Je déteste mon enfance
et tout ce qui reste de celui-ci - Jean Paul Sartre (Les Mots)
Being born in a stable
does not make one a horse – The Duke of Wellington
It would be fair to say I have a troubled emotional
relationship with Gateshead; the “dirty back alley that leads to Newcastle”
(Robert Louis Stevenson), which was my place of birth and home for my formative
years. While I often retell the story of how, when applying for University, my
dad took me to one side and urgently suggested I investigate the courses on
offer at Aberdeen or Exeter that was done more with a desire to see me make my
way in the world than to get me out from under his feet. Or at least that’s
what I try to tell myself. Mind I think I trumped him by ending up in County
Derry, which prompts the question; just what the hell was he doing allowing me
to move there in 1983? The Sunday after I arrived set the tone for my studies,
as I saw huge brawls in the Student Union bar when news broke of a mass escape
from the Maze by Republican Prisoners. I think the short answer is that I was a
teenage twat and they were delighted to see the back of me; this was reinforced
when I got home at the end of my first term to find all my punk, new wave and
indie vinyl shunted into a box at the bottom of a walk-in cupboard and my
bedroom walls transformed from a collection of garish, non-parallel
hand-painted black and white stripes and a huge McEwan’s Lager poster of
the Inverbraw Grouse Beaters to a pale floral pattern flock wallpaper.
In the way that we all seek to rewrite our lives, my
personal narrative has incorporated the detail I left home the day Peter
Beardsley signed, two days after a routine 3-1 home win over Crystal Palace
early in our promotion season, never to return. This, of course, isn’t true.
While I did spend 5 peripatetic years studying, loafing and skinning up in
Ireland, London and Leeds, I returned in late summer 1988 to start work
properly, as a teacher. What I often fail to mention is that I bought my first
property not in High Heaton, where I arrived in 1998 or Spital Tongues, which
saw me purchase a house in 1991, but back in Felling. I was 27 when I finally
left NE10 and so I’ve only been effectively away from the south side, which
I’ve never call the Geordie Left Bank for obvious reasons, for considerably
less than half my life.
While a refracted portrayal of the influence of my youth
will probably be best served by fictional reimaginings of my formative years
that will end up at http://gilipollez.wordpress.com/
I think it is beholden of me to write about my relationship with Gateshead
Football Club, especially on the back of the terribly unfortunate loss to
Oxford United in the FA Cup first round replay on an unspeakably cold Thursday
night in early December.
When I mentioned the fact I would be writing about this to
two of my dearest friends, Adrian Ragsdale and Shaun Smith, both of whom are
Gateshead fans, their immediate and instinctive reaction was that they wouldn’t
read this blog, perhaps out of fear that I’d say something harsh or callous
about their club. Let me put their minds at rest straightaway; I won’t. After
all, I was at Gateshead’s first ever game at the International Stadium back in
1974 when they beat East Fife 3-2 in a pre-season friendly. Back then they were
known as Gateshead United, assuming that name on moving from Simonside Hall
ground and consequently changing their name from South Shields, though they
kept the claret and blue colours of the Mariners in those early years. Clearly
I’m too young to have known anything about Redheugh Park, the Callender
Brothers or being kicked out of the Football League for Peterborough in 1961.
Such tales were not part of my childhood narrative either as my Dad always
maintained he was much more likely to watch Newcastle Reserves when the first
team were away than visit Gateshead.
I have little or no memory of that East Fife game, other
than the fact it was on a Monday evening as I accompanied my dad, who had had to
attend his weekly meeting of his trade union, EETPTU (no he didn’t like Frank Chappell, always describing him as
“a bosses’ man”) in Dunston before we got there. I remember Dad finding us a
spot just to the right of where the main stand is now, while I can only recall
clambering around on the banks of loose shale behind the goal and half watching
the game. Back then, aged 10, I was an avid reader of the Gateshead Post sports
pages and every Thursday I would pore over match reports, learning of
Gateshead’s progress in the Northern Premier League. My next visit was for an
FA Cup second round tie on December 13th 1975; a bitterly cold day
and a frozen pitch saw Gateshead draw 1-1 with Rochdale, only to lose the
replay 3 days later. I have a dim memory of attending the International Stadium
again on New Year’s Day 1976, with my dad and my Uncle John and vaguely recall
the Heed, as nobody ever called them before the internet was invented, winning
2-0, but I can’t find results grids for this competition so can’t confirm that.
I also can’t recall Gateshead United going out of business
in 1977, when they’d finished in 8th place as well and reforming as
Gateshead, in a bizarre all red kit, for the start of the next season. Indeed,
as music, literature and a particularly unsuccessful interest in women overtook
football as my main obsessions for a few years, the fortunes of the team from
the International Stadium didn’t cross my consciousness until late in the
1982/1983 Championship season. Working in The Greyhound in Felling Square, I
headed down to see the mighty Bob Topping bag a couple of goals in a midweek
game, opponents unknown, that saw the title secured on the night with a bunch
of regulars, ending up in a lock-in in The Old Fold Tavern. The Tynesiders
were in claret and blue that night, but by the next time I saw them, the
familiar white shirts and black shorts combination had been adopted.
My first ever Vauxhall Conference game was at Lower Mead,
the former home of Wealdstone FC in April 1987, to see Gateshead trounced by
the non-league double winners of the previous season, The Stones; the year
before automatic promotion to the Football League was introduced. I was working
in North West London at the time and living in Harrow. Two of my work mates
were Steve, a QPR fan and Ed, a Wealdstone supporter; when Newcastle were at
home or away in an inaccessible location, the three of us would visit either
Lower Mead or Loftus Road, or even Meadway where Harrow Borough played. So it
was I made up 20% of the travelling Gateshead support on a day they were
sounding hammered.
Another huge gap then appears; it was half a decade until I
next managed a trip to see Gateshead. On the day Newcastle United lost 5-2 at
Oxford, February 1st 1992, in what was Ossie Ardiles’s final game in
charge, I saw a terrible 1-0 win over Barrow in the FA Trophy, courtesy of a
ridiculously deflected goal. October of that year saw a visit to a midweek 3-1
win over Witton Albion as a bloke I used to correspond with in the early days
of fanzine friendship was at that game for a groundhopping “tick.” To be honest
though, while I was falling in love with the non-league game, Gateshead never
did it for me, mainly on account of that appalling lack of intimacy or
atmosphere at the International Stadium; one stand and acres of open space with
nothing but gusts of wind to fill it. Consequently I confined my visits to
watching Newcastle there, either when the reserves had it as their home pitch
or when a pre-season friendly took place.
I did see a few games under Ian Bogie; mainly because the
former boss, a lovely bloke it has to be said, was a work colleague (I was his
union rep in point of fact; same as I am for Rob Blamire from Penetration,
proving I’m still equally obsessed with music and football as I approach 50) and
was happy to provide me with the occasional freebie. Memorable encounters included
a 3-0 walloping of Kendal on Good Friday 2008, on a day so windy that both
wheeled dug outs blew away down the track, like a bizarre parody of Asafa
Powell breaking the 100 metres world record on the same stretch two years
previous. I was also there for 2 successive play-off victories; the 2008 win
over Buxton that took the team into the Conference North and the defeat of
Telford a year later that brought them back into the Conference proper. I also
saw both legs of the superb back to back double over Blyth Spartans on Boxing
Day and New Year’s Day that season; great atmosphere, great games, great times
and great to see The Tynesiders doing so well.
I must admit I was delighted to see Gateshead prosper under
Bogie and was disgusted when he was shown the door as I felt it showed deep
ingratitude for all he’d achieved with them; two promotions and stability in
the upper half of the Conference should be success in anyone’s terms,
especially a club so previous riven by financial disasters as Gateshead. This
is why I was delighted when the next boss, ex Mackem Anth Smith, was shown the
door as, let’s be honest about this, Gateshead are a Newcastle United leaning
team. It’s not scientific, but I’d imagine that the 90% plus of Gateshead
residents who follow Newcastle are probably reflected in the demographic of the
active supporting element of Gateshead football club; indeed, I’m not even
prepared to discuss specious arguments to the contrary.
What isn’t up for debate is that Gary Mills is doing an
amazing job as Gateshead manager. Taking over a club ripe for a fiasco of a
season, he’s got them almost halfway up the league and into the last 16 of the
FA Trophy, with a stated aim of winning it. I hope they do. Indeed, if they get
to the final I’d imagine I’ll go. That said I only got to the Oxford replay
because Raga was able to pass on his ticket, being unavoidably away with work.
Having blown a 2-0 lead in injury time at the Kassam
Stadium, Gateshead should not have even been playing this game. However, they
were. The original replay on Wednesday 20th November had been
postponed because of a waterlogged pitch and the rearranged date of Thursday 5th
December allowed me to make the game. A freezing, awful night it was too; too
cold for a yellow polo shirt and cashmere sweater combo, as often sported by
the Absent Friends of Derek Llambias, with the Saltmeadows micro climate making
it treacherous underfoot. Oxford, boasting Dave Kitson and Matt Clarke were
truly awful, perhaps unsettled by news their manager Chris Wilding was in talks
to take over at Portsmouth, but Gateshead, despite lovely approach play, failed
to find a killer goal. Surely if Liam Hatch had been introduced sooner, one of
the numerous aimless crosses would have been meat and drink for his prodigious
heading skills; sadly it wasn’t to be and the referee, frozen to the marrow
like the rest of us, brought things to a farcical close with the softest of
penalty awards after 115 minutes.
It was tough on Gateshead, who’d hit the post and had one
disallowed; they ought to have been away to Wrexham in round 2. At least the FA
Trophy dream is alive. I would love to think that a proportion of the 2,632 who
attended (even if many of them had shivered through the exits after 90 minutes)
will return to cheer them on again. Sadly, I doubt I will, unless the mythical
proposed ground on the site of the old North Durham cricket and rugby pitches
becomes a reality. The worst thing about Gateshead Football Club, as ever, is
the desolate wind tunnel that is the ground. The club is a jewel in the Geordie
football crown and I wish them all the very best.
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