It is always an early start, we quietly shuffle out of the house, trying not to wake everybody up before the larks are even awake.  

We meet in the yard bleary-eyed with a coffee in hand, prep the coach, and give it a final clean, arriving at Liberty Stadium at least 5 hours before we are due to depart. There are always two of us on the journey, one of us drives and the other navigates and is responsible for the radio. 

The chef meets us and we help them load the dishes onto the coach, assortments of fruits, vegetables a surprising amount of ‘fast food’ burgers, chicken & wedges. When the food and kit have been loaded onto the coach, we carry out our final checks and then depart.

It’s become mandatory to get ‘diet’ sausage and chips for brekkie from Rossi’s as soon as it opens, we’ve become such regulars that they don’t even ask us for our order anymore, it’s their first order of the day! Once we’ve finished our battered breakfast we head back to the Stadium and wait for the players to get on board.  

We take it in turns to drive, but one of us tends to drive for as long as we are legally allowed, or until our bladder can’t handle any more driving. Sky Sports is our normal go-to radio station, the players have TV monitors, Now TV & Xbox’s upstairs to keep everybody entertained on the long journeys.  

Players will have a bit of banter with us as we cruise along, one will run down to declare it’s far too cold upstairs, only for his buddy to appear moments later complaining it’s too hot! 

Sometimes the players will fly up as the journey is too long, normally if we are going any further than the midlands. It isn’t as much fun for us as we drive up empty and we miss the chats we have with the players.  

We always drive up the day before, so the first stop is heading to the hotel. Whenever we arrive at the hotel, we will always check out the gyms, I am not sure why as we are never likely to use them, but we always entertain the idea that we might do! Before COVID we would have one drink with the players, but times have changed now so we normally head to our room and have an early night, after all we’ve been up for hours! 

On the day of the match, we give TC (Team Coach) another clean to ensuring it’s gleaming, we collect the players when they are ready and take them to the fixture venue, we always enjoy watching the matches and cheering on our team, when the game is over and victory is ours, we load up the coach and head back to Swansea, more often than not we head back cheering! 

 It’s a real honour driving ‘The Swans’ and we can’t wait for them to move into The Premiership.