Doing the 92 is Daniel Storey’s odyssey to every English football league club in a single season. This is club 91/92. The best way to follow his journey and read all of the previous pieces is by subscribing here
I
On the mantelpiece of Steve Townsend’s home, a smoothed white heart is perched upon a stand. Next to it stands a small figurine of a West Bromwich Albion supporter wearing a bucket hat. In the middle of the two is a framed photo of Steve’s brother Mark, looking sideways at the camera with a broad grin upon his face.
“He was my brother and the best mate I could ever have had,” says Steve. “If I needed advice, he was there. But it wasn’t just me. There were 200 people at his funeral who had worked with him and my phone didn’t stop all day with other colleagues who wanted to come and couldn’t.
“He treated every person how he wanted to be treated and never went out of his way to be nasty to anyone. His whole life was Marion [his wife], his dog Alfie and his family and friends. He just spent his time making sure that those around him were happy in their lives.”
Mark and Steve were always close but, as with so many siblings across the country, football was the great connector. Mark, six years Steve’s senior, took his little brother to stand on the Birmingham Road End and to away games on the train. They travelled the length and breadth of England watching Albion. When Mark got married to Marion, the flowers had ribbons in the right colours.
And yet 2024-25 was a landmark season for Mark. A year away from retirement, he and Marion were having a house built in Donegal where they would spend their time in relaxed contentment. Obviously Mark was still planning to fly over for matches regularly. Once a month was the plan; at least once a month.
With Steve caring for his wife Jo, who spoke at length about just how at ease Mark had always made her feel, he was attending fewer away matches. With Steve’s son Matt having a season ticket alongside them, Mark would take his nephew to away games. Steve and Jo were proud of the friendship that Matt and Mark shared too: snooker, concerts, the football. Two more best mates, continuing the lineage.
West Brom 1-3 Derby County (Monday 21 April)
- Game no: 87/92
- Miles: 109
- Cumulative miles: 16,870
- Total goals seen: 227
- The one thing I’ll remember in May: West Brom is the most comfortable press box in the country and has the best view from the media room. These things matter, sorry.
II
On 28 September, West Brom were top of the Championship and playing away at Sheffield Wednesday in the lunchtime kick-off. There was a spare ticket for Steve, but he couldn’t be away from Jo for 14 hours and so Mark and Matt went together. They left the house early and Steve was sent a photo of the two of them enjoying breakfast in a Wetherspoons.
Twenty minutes before the game started, another photo of the pair in the Leppings Lane End of Hillsborough with cheesy grins. As Jo says with a rueful smile, the thing that jumps out at her and Steve is just how normal that photograph is, a snapshot in time before the worst happened.
Albion fell two goals down in the first quarter of the match. Shortly after the second goal Steve, watching on TV in the lounge where we are now sat, heard the Sky Sports commentator mention that there was some commotion noticeable in the away end: frantic waving of arms and shouting for the game to stop.
Before he could really process what was happening, Steve’s phone rang. It was Matt. Mark had collapsed in the away end and they were trying to get help as soon as possible. He had suffered a cardiac arrest at the match.
Exactly what happened next is open to interpretation and investigation. All of it matters deeply, but nothing can change the simple horror of the result: Mark Townsend passed away at the age of 57. Steve got one more call from his son, made from the paramedic’s car as it followed the ambulance on the way to the hospital. An hour later he received the third phone call, this time from a nurse. It was the worst news.
There is none of this story that doesn’t punch you in the stomach. We all go to football, on some level, for escapism. It is our own personal happy place but also an environment in which connections are made. Thus it feels like a place of safety and comfort. To have that ripped away is unthinkably grim.
Two things stick out more than most. First, the strength of Steve. He had to deliver the news to his own parents. He had to go to the factory where he and Mark worked to spend hours with devastated colleagues. To understand the case for a full inquest, he has watched back the CCTV footage that details, vividly, the worst moments of his life.
That all takes some doing. Nobody can prepare for any of it.
III
With the help of solicitors and witness statements from 40 different people that Steve worked tirelessly with supporters to collect, including an off-duty paramedic who Steve is hugely grateful to, a full inquest will begin on 29 September 2025, a year and a day since Mark’s death.
It will examine the training of the medical staff, the timing of the response and the use and suitability of medical equipment used. The opportunity to ask questions will be given to Mark’s family as well as Sheffield Wednesday, Yorkshire Ambulance Service, Lambda Medical and the Sports Ground Safety Authority.
Steve already has his questions. They have been whirring around his mind for months and the list grows as he sees and hears more witness testimonies.
Why is there a gap between the response time that Sheffield Wednesday state and what those there, including his own son, say? Did the emergency message get to the chief steward in a sufficiently efficient manner? Were the medical staff from Lambda as appropriately trained as any reasonable person would like?
Why, as Steve says it appears on the footage, were there no straps on the board that Mark was carried away on? Was there a change of defibrillators – if so, exactly why? Why was the decision made not to take Mark straight down to the concourse to be worked on? Why did the CCTV footage take so long to be released to him?
I ask Steve and Jo if the inquest will provide a sense of closure. That’s definitely relevant, they say, but it’s also about learning as much as possible. I completely understand that desire: they were both in an extraordinarily difficult position, simultaneously watching on television and getting updates on the phone, feeling like they were there, and yet clearly more than a hundred miles away and so powerless. That’s incredibly difficult to process.
As Steve says, there’s something more at play here and it is to his immense credit: what can be done to stop this happening again? Nobody should go through what he, Matt, Marion, Jo and Mark’s parents went through. If there is anything to learn, without vindication, to make suffering a cardiac arrest at a high-profile football match less likely to end in this way, that learning is non-negotiable.
“This happened to us,” Steve says. “But it also happened to football. It could have been anyone else at any other game. We have to know that everything is being done to keep people as safe as possible. There is so much money in football but that has to be its number one priority.”
IV
That could have been the end of this story, but as I heard Steve talk about the events of 28 September and the aftermath, it became clear that the behaviour and support of West Bromwich Albion is crucial to mention. Steve has always and will always love his football club, but the manner in which they stepped up is both an example to follow and a shining light through a terrible tragedy.
It started on the day itself, when two club officials went to the hospital and stayed with Matt until Marion arrived. When the inquest was scheduled to last 10 days, the club told the Townsend family that they should not be driving to and from the hearings daily; something would be arranged.
Since last September, the club have kept in touch with Steve and Jo, Marion and Steve’s parents; there were commemorative flowers but the ongoing thought means more. On the day of Mark’s funeral, the club emptied out of staff to form a guard of honour and pay their respects to the cortege. It was the club who linked the family up with Irwin Mitchell solicitors to help with the case.
On 1 October, three days after Mark passed away, West Brom hosted Middlesbrough at the Hawthorns. Mark’s family were invited to the game as guests of honour of the club. Before the match, Matt and Steve went to sit in their usual seats where a home shirt had been draped on Mark’s chair. They sat for a few minutes, swapped stories and had a hug.
On the walk back from the seats, inside an empty stadium, John Homer, the Chairman of the West Bromwich Albion Supporters’ Club, began to sing The Lord Is My Shepherd. Having held it together, Steve says, that was when the tears began to flow: “I think I pretended that I had grass in my eye,” he jokes. “I just wanted to stay back a while.”
Mark’s image was displayed upon the big screens and supporters laid flowers, including those from Middlesbrough. Fans who sat five, 10, 20 rows away from Mark, Steve and Matt came over to offer condolences and support. Shilen Patel, West Brom’s major shareholder and chairman, knelt down to chat to Jo in her wheelchair and spent time with Mark’s Mum and Dad.
That is what people who don’t watch live football fail to appreciate: there are unbreakable bonds here that do not rely upon constant reassurance nor even necessarily meeting before. It is the sense of community that drives it all, a shared love that is strengthened by unity, and it permeates through every person: top to bottom, bottom to top, all around.
One moment that evening epitomised the unity. As Matt and Steve were sat in their seats during the game, they could see a steward making his way around two sides of the pitch towards them. The steward had been at Sheffield Wednesday on duty with the away supporters and wanted to make sure to find a way to check that Matt, only 22, was OK after what had happened. They had seen him leave with the paramedics and felt that they needed to check in.
“I mean I love this club anyway,” Steve says. “But right then I knew that everything they say about being a family club is true. And they have proved it time and time again since.”
V
Matt and Steve still go to the football together – Matt has only missed one home game since he lost his uncle when he and his girlfriend went on holiday to Thailand. That meant, for the first time in almost 40 years, Steve went to the game by himself.
“I walked up the steps to my seat and somebody asked me if my Matt was in the toilet or at the bar,” he says. “I’m glad I composed myself before I went in, because I sat down and I had Matt’s empty seat on one side and Mark’s on the other. I told myself to suck it up: focus on the game.”
Steve intends to create a legacy out of tragedy. Coincidentally, it was a Sheffield Wednesday supporter who set up One In Every Corner, a campaign to increase the number of defibrillators in football grounds after his daughter died after a short illness.
Steve will work with them to push for better, everywhere. He firmly believes that there should be established rules to increase the equipment in stadiums on a sliding scale according to ground capacity. As he says, we’re talking about hundreds of pounds in a sport awash with many millions.
But West Bromwich Albion have created a legacy too. Their support for the family has reinforced a message that a football club is only as strong as the supporter that is relying upon it most. They did all this not for kudos or praise – although it is due – but because it was the right thing to do. Steve will never forget that.
This summer, Steve and Matt have a decision to make. The season ticket renewal date is approaching and Steve has told his son that he would fully understand if he wanted to move away from the seat that would always be empty to them, even if it was occupied.
As yet, the decision is left unmade. I can see the reason to start a new era, a lad and his Dad going to watch Albion without a little of the emotional baggage. But then, as Steve says, where do you sit? There will always be an empty space somewhere. There will be more games where Steve has to go by himself.
Still, there is a guy and his daughter on one side of their current seats and a mate who used to work with the brothers on the other. In front are an entire family, grandfather down to youngest grandson. All looked after him in the aftermath of that horrible September day. That’s the abiding, beautiful truth: you’re never alone at your home stadium.
Daniel Storey has set himself the goal of visiting all 92 grounds across the Premier League and EFL this season. You can follow his progress via our interactive map and find every article (so far) here
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