...

Breakfast and football don't usually mix. But when you're on the other side of the world to Bootham Crescent, cornflakes and coffee are a good companion as you wait for York City's latest result to trickle through.

My midweek game is Bristol Rovers away. For many of my friends in England, that means getting away from work early enough to make the 7.45 pm kick-off.

For me, it means turning on my computer first thing in the morning - New Zealand is 13 hours ahead of England, remember - as I hook up to the Internet and one of the football sites which offer live coverage of matches. I check my watch and calculate the referee is just about to start the game.

My coffee disappears as I try to concentrate on writing a report on my computer for a client of my management consulting business.

But I have one ear on BBC5, also available to me through the Internet, and one eye on the small area of my computer screen that's monitoring the action from Bristol.

The business report is forgotten when I spot City have gone ahead in the 34th minute with a goal from defender Barry Jones.

York fans cheer in unison in the floodlit atmosphere of the Memorial Ground. I scream with delight as the sunshine pours through my open window and into my home office. The birds are singing with me.

Half-time comes up, so it's time for another coffee and another look through the pile of Evening Press clippings kindly sent to me a couple of days earlier by Raymond Wynn, the secretary of the Supporters' Club in York.

He encouraged me to form the New Zealand branch of the club in 1996 when he wrote a piece about me for the City match programme. We met during my two visits that year to England on business, both conveniently timed to take in several City games.

Unfortunately, City did not win any of those games, nor did they win in 1989 during my previous return to the City of my birth. I was starting to think I'm a jinx.

I emigrated from York in August 1970, the day after a boring 0-0 home draw with Notts County. The opening game of a new season, I'm surprised I was not the only supporter to leave England after that result.

So it's now 28 years since I have seen City win a game, and for 27 of them, I had not even seen them score a goal. That was fixed in 1996 when I arrived off a 26-hour flight from New Zealand via Los Angeles, jumped into a cab and went straight to Griffin Park to see the Minstermen take on Brentford.

A few minutes into the game and Neil Tolson scored from close in, shaking off my 27-year voodoo (had I really broken four mirrors?) and most of my jet lag.

Moments like that are fond memories for a York supporter who has to rely on a computer, the Internet and a network of enthusiastic supporters spread throughout the world. They keep me informed from almost 10,000 miles away. None is more vital than the Yorkshire Evening Press which I read daily.

But it's back to the Bristol game, and I've all but given up on finishing my business report till after the final whistle.

Drat. Bristol have levelled seven minutes into the second spell. After the dramas of this season, it's a familiar story and I anticipate the rash of email messages no doubt questioning whether manager Alan Little made the right substitutions after the equaliser.

I'm wrong. He sticks with the starting 11, which includes Richard Cresswell, the striker considered physically capable of a rough-and-tumble game. In the 72nd minute, Little's confidence is repaid as Cresswell scores the winner.

Fascinating to not see the goal and thereby rely on Internet descriptions ranging from 'a deflection', 'a clever back-heel', 'a goalmouth scramble' and 'a side-foot into the net'. I don't care how he scored - I just hang on until the computer screen shows those magic letters "FT", meaning a full-time result.

Within half an hour, York fan Gary Morton is back from the match and has emailed his match report from his home in Bristol. Gary, born in Dringhouses, runs one of three web sites dedicated to City.

I edit Gary's report into a form suitable for my daily email newsletter that now goes to 70 followers around the world.

It seems amusing that a supporter who lives the furthest distance from Bootham Crescent can be supplying news to the United States, Canada, Sweden, Norway, Austria, Australia, as well as New Zealand and England. My Bristol Rovers report dispatched, I telephone a friend, Steve Duck, who is originally from Haxby and who emigrated three years ago. Delighted with the three points, he is one of 67 members of the Down Under branch of the Supporters' Club.

Others are a mixture of ex-patriot Yorkies, relatives and friends of keen Minstermen.

The Coca-Cola Cup wins against Manchester United and Everton have done much to enhance City's reputation as a plucky underdog, an image that sits well with New Zealanders who love to champion the "little guy".

Basking in the afterglow of victory, I cruise through my workday and look forward to an evening rendezvous with City fans, Jonathon and Karen Smales, who are having a brief stopover in Auckland on their way back to England after an Australian holiday.

I get home to find a letter has arrived from York, a Mr Jackson who is 72 and is trying to track down an old friend, Joe Walsh, who left York in 1946. Mr Jackson is sure Joe would still be following City so is there any chance he's a member of our branch?

Sadly, I reply saying he's not a member, but I make a note to include his request in our next newsletter.

The next morning, 24 hours after the win over Bristol, I turn on the computer again so I can print off the match reports in the Evening Press. I pass them on to Peter George, a young supporter who lives in South Bank, who is visiting relatives near where I live. He is surprised - and thrilled - when I give him the reports, incredulous that technology can deliver the Press to a home on the other side of the planet. I'm as delighted by a copy of the Everton match video, carried round the world from the Bootham Crescent shop.

One of the best aspects of running an outpost of City support is the contact with fans around the world. In January, it was 76-year-old Syd Heppell from Badger Hill who brought an away strip and a T-shirt donated by Selby supporter Gary Chatterton. They were pointed in my direction by old friend Joy Crawshaw, of Haxby, who is a correspondent for the Press.

Acomb brothers Tom and Nicholas Calpin send regular postcards with views on the club's progress. Again we've never met, but our support for City makes the world a very small place.

They are pupils at the same Carr Lane School that I attended in the 1960s when I first fell in love with the view of Bootham Crescent from the Shippo Street end.

As the old saying goes, you can take the boy out of York, but you can't take York out of the boy.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.