Until next time, Saints Marching.

So, after 18 months and nearly 600 articles, this is my final piece as Site Expert of the Saints Marching blog here at FanSided.

For those of you that don’t follow my personal Twitter or Saints Marching’s, I’m stepping down from my position as the co-editor of this site having been offered a full-time copywriter position that will leave me without any time to be able to keep up my commitment here.

For the majority of you who don’t know, I’ve been able to run this blog because I’ve juggled it alongside 30 over so hours a week in a restaurant I’ve worked in for five years – today is also my last day there as well. Anyone who has worked in hospitality knows the hours a lot less orthodox and I was able to run this site because I often wouldn’t start until at least 11:30am and I had the time and freedom to write on my three days off as well.

Either way, after 18 months running this site, this piece will be my last, so I wanted to make it more of a farewell piece than just something generic I could cough up in 30 minutes.

I actually never expected to stay in the role here as long as I did – for those who aren’t aware I spent about seven months writing as an unpaid contributor with another FanSided blog, Thunderous Intentions, before looking for an Expert position just before finishing my Sport Journalism degree as a means to get some pay for my writing even if it was just for two/three months.

However after that amount of time I was enjoying running the site so much I chose to have a good crack at it for around a year before getting a ‘proper job’ which is exactly what I’ve now done and I wouldn’t of got it without the experience running this site.

At times I’ve absolutely hated it and it’s been a massive slog to get pieces done but for the best part of the last 18 months it’s brought me unrivaled joy and pride. We’ve had at least 30 different people write for us over this year and a bit and have had at least one piece of content up every single day since Easter of last year. Over summer we smashed 100,000 views in a single month and in total we’ve had just shy of 750,000 views all in all which is absolutely crazy and beyond all my expectations when I took over.

I’ve had the pleasure of becoming acquainted with so many wonderful people over Twitter who I wouldn’t of met otherwise – Matt Markstone, Freddie from The Ugly Inside, the guys at the Southampton Page and so many more. I’ve been lucky enough to lend my thoughts to the first two and hopefully me stepping down here doesn’t stop that happening again in the future.

More from Saints Marching

Although we’ve had bigger writing teams in the past – a lot of whom have stepped on to bigger things (Dan Hargraves, Ben King, Luke Dennis, Jasper Shiner, Conor Dunford and so many more) the admin team for the blog has grown this calendar year and I’ve had the pleasure of working really closely with firstly Ed Waugh and secondly Marc Walker.

Ed has ran our Twitter incredibly for what must be around nine/ten months by now while Marc became my Co-Expert at the end of last season. I’m happy to say that another one of our writers, Ryan Borowski, will be stepping up to join this admin team as I depart. I can’t wait to see what direction these three can take the site.

Saints Marching wasn’t my creation nor was I the first man to run the site, but there was a four-month gap with no one at the helm so it very much like a case of starting from scratch. My girlfriend has hated me for it at times but this blog has been my absolute baby for the last year and a half – every little gap between Harvester shifts has been filled with writing, recruitment or editing it feels. I’d be lying if I were to say I’m not a bit emotional writing this and in passing the reigns over to Marc and Ryan, but I’m proud of how far this site has come since April last year.

I’ll miss regularly speaking to each and every contributor that the blog our currently has – some of our team like Erik and Nikos have worked with me for well over a year so it’ll be tough moving on and starting a new chapter which I’m doing in about 11 days time.

I’m sure the moment I hit publish on this I’ll forget one of the things I was planning to say or write – but for now I’d like to publicly thank the Soccer Director Khaled Abdallah for being such an approachable yet professional boss and for the people at Thunderous Intentions who made me a part of FanSided over two years ago.

Let’s just hope Southampton can start to actually win now…

Until next time.

Chris