Welcome to the life of Gillingham Football Club.

That is my English team along with other Schalke UK Fan Club members Andy Devine, Tim Martin & Kevin Dean. It is life sentence. Our home games are played at the Priestfield Stadium and it has capacity of 11,500. We average around 4 - 8000 dependent on what league we are in at the time. We are currently in League 2, the basement league of English professional football. It is a rubbish league where even a club like Gillingham is a big club. We should have enough quality to get promoted back to league 1 this year, although, like Schalke our start to the season has been terrible.

Gillingham is part of collection of towns known as the Medway Towns in the County of Kent in South East England. If you look on the map at the piece of land South East of London and that is Kent. Gillingham has a population of around 100,000 people and used to have strong Naval links to Historic Dockyard in neighbouring Chatham. Kent is known as the Garden of England due to its beautiful countryside and

villages. We have supporters clubs in Denmark, Holland, Australia and Canada!

In case you haven't guessed football is a huge part of the Askam household life. Dad has spent a lifetime following Manchester United through their ups and downs and is fortunate in that Sam is also an avid fan and now an assisstant coach of Jacob's local youth football team. If there is a match on the television it is likely to be playing in the Askam household. Stands to reason that Jacob has become a huge fan then of the beautiful game.

Living in Germany though makes it difficult to get to Old Trafford as often as we would all like and so decided to watch the Budesliga as often as possible. Though not the nearest team, having been to watch FC Shalke 04 play a few times before it was decided that we would give them our family support.

Shane popped dowm to Gelsenkirchen towards the beginning of the season only to find that once more all the season tickets were already gone. So he did what anyone else would have done under the circumstances, purchased as many tickets as he could for the 3 of them, nearly all the singles that were left and only showed the missus reciepts for half, LOL.

100 years FC St. Pauli, a extraordinary exhibition

During the last week I was on a holiday trip in the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg with my wife an my daughter. After we had visited the musical “The Lion King” as well as many museums and the landing bridges it was time to go and see the exhibition “100 Jahre FC St. Pauli”.
I had enough time to see the exhibition, because my wife and my daughter decided to go to the Mönckebergstraße to do some shopping.

With the tube no. 3 I arrived at the station „St. Pauli” near the Reeperbahn. From that point there were just 500m left to go until I arrived at the stadium. At the place in front of the new south tribune there was the exhibition building, consisting of 36 old maritime containers, as you find thousand of them in Hamburg.
 At the cash desk I came out as a Schalke fan. That led to a shoptalk with an employee about Gerald Asamoah. After that she shortly explained the main things about the exhibition to me and then I went into the container.
Who wants to see cups or other trophies would be dissapointed here. It quickly becomes apparent that the FC St. Pauli is a team that is kind of different. At first you get to know everything about the club’s history, for example, that the first game in the rebuilt stadium after the second world war in November 1946 was against our football club, the FC Schalke 04. FC St.Pauli won the game 1:0 in the overcrowded stadium at the Millerntor.