On The Road

It was the FA Cup fifth round last weekend. Obviously Newcastle didn't have a game and could enjoy a week earned rest after three successive hammerings in the league. One of those at Chelsea had me shaking my head and questioning just why would anyone pay £50 for a ticket and the thick end of £200 in travel and beer to watch an inevitable defeat. Many years ago I used to travel in expectation rather than hope; not just with Newcastle, but sometimes with Barnsley as well. Here's an article about being part of Barnsley's away following, which will be in West Stand Bogs issue #3.....

As pointed out in issues 1 & 2 of West Stand Bogs, not to mention about a dozen times in various copies of South Riding (RIP), my team is actually Newcastle United. However, because of marital connections in the Darton area, I followed Barnsley as a second team throughout the 1990s. My first game at Oakwell, supporting the home team, was a 2-0 victory over Bristol City, for whom Gary Shelton was red carded, on New Year’s Day 1991 and my final time on the terraces down Grove Street way saw QPR beaten 1-0 in August 2002. While I attended, at a rough estimate, about 5 games a season at Oakwell during this period, the chance to see the Reds away from home was much more limited, bearing in mind my NUFC commitments. In fact, other than at St. James’s Park, I only saw Barnsley play at 3 other grounds, none of which are in use any longer, strangely enough.

Firstly, and most painfully, were my trips to my nearest and not so dearest local rivals; sunderland. While I didn’t get to see the 2-0 loss on New Year’s Day 1992 as we were down in South Yorkshire for the festivities, taking in Sheffield Wednesday 1 Oldham 1 that day from the top tier of the Leppings Lane with the away fans of course, I was at each and every of the subsequent defeats on Wearside, stood glumly in an exposed corner of the uncovered Roker End, often with my ex-wife’s sister’s ex fiancé, who now works as a barrister in Newcastle (hello Nick,) as Barnsley came up with ever more inventive ways to get beaten by the most repulsive team on the planet.

December 5^th 1992; 1-2 in front of 17,395. Floppy-haired drunk Michael Gray puts them a goal up after 42 seconds, Shaun Cunnington doubles this on the half hour and the consolation is an Ian Sampson own goal (me neither…) after 52 minutes. We had a good drink both before and after mind; The Blue Bell in Seaburn, supposedly a notorious hooligans’ pub though we saw nothing  amiss at all and then a crawl round the Quayside back in civilisation. January 3^rd 1994; 0-1 in the teeming rain in front of 19,302. Phil Gray’s header was cleared off the line by Gary Fleming and his incredible tache, but the linesman said the ball had crossed. A rotten day all round. September 17^th 1994; 0-2 before 16,145. A better day and a better performance, but late goals from Phil Gray and Don Goodman meant another wasted journey. October 28^th 1995; 1-2 with 17,024 onlookers. Andy Liddell scored a goal, the first I’d seen on this ground by a Barnsley player, but it was only a consolation after Craig Russell and Lee Howey had notched for that lot.

After this, the Mackems were out the Barnsley equation for a while, spending a year in the top flight in 96/97 and passing Barnsley on their way back down. By the time the clubs next met, on 21^st November 1998, the game was at the Stadium of Light in front of 40,231; more than double the attendance of each of the previous 5 fixtures between the clubs. Around this time, I’d developed a love of non-league football, which I watch in preference to the professional game these days. Nowadays I edit the programme for Heaton Stannington of Northern League Division 2, but back then I’d just secured a job doing match reports of local games for our regional Sunday paper, The Sunday Sun. Instead of seeing a heroic 3-2 victory with my ex-wife and ex sister in law who had accompanied Nick, where Ashley Ward went from goalscoring hero to red carded villain in 5 minutes, with the points sealed by a late Darren Barnard penalty, I was watching Ashington 0 Horden Colliery Welfare 0 in Northern League Division 2. I suppose I did get paid £20 for the privilege.

Since then, the vagaries of promotion and relegation have meant there has only been one other meeting on Wearside between the two sides; a 2-0 win for the Mackems with a crowd of 27,918 , courtesy of goals by Dean Whitehead and in the last minute by Chris Brown, but nobody was laughing. Hopefully, if Barnsley stay up and the Mackems go down, I can return to Wearside to cheer on an away win in 2014/2015.

In the same way as I managed a clean slate of losses on Wearside, my time following the Tykes on Teesside also produced a 100% record; only this time it was a positive one. In 1991/1992, Middlesbrough were promoted, gaining 80 points in the process and only losing 2 games at home along the way. Incredibly, one of those defeats was to Barnsley, on a mild Monday evening for a rearranged game in mid-April, when 12,473 gathered to languidly watch a smash and grab raid by master tactician Mel Machin. The final score was 1-0 and, try as I might, I can’t remember who scored; all that occurs to me is the relaxed, almost pre-season friendly feel to the whole evening. This was an alien experience to me, as every visit with Newcastle, whether we won, drew or lost, from 1983 onwards, resulted in scenes of incredible violence in the streets around the ground, from psychopathic locals and radgie Geordies prepared to meet them on their own terms. That night, there was nothing untoward aimed at the 101 (I counted) Barnsley fans penned in that little corner of Ayresome Park.

While there were very few at Ayrseome that night, there were 6,500 at Maine Road the following February for a FA Cup fifth round tie. Having been unable to source a ticket for Newcastle’s trip to Blackburn in the same stage of the cup the same day, Nick came to my rescue with a game and travel package, courtesy of a seat on a bus and a place on the Kippax. The transport wasn’t even Side of the Road standard; it was a Yorkshire Traction double decker and I stood both ways. The game itself was poor; City were in steady decline under Brian Horton, but a David White double did for Barnsley, while the Young Guvnors kept up a barrage of missiles across the divide between the fans all game. After the second goal went in, one exasperated Tyke, sick of being pelted with spit, plastic glasses and coins, swilled off the dregs of his plastic mug of Bovril and launched his tartan thermos flask towards the citeh hordes, in a futile gesture of retaliation. The whistle blew soon afterwards and by 7pm we were drinking steadily in The Manx.