Newcastle
2 Portsmouth 1
6th October 1990
Team: Burridge, Anderson, Sweeney, Scott,
Ranson, Aitken, O’Brien, Dillon, Brock,
Quinn, McGhee
Crowd 17,682
“Three passions,
simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love,
the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.”(Bertrand
Russell)
I used to get up very late on Saturdays. The
cumulative effects of the working week, gallons of imported lager and three or
four nights a week standing around in chilly, half-full pub back rooms and
cellars took their toll. Especially during the 1990/1991 season; there wasn’t
much about Newcastle United that stirred you from sleep, to feverishly
anticipate the coming match. . We’d lost the unmentionable play-off game three
months previous and seen our squad supposedly strengthened by the arrivals of
Scott Sloan and Neil Simpson. Admittedly the season started satisfactorily with
wins over Plymouth and Blackburn, at an eerily deserted Ewood Park, but things
went downhill with losses to Millwall and Bristol City and wins thrown away
against West Ham and Sheff Wed with ludicrous and late equalisers. Three days
before Portsmouth rolled up; we’d drawn 0-0 against the Smogs and were marooned
in mid table. Crowds had just dipped under twenty thousand and wouldn’t
recover, apart from the cup games that season against Derby and Forest, until
KK arrived eighteen months later, but that’s another story.
Around this time, though I wasn’t to know it,
my life was about to change dramatically; the day after the Boro game, I
trudged to work in a foul mood and immediately met the woman I would later
marry. This woman, who I quickly learned was called Sara, had been sent by
Newcastle University on her postgraduate teacher training to the school in
South Shields (long since pulled down) where I spent a decade alternately
staring out of the windows and watching the second hand of my watch crawl
towards 3.45. Idly chatting in the staff room, we discovered a mutual interest
in music. In those days, being single, employed and reasonably affluent, I
would regularly see a couple of gigs a week on average; regardless of merit,
I’d be there if they were loud and indie. A Peel play or a halfway positive
review in the NME was reason enough for me to be there. Riverside,
The Broken Doll, The Cumberland Arms and medium
sized venues like The University, The Poly and, to a lesser extent, The
Mayfair.
The first weekend of October 1990 was perhaps
the nearest we’d ever get in Newcastle to musical perfection, with a home game
against Portsmouth somewhere in the middle. On the Friday, That Petrol Emotion
were playing Riverside, on the Saturday The Pogues were
headlining at The Poly and the real biggie was Sunday, when The Pixies would
face a sell-out Mayfair. As well as writing for The Mag, I would
also scribble a few lines for a now defunct music magazine called Paint
It Red, as I thought being able to say “Hi! I’m a music journalist”
would get me more than a flat refusal when attempting to impress nubile
undergraduates from the Shire counties. It didn’t. Of course you didn’t get paid
for those opinionated doodles; that wasn’t the point, because we were all doing
it for the love. That said freebies, promos and most important, guest list
places made it all worthwhile. I managed to impress Sara by casually offering
her a free ticket for The Pixies, which she readily accepted, though it was the
chance to see a big name rather than a night out with a pretentious gobshite
teacher that impressed her I’d imagine. However, there was a long weekend ahead
of me before Sunday evening.
Friday night was about to kickstart the
weekend, with That Petrol Emotion headlining at The Riverside.
While I curse the fact I didn’t get to see The Undertones in their original
incantation, I’d seen That Petrol Emotion, a spikier, less poppy version of the
original band, dozens of times in Leeds, London, Belfast and Derry during my
student and post student wanderings, but this was their first time in Newcastle
since I’d moved back in the summer of 1988 (Typical me, I leave when Keegan
signs and return in readiness for our relegation campaign).
The gig was great, I’ve still got the 7”
flexi given out to all punters, and naturally, the backstage party I’d invited
myself to was extended to the hotel. Over 3 a.m. champagne and cognacs, courtesy
of the record company, the rest band expressed a deep disappointment that they
had to be away off to Glasgow by Saturday lunchtime and so couldn’t come to St.
James Park, as they had wanted to hear “the famous Geordie roar” first hand.
The fact that four Irish rock stars (the American singer wasn’t that keen to be
fair) who were, unsurprisingly, uniformly Celtic and Man United fans and had,
more importantly, released four albums on Virgin wanted to come
and watch our shower of shite stunned me. Why would anyone want to watch
Newcastle when you didn’t have to? I mean, I loved the team and reckoned we
were about to launch our promotion push at any second, but I couldn’t in all
honesty have made any sort of sales pitch to the unconverted about the merits
of our wonderful stadium and its atmosphere and or the languid ball skills of
our team. Especially against non-entities like Portsmouth. As I staggered out
on to Osborne Road at first light, I promised them a programme each and struck
out for the first Metro home.
When I woke up at noon, my first thought was
not the imminent match; it was the raging hangover that was poisoning me. These
days the thought of drinking alcohol on successive days sends me lurching
towards the Seven Step Recovery programme, but as a callow mid-twenties social
gadfly, I knew a hair of the dog was a top priority. A quick visit to Greggs’
later and then I was ready for a substantial liquid lunch. Nowadays 52,000
punters in town on a match day means that all the pubs are heaving before Football
Focus has even started, but that wasn’t the case in 1990. You could go
on a pub-crawl and we did; The Star, Bourgoynes, The
Newcastle Arms and Rosies was an absolute minimum. You
could leave at 2.55, pay in to the Gallowgate and still see kick off. For us,
negotiating the stairs up to the Milburn Stand was a bigger test of balance and
bladder control than stamina. To be frank, the football was so lousy,
uninspiring and downright dull that the best part of the day was the pre match
boozing. So it was; I took my place among a crowd of 17,682 for this
all-to-unimportant mid-table clash.
The game, as far as I remember it through a
fug of 23 long years and senses dulled by several pints for breakfast, was as
dire as anyone would have anticipated. Mickey Quinn scored both of our goals
against the team he would break his kneecap scoring against a year to the day
later. Both headers, from O’Brien crosses. Ugly goals. Unimaginative goals.
Third rate goals. Jim Smith goals. Yet that is what we were at the time; while
the rest of England basked in Gazzamania and the post World Cup feelgood factor
and faceless financial whizzkids peered intently at balance sheets and worked
out a way to put fewer snouts in a bigger trough, which would eventually become
The Premiership, Newcastle continued to shamble aimlessly along. Twenty
thousand at the game and two hundred thousand at home whinging about our
performance.
One incident I remember clearly was
Portsmouth’s goal, scored by one of the most honest players I’ve ever been
privileged to watch. A Portsmouth throw-in, taken by John Beresford, from the
East Stand side came in to the box at the Gallowgate end. One person rose
tallest, prepared to do his duty; John Anderson appeared from nowhere to bullet
a header past Burridge to give the dozen or so Pompey fans false hope of a
point. Ando’s head in his hands, Burridge hand on hips, hundreds of indignant
signs denoting sexual self-abuse appearing out of the Gallowgate and all of us
pissed ones in the Milburn laughing. It was as good as Dabizas v Spurs or Scott
v Brentford.
Thankfully, Portsmouth were as dreadful as we
were, if not worse, as they finished 17th to our 15th in
the final table. They failed to produce another shot during the game as the
clock aimlessly ticked away. We held out for our first win in five games and
made it down to the traditional post match watering hole of The Three
Bulls with a spring in our step. While poring over our copies of The
Pink, it seemed clear a couple of good wins would have us putting pressure
on pacesetters Oldham and Notts County (ahem). It’ll come as no surprise to
most of you that we embarked upon a seven game winless run after the Portsmouth
match. Now the gang of us who went to the match then, are pretty much the same
gang as I go with now, on my infrequent visits. As ever, I was the odd one out;
they were all either married with kids, shacked up or courting strong and their
idea of music was Texas or Simple Minds. The fact that I was not only staying
out, instead of going home to for a wash and a clean shirt was bad enough, but
the fact I was about to spend my Saturday night with a thousand sweaty students
at a Pogues gig was incomprehensible to them.
To this day, The Pogues are one of my all
time favourites, but they were in a fallow period back then. Shane McGowan was
in his last days of his first phase and their recently released album Hell’s
Ditch had bombed. While the lyrics were still as good as ever, the
voice had gone and the music was all mid tempo rock. Frankly, the gig was an
absolute turkey; McGowan sang about five songs maximum and kept wandering off
stage. It didn’t seem to bother the audience though, as they bobbed up and down
and sang Celtic and Ireland songs in a Home Counties accent. Now I’m as guilty
as anyone of being a Plastic Paddy, with my Irish passport and lifelong support
for the Shamrock as opposed to the Three Lions, but this got on my nerves. We
were in Newcastle and what is more, the lads had won. Much to the disgust of my
mate Al, whose only experience of football was our 4-0 howking by Everton on
Boxing Day 1986, I started to sing Newcastle football songs, in the hope of
rallying the crowd. Not a chance; I was a voice crying in the wilderness. Maybe
it would be more accurate to say I was drowning in beer. The louder I battled through
I Love To Go A Wandering Along The Cliffs Of Dover or We’ve
Been To Chelsea, We’ve Been To Stoke, the worse it got. Half-cut
students slam danced in to me as a downbeat Pogues struggled through low
quality karaoke versions of songs that should have made us all stand and cheer.
Pissed and pissed off, I cut my losses with a carry out and a taxi home, in
which I left the Newcastle v Portsmouth programmes I’d bought for the TPE lads.
I tried to engage the driver in conversation about the match, but he wasn’t
interested.
Next morning, my performance in the Tyneside
Sunday League was a study in immobility.
I didn’t do it because I was any good at it, in fact my performances
deteriorated on those rare occasions I played without a hangover, nor did I do
it for social reasons, as I was always the most unpopular player among my
peers, I did it to scourge myself for all the boozing I did. On this particular
Sunday, the Khmer Rouge could have come up with a more cruel and unusual
punishment than making me walk around for 90 minutes on a grassy corner of
Gateshead. Suffice to say, I was ready for bed come full time. However, in the
nearest approximation I had to being a dutiful son, I went to see the parents
for Sunday dinner and to pick up my ironing. Over lunch my dad, whose last game
had been against Sheff Wed in August 1984, gave me a blow-by-blow summary of
the match, courtesy of what he’d picked up from the Sunday Sun and
Radio Newcastle.
Come five o’clock, I was back home and
relaxed; stretched out in front of the fire at home marking exercise books and
listening to Swervedriver’s debut album. I was aching from the football,
dehydrated from the beer, exhausted from the lack of sleep and looking forward
to an early night. The phone rang; it was Sara, wondering where and at what
time we were meeting for The Pixies. Quite frankly, the idea of another night
on my feet if not the beer, when I had an early start and a full week ahead of
me, was not an appealing one. However, I am nothing if not honourable and so
found myself in The Trent House at seven thirty. For an hour and
a bit Sara and I made stilted, self-conscious conversation about teaching, our
background and music. The fact I was exhausted and not even drinking made me
tense and her bored. Chemistry? We were two inert gases in a deep freeze. Going
to the gig should have been a relief, but it wasn’t. The Pixies, after
conquering the world with their previous album Doolittle had
received lousy reviews for its follow-up Trompe Du Monde and
tensions were growing in the band. None of us watching were to know it, but
this would be their last tour before splitting. Their astonishing descent in to
mediocrity and then oblivion was hinted in the show, whereby older material was
fiercely played and ecstatically received, while the new material was
perfunctorily dashed off to muted applause. Members of the band stormed off
stage for no apparent reason and then came back again. There wasn’t a word
addressed from the stage to the audience. Thankfully, the whole thing was over
by nine thirty. A total let down. I didn’t bother even asking Sara if she
fancied another drink, but she asked me.
We went to The Strawberry, which
was still in its radfem Friday and radgey Saturday incarnation. Gesturing at
the ground with my pint of blackcurrant and soda, I mentioned that I’d been
there the day before to see a hopeless game. Imagine my surprise when Sara not
only repeated the score, but announced she’d seen the goals on the telly and
further volunteered the information she was a Barnsley fan, who had gone to
games regularly all her life. To say I was impressed would be an
understatement. From then on, we relaxed and had a laugh, talking about
football of course. Three weeks later, I took her on our first proper date to
see Newcastle draw 0-0 with Barnsley in a game that made the Portsmouth one
seem like the 1970 World Cup final in comparison. On January 2nd
1991, the day after Mark Stimson scored an injury time equaliser against Oldham
on the Boundary Park plastic pitch to deny us victory, we moved in together and
we married in the summer of 1992.
Looking back that weekend in October 1990, it
tells me a lot of things about my life. Firstly, people move on. That Petrol
Emotion split in 1994, only to reform last year as The Everlasting Yeah Shane
McGowan is a hopeless alcoholic somewhere in County Tipperary. Both he and
Frank Black, the leader of The Pixies, reformed their bands. I can’t understand
why anyone wants to go and see them; October 7th 1990 was
enough to sour my attitude to them to the extent I have no interest whatsoever
in their reformation shows this autumn. The only thing that lasts is love; I’m
still hopelessly, head over heels and wide-eyed in love with the greatest, most
positive, life-affirming aspect of that weekend.
While Sara and I divorced in 2001, home
victories (for Heaton Stannington more than Newcastle United) are as treasured
and doted upon as ever.
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