Introduction

Nau mai, haere mai ki tāku rangitaki.

Welcome to the ITBOTN archives.

In-the-back-of-the.net was a blog I worked very hard on between 2009 and 2019. In this space, I have re-published a curated selection of my work from that decade – mostly thoughts, coherent or otherwise, I had while attending football games.

There were well over 1,000 posts on ITBOTN when it folded. This collection has been carefully shaved back to 375.

There are only three posts in this selection I didn’t write myself – two guest posts by Rod de Lisle that maintain the continuity of my 2014 Chatham Cup odyssey, and an important contribution by my late comrade Helen Kelly. This choice was not made solely so I could put those two people in a sentence together, but that is an added bonus I know Helen would have enjoyed.

With a couple of exceptions, I have only included one image per post because I don’t want to carry high permanent costs for storage space. I have somehow lost all my photography from a small number of games – if a post with a score at the top contains no images, that is probably why.

The picture included on this page is the only one you’ll find on this website that I didn’t personally take – it’s by Nat Broadhead. It records one of my final moments as a football blogger, and also one of the best.

Piecing this together and presenting it cleanly in a way that shouldn’t require much if any ongoing upkeep has been labour intensive, but it was a negligible time commitment compared to the many thousands of hours I spent on the original site.

I hope in the years ahead people will come to fully understand the impact and significance of this work, and that it will give ongoing enjoyment to those active in the game of football during this period.

Nō reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.

Enzo Giordani
29/2/2024