Football FanCast columnist Chris Mackin looks at the latest batch of Championship hopeful's hoping to cut their teeth in the Premier League next season and feels for some of them it could well be a painful experience.

If you'll excuse me my terribly immodest name dropping for a moment, Phil Brown is from the same town as me and I was two years behind his son at school. I'm somewhat fond of how utterly underwhelming this particular claim to fame is and was concerned a Hull City promotion may impinge on it to the point it becomes almost impressive and I start regaling strangers with the tale in the same manner I can still be heard boring people about the time I bumped into John Barnes in the Metro Centre branch of Selfridges ("Alright, John?", said I, "Alright", he replied).

Football FanCast columnist Chris Mackin looks ahead the Chelsea United final in Moscow and is in somewhat of a quandary.

I got in a daft argument with a Manchester United fan watching their game against Barcelona in the pub the other night. Obnoxiously talking loudly enough for everybody to hear and clearly insecure about his support for a team who play their home games a two hour and forty minute car drive from our local, he was convincing nobody, least of all himself, when he said that he'd spent the entire match "kicking every ball".

Football FanCast columnist

The word ‘overrated' is one of the great aids of the modern day football fan. Like the grumpy music connoisseur, sighing to himself about whatever painfully average sounding band with daft haircuts NME are boring us silly with this week (until they get tired of them midway through their second single) we use it as a defence mechanism, a crafty rejoinder to the insane hype we are constantly subjected to by manipulative people with ulterior motives.

Football FanCast columnist and Newcastle Utd man Chris Mackin looks back at the easy day at the office on Sunday and wonders whatever happened to great revolution that was supposedly happening down the road.

There was a bloke by me up near the top of the Milburn stand on Sunday who was clearly a Sunderland fan. Edgy and silent throughout, and conspicuously subdued when Owen scored his first, he eventually left when Newcastle got their penalty never to be seen again. Timid and meek, his presence was ill advised and sensibly re-assessed and aborted at half time. He will take little solace in his role yesterday as a walking literacy device, particularly as his otherwise note perfect allegorical performance, his on the money metaphorical channelling of his team's dismal showing, did not extend to the "re-assessed and aborted at half time" bit.

Football FanCast columnist

The 25th of August 1999: my first ever Tyne & Wear derby. With the powerful and impossible to repress sensory imagery of Travis Bickle flicking through his old Vietnam scrapbooks, I can still vividly remember every emotion of that night; sat motionless on my seat in the East Stand Family Enclosure, traumatized and numb, the entire universe thinking it might be a bit of a laugh to cataclysmically implode on itself.