Tony, who built a career as a radio sports reporter and is now a press officer for QPR, has been so determined to complete the challenge that he went part-time at work this season to be able finally finish his adventure.<\/p>\n
He has also had to manage his personal life around his football trips, including marrying his wife in summer to avoid missing matches.<\/p>\n
In 2023, he was presented with a trophy to mark his achievement of attending every one of QPR’s home matches for the past 50 years.<\/p>\n
“I actually almost missed my daughter being born”, he says. “My wife went into hospital six days beforehand so I slept on a chair in the hospital for five nights and all the time I’m thinking, ‘QPR are at home in a few days’.<\/p>\n
“In the end, my wife had the baby, then I ran out of the hospital into my car and made it to Loftus Road just in time.”<\/p>\n
Tony’s love of watching football at all levels means he has attended games in some unusual circumstances, including way below even non-league.<\/p>\n
“I got a special invitation to go inside Feltham Prison in 2011 to watch a match as the only spectator,” he says.<\/p>\n
“The prison team was in a league alongside companies with shift workers and obviously couldn’t play away games!<\/p>\n
“I had to get there an hour before kick-off, had my phone taken off me, got searched and then three prison guards took me and the away team through to a nice little ground in the prison with proper dugouts.<\/p>\n
“It was just after the London riots so the prison team was full of good young players and they won the match.”<\/p>\n
There was no programme or ticket to show for the trip and no half-time brew but the exit was memorable.<\/p>\n
“On the way out, some of the prisoners came out of their cells and started lambasting the away side for losing the game,” Tony says. <\/p>\n
“One of their guys replied ‘lost the match but at least we’re going home, lads’ and we were then rushed out of there very, very quickly.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tony, who built a career as a radio sports reporter and is now a press officer for QPR,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":517280,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-517279","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=517279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517279\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/517280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=517279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=517279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=517279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}