FEATURED post

It's preseason, the football's on pause (well the proper stuff we mean), but there's never a shortage of things worth talking about at Beans!.

I was 19 years old when we were drawn away to Dover in the FA Trophy quarter final. We didn't know it at the time, but we were rapidly approaching the end of the Vaughan era. He was getting his collar felt by Customs and Excise and temporarily falling on his sword, stepping down as chairman. The first ruptures that something wasn't quite right. But at the time there was still goodwill, optimism and a bloody good team on the pitch. We were only eight years post Wembley and th

Forty-five minutes. Two thousand seven hundred seconds. That's allegedly how much time Paul Hornby had to celebrate our promotion back to the EFL until Bolton made the first phone enquiry for Evatt. Then it began again. Football, post triumph or tragedy, needs to regenerate fast. So, at the business end of the season, even as the Premiership hyperbole approaches a juddering climax and we await the Champions League; even as World Cup venues and opponents are pored over, overhy

So it was to an industrial estate adjacent to a Tyne and Wear metro station named after the venerable Bede (not to be anal, but it's more towards Jarrow than South Shields itself) that a cursed 2025-26 campaign drew to a close in the pouring rain for your correspondent here on Tyneside. South Shields, the second placed team in the National League North narrowly losing out to our old friends AFC [Swearfilter] in a two horse race, the young upstarts