Fifty Observations from (almost) completing the 92.
Part 2.
There is delight to be found in losing track of the game by instead of watching, googling Jack Barrett, Eric Whalley (Accrington) and Ray Wilkie (Barrow) in order to find out why they are so revered that they have a stand or bar named after them.
27. A lot of people are employed by clubs on matchdays. You have your external stewards welcoming and guiding fans unfamiliar with the ground. There is the surly bloke on the entrance to the bar in the stand. The turnstile attendants, the programme sellers, the security staff who pat you down, the club shop staff, the stewards, the refreshment staff, the emergency response workers, the hospitality staff … and all the others not listed here. One wonders how football matches happened when policed solely by a moody steward and an equally truculent copper back in the day.
28. Pubs around Goodison Park and Anfield seem to be Carling loyalists. Anyone looking for an alternative pint of ale or craft beer will be struggling – not even a pint of the now ubiquitous Neck Oil. One wonders what Merseysiders have against beer, and the nature of the weird stranglehold Carling seems to have on them. And how the hell did Madri corner the market so quickly in club bars and pubs? One week it’s Neck Oil, the next it’s Madri. Still, a little win is to ask for a pint of the rarely drunken local ale, and in doing so, receive a curious but pitying look as the friendly bar staff pulls your pint.
29. The matchday uniform is part of the match-going ritual for some. Take a look down next time you are stood on the terrace and count the number of Adidas Gazelle trainers. Then scan round and check out the amount of Barbour coats, zipped up jackets, and of course, the Henry Lloyd/Stone Island badges. This is not a new phenomenon, or indeed to be sneered at. It’s more to say that casual culture is as strong as ever.
30. Saturday afternoon shopping in a town or city centre isn’t a thing anymore. Even if the vast majority of your Saturdays have been spent watching football, there will have been the odd one, usually in the build up to Christmas, where you found yourself ambling round some high street shops before having an overpriced fancy coffee in a well-known chain of overpriced fancy coffee shops. But this type of thing seems to be declining. Walk through a provincial town or large city to a ground and there seems to be fewer Saturday shoppers than ever. No doubt, this is down to various economic factors which in turn have reduced the average high street to a barren wasteland of consumerism featuring a vape shop next to a charity shop next to an empty unit. It feels unwise to punch down on the Saturday shopper; it’s more that it feels quite sad that town and city centres are no longer an attractive proposition for many.
31. The universal awfulness of service stations continues There isn’t really much to add. Yes, of course I’ve stopped at Gloucester Services and sure, it’s lovely and all that, but not if you just want a sandwich and bag of crisps for a reasonable price. And after around 20.00, there is hardly anything worth eating for sale anyway. Not that this excuses the two Forest fans I watched lift a bottle of wine each from a display outside M&S and brazenly stroll to their car without paying after the away game at Burnley on the final day of the 2023/24 season. Poor form, chaps. Very poor form.
32. Bargain bins in club shops towards the end of the season hold treasure. You can pick up all kinds of unusual memorabilia, and it’s the perfect time to bag a shirt as the club tries to divert all eyes towards the new shirt for next season. Kudos to Walsall for selling their shirt for as little as a tenner, and extra bonus for it having POUNDLAND emblazoned on the front.
33. Listen in to local fans’ conversations and it will universally be about the last game.
‘We were terrible at Carlisle on Tuesday.’
‘Awful, weren’t we? We couldn’t pass the ball to each other.’
‘Even club player legend X had an off day.’
‘And new singing Y looks to be a dud. He doesn’t even look fit.’
We’ve all had these conversations. But at least the general rubbishness of our team’s last performance holds us together like glue and gives us something to talk about. We don’t go to the game for political discourse or workplace problems; we go to forget about such things and indulge in football small talk about our respective rubbish teams. Just leave us alone and let us get on with it – we aren’t hurting anyone.
34. It always strikes me how local residents near to a football ground exhibit general indifference to living near such an important and storied geographic feature. Every fibre of my being wants to shake them and loudly enquire, ‘How could you possibly be painting your fence or hoovering your car when an actual league game is about to start a mere 300 metres from you?! What is wrong with you? Don’t you even know about Jimmy Glass? Don’t you even care…?’
35. Organised fireworks displays are definitely an event in the lower leagues. Who knew they were so heavily advertised? Who knew they were a thing? (Oh, you all did, did you? Fair. It just somehow utterly passed me by.) Such events are advertised more than Elton John gigs in provincial, small, football grounds.
36. Another way to alleviate a tedious game of football is to note the weird and random advertising hoardings: Betterwave – what do you do? Is MFR Motors trustworthy? How much do EBay pay for a small board at Accrington? What exactly prompted Kellogg’s to pay for a small board? What the heck is Britcon and why are Scunthorpe so at the mercy of it? And scan hard enough – especially in the northwest – and you are never far away from a Rainham Steel advertisement.
37. The price of mugs from club shops varies dramatically from £4.99 - £12. (Reader, I have an infuriating habit of buying a mug from new grounds I go to; just lower league ones, mind, if that makes it any easier to understand, which obviously it doesn’t. On one occasion, I had the rather discombobulating feeling of being helped to buy my silly little mug in the club shop by one of the American cryptobro co-owners.) There should be a nationally agreed ceiling price on club mugs.
38. The strength of local pride and identity of away fans who mark their territory remains unshakeably strong. This manifests itself in a number of ways, but the favoured approach appears to be – upon exiting the train, minibus, car – loudly assert where you are from, be it postcode, county, general area (this is also displayed on the St George flag) in a shouty-sing-song manner.
39. When driving to a game, it used to be that one displayed your allegiances by carefully trapping a scarf in the rear or boot window, so it fluttered violently outside the car all the way up the M6. This has been replaced by the executive car sticker or personalised number plate to assert club loyalty, and our society is much the worse for it.
40. Gaining entry into some Premier League grounds as an away fan is akin to travelling through a particularly stringent airport. It is not unheard of to be required to empty pockets entirely into a tray, or to be told to open your wallet so the security guard can check the contents, or to be told to pull your trousers down to your ankles, or be patted on your head – without consent – to check you have nothing under your hat. These have all happened and been witnessed. While at some grounds, you are given a friendly smile and a ‘welcome to the game’. I much prefer the latter method.
41. Each home crowd consists of approximately 38% of sixty-years of age and over blokes who come week in, week out on their own. They are always in sensible clothes, sensible raincoats and quasi walking shoes, which are probably waterproof too. There is fun to be had working out which of these will make a seemingly uncharacteristic and sweary outburst towards the referee at some stage, which is a symptom of watching yet another frustrating performance from their team.
42. Driving to a new ground never fails to be exciting, but at some stage, you find yourself wondering how you actually managed to get anywhere successfully – never mind on time – before the age of satnav/maps. It’s a miracle so many grounds have actually been visited by so many.
43. So rare are they these days that to visit a ground within walking distance of a town/city centre is delightful – it feels like a big day out. More significantly, it encourages a sense of place: you know where you are, you have a sense of being somewhere, which you don’t get from walking through an industrial estate on the ring road or a science park. (Apologies – of a kind – to Colchester, Oxford, Shrewsbury. Kudos to Luton, Peterborough, Sheffield United, to name just a few.)
44. Like ultra-culture, flag-waving and safe-standing, murals around grounds has finally entered the football mainstream in the UK. Like all the above, it took its sweet time, but such art makes the traditional walk around the new ground an enticing one. You may even actively seek out a mural you have seen online. Such things engender a sense of identity to the area, and not in a threatening way, but in a warm and inviting ‘come and see who our heroes are around here’ way. And you invariably stand there agreeing and nodding and thinking, ‘Yeah, he was some player, wasn’t he?’
45. Half time entertainment varies. Sometimes there is none. A modern classic of the genre is kids playing small-sided games. A quirky twist is when some punter has to kick the ball into a skip or the boot of a car. A slightly left-field option is when kids run with a ball around the edge of the pitch. All well and good, but bring back demonstrations of police dogs attacking a would-be criminal wearing a suspiciously heavily padded jacket around the forearm.
46. There is a very distinctive shade of dusk that you get at around 16.45 on a Saturday in November. It’s the shade of final scores on the radio, of steamed windows in cars, of a tea of chip shop chips, of childhood.
47. Drums. We need to talk about drums. Especially single drums. They sometimes authoritatively lead the cheer; on other occasions, they are played by a drunken youth who was regularly kicked out of music lessons at school, and add nothing. On such occasions, they diminish the whole atmosphere. Some achievement that. Think about your single drum and what it adds.
48. Whatever ground you are at, you’ll hear the same chants, but ever so slightly recycled. The current one doing the rounds is the one that goes And that’s the way we like it, Woah-Ah-oh-oh-oh. It’s crushing when you hear what you think is an original song then adapted and used by every single other fanbase. Do better, everyone. It’s difficult, but do better. At least try. Better to try something different and original than rehash at the rate of a MCU film.
49. Late autumn and you enter a ground in hazy sunshine. You exit the ground into a dark, wintry blackness and it makes you feel you’ve achieved something with your Saturday and can respond with something vaguely interesting to the universal work colleague question, ‘Do anything nice at the weekend?’ Yeah. Yeah, I definitely did.
50. How little all of this matters in the big scheme of life, but at the same time, how much all of this matters in the big scheme of life.
Part 1 is here.
If you don’t know me, I am the author of ‘Reds and Rams: The History of the East Midlands Derby’ and ‘The History Boys: Thirty Iconic Forest Goals’ (both available in the Forest club shop). I have written pieces for Mundial magazine, Football Weekends magazine, edited two award-nominated fanzines and was a columnist in the Nottingham Forest programme for eight years.
If you do know me, I’m truly sorry.
