Cans & Megabus – Your Guide To Portsmouth (A)

The Good Ship Sunderland sets sail down the North Sea and takes a right down the English Channel on Tuesday night to visit our League One nemeses Portsmouth. Tom Walsh takes us all on a trip down south so we don’t have to.

What to do with little Portsmouth? Too hilarious for the Championship, not hilarious enough for League One. The club was an outcast. Every time Cans & Megabus gazes its wistful eye onto the South Coast and see the zit-covered face of Portsmouth looking back at us, we can only smile and pat it on the head.

Oh Portsmouth, when will it work for you? You think you’re so great but, like buying brand name lagers from Lidl, it just never pans out the way you want. And yet, here we are, once again playing this stupid fixture and pretending we hate each other because neither of us want to be here.

Whenever you think it might be working out for little old Portsmouth, they pull out another ace from the deck and get battered by someone like Northampton Town. Silly old Portsmouth, with all those players you thought were good, like that man, that other man and that other man with a ponytail. How daring.

Portsmouth’s biggest sin of recent times was releasing their talismanic striker, and close, personal friend of Cans & Megabus, Brett Pitman. Luckily, Brett has since found casual work in Swindon where he fits boilers during the week and plays for the local football team on the weekends.

There will come a time where ours and Portsmouth’s paths no longer meet, and it will be a day this charismatic, handsome and olive-skinned column will cherish. Here’s to you “Pompey”, you hilarious mess.

How To Recreate The Fratton Park Experience?

Start off by chucking some kind miscellaneous goo over your chair or settee to recreate the away end at Fratton Park. Once you’ve done this, get a member of your household to ring a bell about a foot away from your ear incessantly for two hours, if you’re living on your own just set your phone alarm to go off every two minutes.

Now, this is the most important bit, invite all the people in the world that dislike you the most to stand outside your house and just stare at you. Every now and then, they could bang on the window and call you a “Northern mug” for absolutely no reason. Then, once the game is over, all your friends can say what great supporters they are.

Does This Place Have Any Good Brews?

A trip to Portsmouth tends to be full of enduring misery, however, the only bright spot to this hell ride of an adventure is stopping by Staggeringly Good Brewery. Located right outside Fratton Park, it takes the edge off the utter drudgery that is watching a game of football on that weird island in which Portsmouth occupies.

So, if you like dinosaur-themed beer – as all Jurassic World Evolution fans will attest – this will be right up your Stegosaurus. Treat yourself to a drop of their Dawn Stealer Black IPA or just get hilariously trashed off their 10.3% CocoaDocus Chocolate Imperial Stout.

Did You Know?

Portsmouth is the only town in the UK that permits dogs to have bank accounts. It is believed that this law was introduced shortly after World War II after a local man claimed he’d been defrauded out of his entire life savings by a “deceptive Alsatian”. Since then, all dogs born within the town’s limits must be registered with their own banking account in a bid to prevent more dog-people fraud.

The most mystifying part of this legislation is that if you ask anyone in Portsmouth whether it’s true or not, they look at you confused and angry, as you would expect by a population routinely swindled by dogs.

Tom Walsh

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