Inside Left

Aye aye all.

Over the past 2 years or so I’ve spent a lot of time working on Inside Left, and while for the most part I’ve always enjoyed researching the articles and putting it on the site for your enjoyment, I’ve recently come to the conclusion that not thinking about the site is becoming easier with each day that I’m not up till all hours browsing through statto.com to prove another laboured argument, or ignoring my kids on a Saturday afternoon to bring you the scores when a cursory glance at the BBC website could do the same thing, only better.

Since the World Cup, activity on the site has been minimal to say the least. The summer brings welcome relief from Scottish football, and a welcome relief from writing about it. My plan was that while the World Cup was on, that would be the time when I would get the site ready for next season: the league previews, the team & player profiles, predictions and so on.

But as time went on, I found other things to occupy my time. A new computer meant that Grand Theft Auto 4 and Flight Simulator 2004 no longer looked like an extended Powerpoint presentation, and instead of not really enjoying ranting about Mark McGhee, I was happy driving my car across the pavement in Liberty City, or flying between Edinburgh and Islay.

The fact that I do not live in Scotland, while it makes me very objective, also means that I am slowly losing touch with the teams, the players, the leagues and the issues that make up the whole point of blogging. This is something which pains me greatly, but which reflects the reality of my situation. And because of that, keeping a site about Scottish football going becomes harder every day.

Despite finding ways to make keeping the site updated easier (a brief dalliance with Tumblr was soon abandoned), the pressure and hard work required to keep the site going was becoming a bit much in the face of other activities which I enjoyed more. As the days in which the site was not updated turned into weeks, eventually the site became less of a concern, and the relief in not thinking about having to do another update, of not thinking about having to comment on the latest fiasco that seems to constantly affect the Scottish game, of not thinking about having to get the previews up before Friday afternoon and of not thinking about having to re-jig everything around to suit the latest and greatest template was palpable.

I’ve received fabulous responses from several people who answered my calls on various forums for contributions and so take the workload from off my narrow shoulders. Their input has been fantastic, and my heartfelt gratitude goes out to you all, together with my apologies for ultimately wasting your time.

For the time being, my interests lie elsewhere. My work is providing new challenges which require my undivided attention, and I intend to spend time exploring other avenues of internet and social-media related fripperies, as well as getting back behind the camera lens and my guitars, my other great passions, aside from (Scottish) football.

Not that I’m giving up altogether: I will continue to write on the Scottish game over at The Offside (more specifically the Aberdeen pages), and would be more than happy to contribute the odd article for your site. Aside from Scottish football, I can do you stuff about Dutch football too.

For anyone interested in getting in touch to discuss or commission story ideas, the address is sebgevers {at} {the letter between “f” and “h”} mail {dot} com. All the posts from previous years are still available, should you need a reference of some kind.

For those of you needing their dose of Scottish football, I can heartily recommend the excellent and thoughtful writing of Tom Hall over at the Scottish Football Blog. For those of you who prefer their football blogs to get their temples throbbing and their blood pressure a-risin’, Scotzine also provides wonderful commentary.

But for now, in as far as this site in concerned, that’s it. So long, and thanks for all the comments and contributions.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 23rd, 2010 at 12:48 pm and is filed under Front Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.