2011 – A Thank You
It’s been a drunken busy Christmas and New Year period and I haven’t got round to summarising 2011 on the site. I wanted to take the chance to belatedly amend that now.
2011 was the first full year GhostGoal has been in operation and it’s been great that it’s developed as it has. The year began with the ‘My Favourite Goals’ feature which started out as a chance to invite anyone to write something about, well, their favourite goal.
The fact that ‘anyone’ ended up including award-winning writers such as Andrew Thomas, Michael Cox, Dave Hartrick, Jack Lang and many more volunteers was much more than we could have hoped. I think it highlighted the fun side of blogging collaboration in what turned out to be a fraught year for the – awful phrase coming up – ‘blogging community’.
Since then we’ve been chugging along. It was good to be one of the first sites to point out back in May that Owen Coyle wasn’t all that people held him up to be, while the defence of Serie A from the criticism of the Sunday Supplement brigade in October certainly seemed to strike a chord with a lot of people.
For me personally it has been a far more successful year than I could have hoped. When Oli and I first had the idea to jot down a few of our frustrations back in May 2010, the notion that this could directly lead to me getting paid to write about football would have been ridiculous. But (albeit in a small way) that’s what has happened over the past year with magazine commissions, regular work with Sky Sports and even an award nomination.
As a result of these writing distractions, the plans for GhostGoal in 2012 are sketchy but I’m afraid there won’t be any dramatic “I quit” stories regarding the site. Not least because it’s actually looking better than ever thanks to the much appreciated efforts of Thomas Baugh and his redesign.
And besides, I’m sure Oli will have plenty of things he needs to get off his chest in the coming year and – even if I don’t get round to writing as much as I’d like – with over 200 posts there’s plenty of nonsense for new arrivals to wade through should they be of a warped disposition.
Most of all, thanks for reading, commenting, contributing and criticising over the past 12 months.
All the best
Adam
