Wembley Stadium Sunday, May 15th, 2016 k/o 16:00   National League Promotion Final Attendance: 17,198       Forest Green Rovers 1-3 Grimsby Town
2015 /16

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Purchased a number of early bird tickets in the hope we might sneek into the final but it wasn''t to be. With my last visit to Wembley being in 2000 i hadn''t been to the revamped stadium so decided to go taking a mate from Tranmere and picking up family that lived down south. The weekend started poorly taking in the 20th anniversary of kick racism out of football charity game held 24 hours earlier at Prenton park. I say poorly as the £20 entrance fee was far to steep more than to get in a lot of proper matches and the £5 programme was such poor quality i wouldn''t normally have valued or paid more than 50p for it 24pages small format 12 of which were adverts with the remainder offering very little to read. It was amazing how poorly this was organised but the host club had no input on proceedings and were blameless the game did provide goals finishing 10-2 but taking out the kids that had played previously the attendance was not surprisingly very low. We travelled South after the game had ended staying in Bedfordshire overnight. We decided to park and ride on the underground but called into a couple of none league grounds on the way down and also had a good veiw of the work going on at Barnets hive ground from the train(with the away terracing having been flattened and the pitch pulled up now brown and re-sowed). We arrived with plenty of time took the usual photos and grabbed some food before taking our seats in the second tier. I couldn''t resist stripping to my Tranmere shirt for more photographs as it was sparsley populated and supposedly in the neutral section but their were still a hundred or so Grimsby fans in the adjacent block but i kept a low profile by and large! It was hard to know which side to get behind my heart said FGR as the underdogs but my head said Grimsby as they would have more resources to give us competition next season, neither side had beaten us in the regular season with a 1-1 draw at Grimsby and a 1-0 home win on the last day compared with arguably our best performances of the season against FGR winning 2-0 in the away game and drawing 1-1 at home despite being well on top we failed to take our chances against a robust side on the day but still entertained. I had to applaud the FGR goal which was the highlight for me but the result was probably the best for my team. Didn''t head straight home but when i did it was around 1am.