quickly and unpleasantly). That season, both Old Firm sides reached the Champions League group stages; Celtic made it to the knockout stages, while Rangers' European journey finished with a UEFA Cup Final. Even Aberdeen were still in Europe after Christmas.

Saying Scottish football was in rude health might have been exaggerating, but it was toddling on nicely, maybe on one or two medications for high blood pressure and cholesterol, but you certainly wouldn't have had any reason to look for a terminal illness.

Five years ago, if you'd told me Rangers would be in the third division, the Scottish national team would be getting outplayed by the likes of Macedonia at home, and that Charlie Mulgrew would be the best defender in the country, I'd have sectioned you.

The blog feels very different from when I started - back then, I wrote about anything and everything - and that continued until I realised that there were actually a few people other than my mates who were reading it. It was much easier to write about Jose Mourinho, or Chelsea, or Barcelona, but there are thousands of people who do that a lot more knowledgably, and a lot more eloquently, than I do. So I chose to focus entirely on Scottish football - where there are only dozens who are more knowledgable and more eloquent! Not only that, but the last couple of years - specifically, the pathetic, self-serving coverage by Scotland's mainstream media of the Rangers debacle - revealed to me that the best coverage and opinions of Scottish football came from bloggers; I strived, and still strive, to try to be part of that. I don't know if I'm succeeding, but I'm still trying (in more ways than one!)

  It's all quite remarkable, really - I haven't got bored of doing it, and people don't seem to be getting tired of reading it - in fact the number of hits per month is higher than it has ever been. This has opened up some incredible opportunities for me; for example, a couple of years ago the author Paul Smith interviewed me for his book Tannadice Idols, mainly on the grounds that this blog's title refers to the only particularly interesting thing that Dundee United full-back David Narey did in his long career.

Giving Twitter a go eighteen months ago seems to have made a big difference - especially as my current job suits Tweeting far more than blogging, simply because of time constraints. And it's allowed me to get in touch with other bloggers, and ultimately led to things like my recent involvement with The SPL Podcast, which has been immense fun (apart from how I appear to be having a breakdown every week over Caley Thistle's defending).

There's a few folk who deserve thanks for the encouragement they've given me; my best friends Iain Meredith (who wrote a couple of blogposts in 2009 before he got a proper job, the git) and Tom Webster (who reads this regularly for some reason, even though he couldn't actually be less interested in football if he tried). Another good friend, and local journalist, Colin Macleod, has always got an opinion on what I've written; one day I hope I will find enough free time to collaborate with him on a book about Caley Thistle that we've talked about writing for years.

I've never met Gary Andrews, but he is a wonderful blogger who used to write for twofootedtackle.com, and who bigged me up on more than one occasion. I hope he doesn't regret it! And lastly I think a mention should go to Tom Hall (who I've also never met), who is the man behind the magnificent Scottish Football Blog, surely the gold standard for footie blogs in this country, and who I'd love to be even half as good as. If it wasn't for these five people, I'm pretty sure this wouldn't have lasted five whole years.

If there's one thing I'd like to do differently in the future, it would be this - Write Positive Things. I'm a naturally pessimistic person (it's not that the glass is half-empty - I believe somebody's nicked the glass) and it's easy to find negative things to write about Scottish football. That's a bad combination. It's also much easier to be critical in writing than it is to be praiseworthy. Maybe there just isn't very much cheer in our domestic game at the moment, but maybe I'm not looking hard enough. So that's the Birthday Resolution.

Here's to (hopefully) another five years of Narey's Toepoker. God knows where on earth Scottish football will be in 2017...

L.