Hi, I’m Tim. I’m a bit of a sports nut. Football, Rugby, American Football… I’ll give pretty much anything a chance. Unfortunately, my ability to play these sports doesn’t match my ability to talk about them. I used to find that I’d have a lot of views about what was going on in the sporting world, but no-one to discuss them with, so felt starting Eyes on the Ball would be the perfect way to stop my brain from exploding!

I’m Gloucester born and raised so it’s no real surprise that my sport of choice is rugby union and my favourite colours are Cherry & White. I played locally for Longlevens RFC at junior level and also for one year at senior level, while also helping out with one of the junior teams for 3 years after returning from uni. In my last year of university at Aberystwyth, I set up a rugby 7s team, the Pistol Shrimps, which has competed in the Aber 7s annually since 2012. As someone who had spent the majority of my time playing rugby in the front row or second row – except for a few games at flanker and one unexpected appearance at outside centre – 7s was something completely foreign for me, so a lot of weekends were spent in the pub watching the Sevens World Series for ‘research purposes’ and this really helped me expand my rugby horizons to enjoy a much more open and flowing style of play that I hadn’t appreciated so much in my days as a prop.

I’ve been a fan of the NFL since my early teens, as a group of us guys at school really got into the Madden games. Having family living in America, I had memories of watching the Tennessee Titans on TV when I went over to visit, so as I began to enjoy the game they naturally became my team of choice as it looked like that was the family team… It turned out the US-based family are Cowboys fans, but it was too late by then!

Besides sports, I am a huge fan of Star Wars and have started a second blog to focus on that: The Canon Padawan. I am also a huge fan of a show called the Movie Trivia Schmoedown on YouTube – which I found through my Star Wars fandom – and I also plan to write about that on here. More recently, I have also started writing on the Schmoedown’s official website – triviasd.com