The Pride of Vallekas

You might think that this is the second iteration of this blog. But, in a way, it isn't. During the second half of the 2014-15 season, I watched all the Rayo games and uploaded match reports to a Facebook page called the Pride of Vallekas. I then impulsively deleted that page, thinking I would never write again. Moral of the story: this is, in an informal sense, the third iteration of this blog. And never, ever, delete things. Umm....I'm deleting things. Again. I started writing about football in September 2015. Back Page Football were kind enough to allow me to contribute - and it propelled me to write about twice or thrice a month. It provided me with a platform to write for BarcaBlaugranes and VillarrealUSA, two blogs under SBNation, and guest post on many others. However, as I've said many times before, a lack of writing towards the end of 2016 frustrated me, and the mandate to write everyday was born impulsively on a Thursday morning more than a year ago. At ...

I had something else to write for today, but I decided to shelve it for another day. Because yesterday marked 150 days since I started daily blogging. Today is 151. 150 days ago, things were very, very different... 16th February, 2017.  My palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy.  My brow is tense, my hand is anything but steady.  My head is spinning, the decision that I'm making  i s major, is intense, is everything, is all or nothing. Excuses come in - where will I find the time? Will I ever get drained and pained by this uphill climb? What may I find, how will I keep up the grind? Will anyone even listen to what I have in my mind? My head, filled with dread, tried to look ahead Tried to see that some stories just deserved to be read That other people would read what I had to say As long as I said it, and just started it today No delaying and stalling and dallying was gonna work I had to start today and hopefully someday see the per...

Failure is a strong word. It means a lack of success, collapse, the cessation of required action. Yesterday, I didn't want to fail. I failed because of me. I had an article ready and couldn't post it - but that's an excuse. As every second ticked towards the 10 o'clock mark I could feel myself becoming more and more frustrated. I was going to fail and I couldn't do anything about it. In just over a month I'm so addicted to daily blogging that the withdrawal was immense - symptoms including crankiness, anxiety and hyperactivity. 26th March will go up on the Hall of Shame, whether I like it or not. The irony of not having written for a day is that it gave me something to write about the next day - something that is amazing in its counterproductive nature. Today's post features the games against Numancia and Espanyol, the teams that the men's and women's teams played respectively. It also features what was supposed to go up yesterday ...

Well, to be fair, this is day 32. I started writing about Rayo Vallecano daily on the 16th of February, 2017. In 36 days, I have uploaded 32 posts on this very blog. 32 times pushing the "Publish" button. 32 times sitting down and asking myself what I should write about. 32 times creating something - a story, an article. a rant. Something. More than a month ago, I remember wanting to start a daily blog, as an impetus to write more, as a way to compensate for an almost disastrous writing in the second half of 2016 and as a way to be more connected and aware of the subjects I was writing about. I remember reading countless articles on the pros and cons of daily blogging - the arguments for and against essentially boiling down to quantity and quality. But I also remember thinking how blogging daily and accept the inevitable drop in quality was just not me. I remember thinking how most of my previous work were long-form pieces that wove sad, forgotten, under-reported and...