What does Vale Park mean to you?

Every time I see a photo of the ground from the 1970s, I’m instantly taken back to my childhood and, more specifically, to my football experience of that era – walking down Dolly’s Lane, the smells (those urinals were unforgiving), the pies, the wait for the half‑time scores to be read out. I remember using the terrace barriers as gymnastic apparatus, zig-zagging up and down the Paddock for no reason at all (always counting the steps as I went up but never on my way back down), kicking anything on the ground that wanted kicking – cans, bottles, fag packets, discarded programmes, a top set of false teeth. Pretending it wasn’t me when I’d just booted a coke can into some bloke’s leg, putting on that innocent face, looking over at another lad to try and implicate him, trying to get away with it. I remember always knowing it would end with a chippy tea at my Nan and Grandad’s in Kidsgrove, and knowing I’d always be allowed to stay up for Match of the Day. Nostalgia is a powerful thing.

It’s said that it’s the joyful irresponsibility we feel as children (or should feel – too many kids are robbed of that innocence and wonder) that fuels our love for those times, rather than the era itself. Things weren’t better in the ’70s; I was just younger, more open, more easily dazzled. Every experience felt exciting. The world felt larger, brighter.

For example, when I was a kid, weekends in Blackpool felt like stepping into another universe, the lights, the colour everywhere, and that excited buzz you could feel when you arrived at the seaside. We had caravan holidays in Rhyl and Colwyn Bay, all sunshine (in my memory, at least), melting ice creams, the cries of seagulls, the smell of the sea. There were donkeys on the beach, the clatter and glitter of the amusement arcades with their hypnotic chaos of noise and lights. Everything seemed endless. I can remember walking up Mow Cop in the snow with my dad and thinking that I had gone back in time. What a place! Evil Knievel, The Bionic Man. Wuthering Heights, Heart of Glass, Are Friends Electric? My first ever bag of Monster Munch – I had never known anything like it. Crazy times.

I’m not yearning for the 70s, not really. Everything I’ve mentioned still exists; I could still go and do all of it today. What I’m missing isn’t a decade, it’s the glow of a happy childhood, the way the world felt new and huge and full of wonder. That’s what I’m remembering.

Nostalgia also runs deeper than just wishing for that old sense of “joyful irresponsibility”. It runs deeper than that. Vale Park back then wasn’t just a football ground to me; it was more. It was belonging, ritual, excitement, awe, that early sense of being part of something bigger than yourself. Now, here’s an important bit, because so much of this happens in our formative years, we don’t just remember the place, we remember what our nervous systems learned to feel there – the rush, the safety, the electricity of matchday. And even tiny changes can spark a wave of nostalgia: the terraces replaced with seats, the faces around you changed or missing, the club transformed, and you transformed with it. Impermanence.

These days, the first thing I do when I walk through the turnstile is picture Vale Park as it was when I was a kid, the Paddock under my feet, the Bycars stretched out to the left of me.

The old sign. Welcome To Vale Park.

It always makes me smile.

I’m glad we’ve stayed put on Hamil Road. I’m glad I can still go somewhere that’s so deeply connected to my childhood. Imagine if we’d ended up in one of those soulless metallic bowls plonked next to a retail park like so many other clubs have done? I would’ve hated that. A home ground should have roots, not a postcode chosen for its parking spaces.

But anyway, this isn’t really what I wanted to talk about. Or maybe it is, a little. What I really want to talk about is football stadiums as sanctuary – the way they give us, as fans and as human beings, permission to be something different. Inside a ground we behave in ways we’d never get away with in everyday life. Vale Park allows that. It gives us room. It gives us freedom. It’s good for our wellbeing, even when the football isn’t.

And this is why.

One of the strangest, most beautiful things about football is the sheer range of emotions we’re allowed to feel over 90 minutes. Joy. Despair. Disbelief. Hope. Frustration. Rage that erupts out of nowhere because the liner has just made a decision that belongs in a parallel universe.

It’s insane when you think about it.

In everyday life, we’re asked to regulate ourselves. To be calm. To be composed. To be reasonable. Follow the rules. Football? Well, it’s just different. We’re allowed to let the primal part of us run free. Those unfiltered outbursts when a penalty isn’t given, that joyous roar when someone lashes one in from 30 yards.

And then there’s the pure emotional detonation of a last minute winner – that moment where time seems to fold completely in on itself. The ball hits the net and the world turns white with noise. Your body doesn’t ask permission; it just moves. The experience of euphoria. You’re jumping, screaming, grabbing strangers. For a few seconds you’re not a sensible adult with responsibilities – you’re nothing but instinct, adrenaline and disbelief. It’s chaos, beautiful chaos, and it leaves you buzzing for hours, sometimes days.

There’s something almost therapeutic about these moments – like a kind of primal scream therapy. You let it all out: the frustration, the tension, the things you’ve carried around without even realising. A shout becomes a release valve, shedding whatever’s old or heavy or unspoken.

By the final whistle, the emotions have been felt, released, and left behind. I always come away with a sense of completeness – a calm clarity. My head feels lighter, as if someone’s cleared out the emotional clutter and hit the reset button. It’s an important form of release.

Football gives you that. Vale Park gives you that. You can’t do that at work. You can’t do that in Morrisons car park. Well, you could, I suppose – but you’d have people mithering about it.

Different rules apply at the match.

Another quiet truth: sometimes the comfort isn’t in the match itself, but in the community around it.

At Vale Park, you don’t need to explain yourself. You don’t need to justify your existence. You don’t need to engage if you don’t have the energy. You can sit there in your thoughts while the world does its thing around you. You can sit in the crowd and say nothing and still feel part of something. There is a rare, gentle kind of belonging in that. A companionship that doesn’t pressure.

There have been times in the past when all I wanted was to sit on my own for a while, to step back, not engage, and catch my breath when the world has felt a little overwhelming. At Vale, I never felt judged for that. People would still say a quiet hello as they sat down, just checking in, making sure I was alright without pushing themselves into my space. Those small moments meant more than anyone realised. When you’re struggling, it’s the simple things – the light touch, the gentle acknowledgement – that can make you feel seen again. And I’ve always appreciated that.

For ninety minutes the world doesn’t actually disappear but it does become quieter. It leaves us alone and lets us breathe. That escape is a gift given to by this place – Vale Park. By the ritual, by the familiarity, by the comfort of being somewhere that has held every version of me across the decades.

Childhood me. Teenage me. Lost me. Hopeful me. Happy-and-together me. They’ve all stood here, in the same air, under the same lights. There is nowhere in the world like it. Nothing comes close.

When I talk about Vale Park as a sanctuary, I don’t mean a place of peace. I mean a place where emotions are allowed to exist in their rawest, most honest form. A place where people carry each other through the highs and lows. And the fact that this place has stayed rooted in the same soil, the same streets, the same Burslem skyline, that makes it more than a football ground for me. It makes it my constant. My compass point. My home. In a world where so much shifts, relocates, disappears, or becomes unrecognisable, Vale Park has remained. It’s a spiritual space. A place where the world falls away and the mind resets. A place that, for ninety minutes, feels like freedom.

It means everything to me.