Groundhopping24

An average beer, but a lovely place to 'enjoy' it  With Zbrojovka again playing at home on the Saturday of this weekend once again (Rymarenko ole!), it was down to Sunday to offer me the chance of visiting somewhere new. On this occasion, I opted to take the train north two hours or so to the town of Šumperk, which according to Wikipedia was both industrial and historical in equal measure. For whatever reason, its name on the railway station departure board always stood out to me. The name itself comes from German origins (Schönberg), roughly translating as 'beautiful hill', which given its location in the Hanušovice Highlands, makes a lot of sense. The football club ply their trade in Divize F, which is the regional fourth tier of the Silesia region, though they switch regional divisions often given their location which could reasonably fit in any one of the three Moravia-Silesia divisions.  They've also been switching between the fifth and fourth tiers throughout ...

 Those who know me well enough will know I'm a sucker for an amusing auto-translation courtesy of Google. For instance, I've bored people to death with tales of what some of my students surnames were translated as via the web browser: Crookedhead, Hobby, and perhaps my favourite of all, when I covered a class with a student named Richard the Poodle.  Rest assured that isn't limited to just students or names, but also towns and football clubs - for example, I've had Rosice auto-translate to dew, Svratka auto-translate to vomit, and my favourite of all, Dosta Bystrc-Kninicky - a club in the fifth tier - translate to Enough Quick Witted Bookworm.  Now it was the turn of Olympia Ráječko, for whom the village they represent has somehow managed to give me two excellent translations. As you'll gather from the title of this blog, they are Little Paradise or Little Tomato - choose your fighter carefully young warrior... In any case, it was to be the final part of an eventful...

This bin certainly knew the score come midday... Back in September of 2023, I had the pleasure of catching a 6am train to Prague for Zbrojovka's away match at Viktoria Žižkov. While the day was excellent with new and old friends alike, the result for Zbrojovka was a poor 4-2 defeat to a Žižkov side who hadn't got going before this encounter. That said, at least it was an entertaining  defeat. Fast forward almost exactly a year, and it's another 4-2 defeat at the hands of Žižkov. I didn't attend this time, but it was nice of them to repeat the game for those that didn't manage the 2023 encounter. This season, Viktoria Žižkov v Zbrojovka Brno happens once again, almost another year to the day. Surely third time's the charm, right? For whatever reason, after my first and only visit so far, I didn't write a blog on Žižkov, though that works to my advantage this weekend. The plan for me is to head up at some point on Saturday and stay with some good friends befor...

Josef Mazopust; arguably the greatest Czech footballer of all time.  For many people, Dukla Praha will only be a familiar name to a certain kind of British hipster, given that the club lend their name to indie outfit Half Man Half Biscuit's renowned 'All I Want for Christmas is a Dukla Prague Away Kit'. That said, there's a hell of a lot more than what meets the eye with this club, who've endured highs and lows to extents that would make Portsmouth's recent history look like a succession of top half Premier League finishes. This is a club that, after all, have two founding dates on their Wikipedia page - 1948 and 1998. So before we even begin to look into this weekend's fixture of choice - Dukla Praha v Hradec Kralove - let's dive into one of Czech Republic's most complicated teams.  Initially founded as ATK Prague in 1948 ( Armádní tělovýchovný klub , which translates as Army Sports Club), the club won eight league titles in the first seventeen year...