American Football charges back into life in Hereford

“Wanna bring the 80s back/That’s OK with me, that’s where they made me at”

IT was July 11, 1980 something and me and my big brother were watching an American football game somewhere in Cardiff.

Back in the 1980s it appeared everywhere in Britain had an American Football team and the Birmingham Bulls were one of the most successful sides in the country. But it wasn’t just the big cities that had clubs it seemed every provincial town and even small cities, like Hereford, had taken up gridiron.

Tigers V Mets, Cardiff’s first American Football derby 30 years on

Thirty years ago this week an American Football game took place in Cardiff that had been three years in the making.

THE South Wales Echo announced “the match all Cardiff’s American Football fans have been waiting for” would finally happen. The original team in Wales, the Cardiff Tigers, for the first time, were to face the club formed by a splinter of Tigers, the Cardiff Mets.

Leicester, the NFL head coach and Brexit

IT was a contentious decision of national significance – game-changing even – that has already prompted some of its key players and more than 600,000 people to call for a re-run or for the final result to be overturned.

Sean Payton in his Leicester Panthers kit. Photo: Arlo White

However the decision has been made and whatever the rights and wrongs the country, the whole world, must accept that it is the Los Angeles Rams and not the New Orleans Saints that will represent the National Football Conference (NFC) in Super Bowl LIII against the immovable empire that is the New England Patriots.

The Bengals, Wembley and modern football

Washington Redskins 27 @ Cincinnati Bengals 27 (Wembley Stadium, London, England)

THE NFL played the 17th game in its London International Series on Sunday but it took the Cincinnati Bengals travelling the near 4,000 miles to the UK for me to make the 149 mile journey from Cardiff, Wales to Wembley Stadium.

While regular season games are a genuine privilege for UK fans the event itself is a move from the strictly business play book of the NFL’s sharpest minds – the executives who measure success not in yards and points but dollars and cents.

Gridiron, doping and sporting redemption

Jason Livingston went from the Olympics to a Welsh American Football team via Cardiff City

BRITISH American Football has agreed an anti-doping code – which might seem strange for a sport that off the field has more in common with Sunday league than it does the NFL’s Monday Night Football – but it brings back memories of the game’s connection to one of British sport’s most infamous doping cases.

Jason Livingston # 44

In July 1992 the world’s best athletes had gathered in Barcelona for the Olympic Games but as the track and field events were due to begin promising British sprinter Jason Livingston was heading home in, as these things are always reported, “disgrace”.

The South Wales Rivalry, American Football’s derby

The rivalry between Wales’ biggest cities finds itself on the gridiron

Cariff Cobras QB Rich Gardner surveys the Swansea Titans defence

AMERICAN Football dates back to the 1870s in the Ivy League colleges of America’s east coast – in 21st Century Wales it is also among the universities the game is flourishing.