I really like football.
and
I spent much of the ‘70’s, ‘80’s and ‘90’s watching Wisbech Town Football Club.
It was probably when I was aged seven or eight that I first accompanied my dad and brothers to Fenland Park to watch The Fenmen, as Wisbech town are nicknamed. It seemed that they fielded the same team for much of the next two decades that I attended. I saw them win the league one season and beat clubs they were expected to lose to in the FA Cup or FA Vase but mostly watching them week in and week out was a festival of disappointment. This is not the beautiful game of Arsenal and Liverpool. Football at this level is a little more basic. It’s not Bach or Mozart it’s Saturday night Karaoke at The Nags Head. I’ve seen many First Division and Premiership matches and know the difference. Perhaps that’s the point. People go to watch lower league football because it’s a group of people just like them doing something they could feasibly do. When you watch Thierry Henry that just isn’t the case. Also, football on the television and live football are completely different things. I realised this the first time I saw Peter Beardsley playing for Liverpool. It’s a commentator’s cliché but he ran for the entire length of the game and covered every inch of the pitch and made a contribution to the team and the game that was never apparent when I’d seen the team play on television. The experience and the players at huge stadiums can all seem a little distant though. I recently saw Marti Pellow sing at a theatre that seated only 250 people. Even if you were leaning against the back wall your view would be as perfect as the sound was. I now want to watch every musician or band play in that venue, even if it’s The Rolling Stones. Perhaps all of those years at Fenland Park taught me to love the intimacy of lower league football. Or mediocrity.
An important part of the live football experience is the crowd, the chants and the interaction between the crowd and the players. At Fenland Park I always stood in the same place, in the same stand, surrounded by the same people making the same jokes and the same criticisms of the players and opposition. The jokes were so bad sometimes you couldn’t help but laugh. You also laughed because of the familiarity of the same jokes being repeated each week. Unfortunately, at Wisbech there was occasionally the nastiness of racism too. Since there was no ethnic diversity in the town there was a fear of difference and this was unpleasantly projected at visiting black players. Les Ferdinand, who played there once, has said it’s the worst place he ever played at. Not good. Wisbech didn’t have a great reputation. This largely wasn’t because of the genuine supporters though. A certain element came out of the woodwork for the bigger games. There was a small riot after an FA Cup game in about 1985. There wasn’t any riot police intervention to put and end to this although there was a police presence. I remember watching the crowd rocking a Police van with all of the officers inside it. The jokes and banter can also be found at the bigger games. Barry Venison may well have been a very successful, and possibly talented, player for Liverpool and Newcastle but I can’t be the only person who thinks of him as a man with a bleached blonde mullet and nothing more. I was among the Arsenal supporters, and supporting Liverpool, at Highbury on one early ‘90’s occasion when Mr Venison was playing for Liverpool. “Venison!”, “Venison!” shouted an Arsenal supporter close to me when Barry came close to us. He ignored the first couple. “Venison!”, “Venison!” and Barry turned around towards the man addressing him. “You’re shit!!” the man then shouted and our small area of the crowd cheered. I wondered why he would fall for that when he’d been playing for so many years and must have been taunted similarly before. Did he think this random man in the crowd was going to pass on a message from his mother? In the second half the shout came from the crowd again; “Venison!”, “Venison!”. Again, he ignored it but after several more he again turned towards the man addressing him. “Your hair’s shit!!” he shouted. He’d fallen for the same trick twice within 90 minutes. The reason why he’d fallen for it was clear. He was an idiot.
While we lived in Hull the football club enjoyed their most successful period ever but I didn’t go and see them. I followed them in the local paper and listened for discussions about the team and manager on the local radio station and was overjoyed when they were promoted to the premiership but still didn’t ever go and watch a game. It was only when we moved to Leamington Spa, with its tiny, minor league football team that I felt it was time to return to watching live games. On Saturday they played their second home game but this was the first I was able to attend.
I knew it would be an interesting experience having already noted from the Leamington FC website that the ground wasn’t actually in Leamington and their head office was in Stratford but I wasn’t prepared for my SatNav to deliver me to a spot surrounded by fields that was actually a mile from the ground. I rang the club to find out where they might be hiding. “No, no, my friend a SatNav won’t get you here. I can tell you exactly where you are right now”, the man answering the phone said as if I were the 48th lost caller that day. I didn’t tell him that I knew where I was it was where he was that I was keen to discover but he swiftly delivered some surprisingly accurate directions that largely involved me looking upwards to see the floodlights on the horizon.
I arrived in time, paid my entrance fee, bought a programme and joined 765 others to watch the match. It was like the Wisbech Town play only with different actors saying the lines since I was in a group of men in their fifties and sixties making jokes and criticisms and shouting abuse at the linesman. The crowd seemed to be largely made up of the cognitively and socially impaired, allowed out without the supervision of their carer or probation officer for a couple of hours so I felt nicely at home. During the match announcements came over the tanoy that a mobile phone had been found and later a pair of spectacles. They were a forgetful bunch. I was a little concerned that so little of the ground (The New Windmill) is under cover which may make for some chilly experiences in a few months time. Leamington scored quite early in the match and then decided to play like a group of men who’d never met before let alone trained and played together and so invited Banbury United to equalise and then take the lead. It was all very familiar. Just like at Wisbech at half time the fans who stood behind the goals changed ends. You don’t get that when Chelsea play Villa. At half-time the results of a raffle were announced. The prize was a scratchcard. So, not actually a prize but the chance to win a prize. In the 65th minute a player I’m fairly confident was called Marcus Jackson was the victim of a pretty innocuous foul and a free-kick was awarded. While the manager was still screaming at the Ref that he should have played an advantage Leamington scored. The manager was now clearly unsure if he should continue to protest or celebrate. Banbury quickly changed to an unorthodox attacking 3-3-4 formation and within two minutes conceded another goal and Leamington (The Brakes) took the lead. What excitement. Since football matches should last for 90 minutes Leamington played for only that length of time and stopped trying during injury time and, tragically, Banbury equalised (3-3) in the 92nd minute.
I’ll go again.
