Groundhopping24

WELCOME TO MATCH! As soon as I stepped off the train at Zilina station well over two years ago now, I knew I'd end up with a special connection with the county. Though my plans to move to neighbouring Czech Republic were still a month or two off, I could make a strong case for it being the city in which it all began. While sat in Zilina's aptly named Hotel Slovakia (it's a hotel in Slovakia - why not?), a good friend of mine mentioned a teaching job in Brno. If I'm being brutally honest, this was a point in my life in which it felt as if everything had slipped away - I'd lost my girlfriend some months before the trip, and I'd felt chained to a country that was somehow becoming more and more miserable and impossible for us Milennials as the days and years flew by with such reckless abandon. Something had to change. I applied for a job at a language school, thinking nothing of it, especially following the countless rejections I'd received on the basis of lacki...

"Forget it Marge; it's Cocktown!" Okay, so hear me out. This isn't some kind of pornographic spin-off of the usual blogs, as I'm sure you'll be over the moon to discover. It's just that the kohout  in the name of this Brno district, Kohoutovice, translates as rooster, or cock.  Much like in German, the Czechs use their word for rooster to also describe a tap. Perhaps appropriately, the hosts were something of a leaking tap defensively last week at Svratka Brno - well, not actually Svratka but their temporary home in Brnenske Ivanovice - as they lost 5-1 in a game I had planned to go to before deciding to take the weekend off instead. Or rather, my finances had made that decision for me. The focus today is once again on the JMKP and this Clash of the Tatrans. If I could remember how to make a trademark symbol, rest assured it would come straight after the word Tatrans there. At the time of writing, there are also plans to take in a brief trip Strani on the ...

Ah, the  Přebor Jihomoravského kraje - everyone's favourite South Moravian regional fifth tier. Ignore the fact it's the only one, but this is the league which - to date - I've spent the majority of my time watching this season.  Perhaps I'm one of few who can boast trips to East Fife and Bosonohy in the same month - how much you can boast about that is another matter. That said, the standard of fifth tier Czech football is what you would expect, though there is almost always some degree of entertainment.  This week's JMKP groundhop was a Saturday morning trip to another club within the city limits of Brno that I'd been yet to tick off the list, Sparta Brno. Having browsed through the results of Sparta Brno last season, I'd noticed both games between Sparta Brno and my former local side, Svratka Brno, had ended in six and seven goal thrillers respectively. I tempered my expectations, expecting it to finish goalless, though as you can see from the title, ther...