In 1972, for my fourteenth birthday, my father brought me to Wales to see Leeds United play Cardiff City in Ninian Park. That mightn’t sound like a big deal today but back then I imagine it was a bit of an ordeal for him to pull it all together.
It probably cost him an arm and a leg as well. He would have had to organise the match tickets, the Cork to Swansea ferry, a train ride from Swansea to Cardiff and then a bus trip to the stadium. He did it in pre-internet days when arranging something like this was a lot more complicated. I can’t remember too much about the journey itself but I imagine it took forever to get there and back.
He wasn’t much of a football fan but he knew that I had been a Leeds United supporter since I was about nine years of age. That time, there was very little football on the television, in fact there was very little television.
As a young lad, I used to go to my bedroom on a Saturday afternoon and listen to the match commentary on BBC Radio 2. I would lay on the bed, close my eyes and I would imagine myself standing on the terraces with the rest of the fans.
I had a huge interest in the football league and sometimes before going to sleep I would test myself by naming all the players on each of the twenty-two teams in the first division. If that didn’t send me off to sleep, I would name the managers and the names of their home ground.
The walls of my bedroom were a shrine to all my favourite players. Not a single square inch of wallpaper was visible. Photographs and posters from Shoot magazine completely obscured whatever lay behind them.
So, to find myself leaning on a three- foot wall that ran around Ninian Park, watching my heroes going through their warm up routine, was simply mind numbing. I knew about the speed of Terry Cooper and Mike Jones and the power of Peter Lorimer from the commentaries, but to see them in real time was almost unbelievable.
When the match started the most striking thing for me was the lack of commentary. I was so used to having the game described to me in detail that I found it strange not being able to hear it. What I did hear though was the players shouting to each other, the thud of the ball, the thump of tackles and of course the chanting of the crowd. It was magical.
At one point during the game Billy Bremner gathered the ball for a throw in right in front of me. I could have touched his head as he bent down.
The match ended and when we went back to the ferry we were able to watch Match of the Day on the TV during the crossing. This was another rare treat and it was nearly as exciting as being at the game. The whole event left a huge mark on me and one that I would never forget, not even after all these years.
The one blight on the trip was the violence between opposing supporters. I had a Leeds United scarf around my neck and as we walked towards the stadium an older man approached my father and suggested that I should put the scarf inside my coat out of sight.
Soon after, we saw a large group of supporters facing up to each other just before it turned into a running battle. Shop windows were boarded up and there were police on horseback trying to maintain order but the numbers were just too great. It was a frightening spectacle.
When my son Colin was twelve, I took him to Anfield to see his heroes, Liverpool. There is a lot more football on television now and travel is a lot easier to organise and kids take a lot more for granted. So, with that in mind, I wasn’t really expecting the same reaction from him that I had experienced all those years earlier.
We got to the ground early and we waited near the dressing rooms for the Liverpool coach to arrive. My son was standing by the door of the bus as the players got out and his mouth was wide open in amazement. He was totally absorbed in the occasion and his mouth was rarely closed for the rest of the day.
We entered the stadium and took our seats and he was speechless as he just soaked up the atmosphere. He lived every kick of the ball during the game and he was able to identify every mark on the pitch afterwards and he could even describe how it happened and who put it there.
The crowd singing “You’ll never walk alone” would make the hairs stand on the back of your neck whether you are a football fan or not. When the match was over he stood in his place and just looked all around him. Stewards eventually approached and asked us to move. He was in a different world.
The crowd control these days is excellent and the stadium empties within miniutes of a game ending and the streets are cleared soon afterwards. Thankfully, those crowd scenes I witnessed in Cardiff appear to be a thing of the past. The all seater stadia now make for a more comfortable experience as well.
We’ve been to a few games since then and the stewarding has been top class. There seems to be a huge emphasis on making the day a family event and a pleasant experience for everyone.
They’ve come a long way since 1972 and hopefully, crowd trouble will remain a thing of the past.