A lifetime of “Southampton Away”
and how I got into an argument with Jamie Redknapp that almost resulted in a bloody St Valentines Day massacre!
and how I got into an argument with Jamie Redknapp that almost resulted in a bloody St Valentines Day massacre!
In UK footballing vernacular “Southampton Away” or indeed “Everton Away” or “Manchester United Away” signifies two important, simple and lucky facts. One is the confirmation of the team your team are playing next or very soon, and invariably it means you’re going to the game as you’ve added the extra “Away” after the team name. Many lifetimes of hushed conversations have been had up and down this fair island of ours whereby a friend or a match going acquaintance would whisper the question in hushed tones, “Are you going to Portsmouth away?” or “Have you got tickets yet for Arsenal Away?”. Growing up as I did in Portsmouth and on the very bottom of this tiny island of the UK, every game was an “Away” game for me as well, you could only really go in three of the four compass directions as heading south was a non-starter unless you had a boat or a ferry and your team was playing in France.
Every football travelling journey from Portsmouth was essentially north, it just varied on the north easterly direction you were heading. Towards the East the nearest “Away” was Brighton and Hove Albion (1 hour 20 minute journey but always in a different Division) or slightly more central toward London and a favoured destination as I became a slightly older teenager. Heading West you had Bournemouth (another 1 hour 20 minute drive and again always in a different Division) and on towards Oxford (different Division) and the English Midlands and these destinations, like London, were explored as I grew into my teenage years.
So it was towards Southampton, and their quirky, quaint, old fashioned ground of “The Dell” that I headed to as soon as I had the gumption to travel the 35 minute train journey on my own or with my regular early travelling companion, Marc. To set the scene a little more for those unfamiliar with the geography of the UK, my hometown of Portsmouth and the lifelong footballing love affair I’d begin to have with Southampton are roughly only 19 miles apart and frankly many members of each city wish it was 1,019 miles! There is a fierce enmity between the two cities, stretching back over 100 years and more and started via the two dockyards that these two great English cities were once so famous for, but much, much less so now. That enmity, hatred and bitterness has grown exponentially over the years and is no doubt no different in your part of the world dear reader. I’m sure that wherever you live, large city or tiny hamlet, there is a neighbouring tribe that for a multitude of reasons you simply have no time for. In more recent years, and particularly so in my formative match going years of the early 1980’s, these local hatreds had firmly entrenched themselves within the football community and football hooliganism was rife, getting steadily and catastrophically worse, causing needless fatalities and became labelled at the time as a “disease”. So, into this world that he barely understood stepped a young boy in essence and not even yet a teenager, who thought it fine and dandy to travel from Portsmouth to Southampton, which was bad enough, and then merrily wait outside the “Visiting Turnstiles” for hours on end until that sweet sound filled the air: of wooden doors being levered apart by the turnstile operators and after you parted with your £2/£2.50/£3.00 you were given a match ticket (always with Saints striker Steve Moran in hologram form — see right picture above) and you were in!
Now, I’m going to come to the official statistics for my lifetime of watching the Reds at Southampton shortly but as a means of more scene setting, as a young child and early teen, travelling to Liverpool and their mecca like football ground “Anfield” was a non-starter due to finance, age, lack of transport, experience, and it was a serious undertaking for a child of my age to travel 2/3rds of the length of England. So “Away” games were my entrance into the real, match going fandom of following my beloved football team, and what better way of doing so than by hopping on a 35 minute train journey to Southampton? The early adventures at The Dell are hazy, similarly so in more recent years and my trips to their new purpose built stadium called “St Mary’s” and a stadium as far away from their old Dell home as can possibly be! The Dell had a capacity of just over 15,000 and their new home has a capacity twice the size. Whereas The Dell was crammed between residential houses, the new stadium is on a huge development beside the docks and purposely built for the football club and indeed for a new century. The Dell had a “Home End” that appeared to be on the verge of toppling onto the road behind any minute, they had these strange floodlights sitting atop the stands on the sides of the pitch, and the teams entered the pitch from the corner of the stadium and from the very cramped confines of an old part of the stadium. Their new home of St Mary’s shines like the sun (no crappy, ugly floodlights on top of the stands), is an all seater stadium and can cater for every event imaginable. Sitting on those concrete steps waiting for the turnstiles to open in 1984/1985, I couldn’t begin to imagine that Southampton would leave their home for something akin to an all seated cathedral, but they did, as have so many other teams in whatever sport you care to mention the world over. But this is now, and we have to go back to the “then”, of Steve Moran hologram tickets, paying on the day, no advance tickets, the walk from the train station to the ground, trying to spot fellow Liverpool fans and walking with them, Liverpool/Celtic “Halfie Hats”, poring over the fixture schedules and making umpteen promises to my dear old Mum that I’d be safe, careful, and that it was only “Southampton Away”.
I always went to Southampton away!
So my “official” statistics stand at:
Played 15
Won 5
Lost 6
Drawn 4
A paltry 19 points from a maximum 45 available and frankly my “Lifetime of Southampton Away” leaves me in the relegation zone! However, the statistics get even worse and send me to the bottom of the league if I add the three games I’m fairly certain I attended too. I do not have a match programme from either game so I can’t validate these, and considering there are two further draws (1–1 in 1985 and 3–3 in 2000) and a defeat in 2004 at the new St Mary’s Stadium through goals from James Beattie and Kevin Phillips for the Saints, perhaps it’s for the best that I don’t include them or indeed remember them!
There was also the (in)famous freezing March night in 1984 when Danny Wallace scored two outrageous and brilliant goals to defeat the Reds 2–0 in front of a heaving and jam packed crowd at The Dell of 19,698. Now I could embellish this silly tale of mine and say I was definitely there but that would be a lie as I don’t know for sure, but there are two other things to consider here (1) the game was famously shown live on BBC1 and I think on a Friday night so this was a very rare event for the time all around. (2) I attended more than the one game I can be absolutely certain of, and that’s because of Steve Moran, the Southampton striker and local talisman.
As per the banner picture of this article and the right ticket in particular, every Southampton ticket I had as a kid before I can verify attendance (memory/ticket/match programme) used to be a hologram ticket and in the middle was local striker Steve Moran. I even remember one season where the ticket had Moran lower down in the picture and below a halo in reference to the Southampton club nickname of “The Saints”. Now, I may have made that last part up about the halo due to vast quantities of the devil’s cabbage and too many trips on magic mushrooms, but I’m absolutely stone cold certain of it. So I definitely went to more games in my early “Southampton Away” career, but can’t verify them.
Now here’s a shocker for anyone reading this and is a bona-fide, died in the wool Red. In the early 1980’s and stretching to the mid 1980’s too, Liverpool didn’t have a huge following at The Dell. The “Away” end at the time was terracing and split into thirds, and the times I visited The Dell I stood in every one of those 3 sections and when the terracing was converted into seats I sat in various parts of a “whole” away end. Now, in the early 1980’s, the “Away” section was only 1 section and the far left of the three as you looked at it from the pitch, and I’m certain I stood in this section more than once. I also remember standing in the far right of the three sectioned parts of the terrace in the mid 1980’s and the strains of “Play Up Pompey” started. Pompey, or Portsmouth, my hometown, must’ve had their fixture cancelled and a few fans decided to travel the 19 miles to cheer on Liverpool against their most hated local rivals as it definitely happened and whilst not a massive amount of Pompey fans, they were definitely Southern voices, all good natured, and they may have even tried to sing the “Pompey Chimes” a second time. And this true tale leads us to another, and indeed circles us back to the original reason for this paragraph, Steve Moran, because his most famous goal for The Saints was in a 1–0 Derby win against Pompey in the FA Cup in 1984 and remains renowned for this fact, and secondly, it was his face and hologram on those damn early 1980’s tickets!!!
Why am I so certain and hung up on the Steve Moran hologram tickets? Because it’s a memory burned into my mind as a child who was by now recording everything in his scrapbooks, it was incredibly distinctive and not a simple piece of paper with just the written details of the game the ticket was for. And because the turnstile operators, those hardy old men (always old men at the time), after they’d wrenched those wooden doors to one side and an almighty cheer from the crowds outside subsided, would hand you a ticket as you entered the ground! All games were “Pay on the Day” but here at Southampton they gave you a ticket as you entered and I distinctly remember having at least 2 if not 3 of these ultimately worthless but gold dust to a mad pre teen football fan, Steve Moran hologram tickets. One was glued into my scrapbook, a trick I would repeat many, many years later, but this was also ripped out (still have the hole in my scrapbook!) and I’d like to think it was because I had the others “loose” and why have just one sitting glued in a scrapbook? So that was the reason for sitting around for hours outside the turnstiles, waiting for them to open dear reader. Because it was cash only and if you got there and the “Sold Out” boards went up, tough. So even though it was only a 35 minute journey to Southampton, I always set off very early and camped out outside the away end turnstiles. I was 13/14, what else was I going to do?
My earliest trips to “Southampton Away” were very definitely singular affairs (perhaps once, maybe twice) but all future games were attended with (on one memorable occasion) “Graeme” who got us plush bench seats in the front row on the side of the pitch beside the goal because he was signed for or going to sign for, the Southampton associate schoolboys (some player was our Graeme) but we were spotted as Reds and marched down the pitch to the Away End! Or more commonly with my oldest and dearest friend Marc or latterly with “Steve The Taxi Driver”. Marc has a huge soft spot for the Reds but has a very Blue Pompey heart, and we travelled all over the South/London for many a year and I can recall so many mini stories of trips to Arsenal (opening day of the 1987/88 season and opening a train door on the way home out mischievousness and nearly losing everything in the carriage!), West Ham United, Wimbledon, QPR (some mischievous scousers had stolen the tomato sauce bottle from the hot dog vendors in the upper tier and delighted in covering us below in red sauce!), Tottenham Hotspur and others, but I don’t have any memorable tales to tell of our joint visits other than bored teenagers sitting outside the turnstiles and waiting for them to open and poring over the match programme. I haven’t spoken to Marc about his memories of “Southampton Away” as I want him to read this as a surprise and hopefully call me with a memory of his own I haven’t remembered. I haven’t spoken with “Steve The Taxi Driver” (now known here simply as Steve) for 19 years and that last time was, yes you’ve guessed it, at “Southampton Away”.
I first met Steve circa 1992/1993 as I was a part-time football coach at the time and his son attended one of my coaching sessions. I was no doubt wearing a Liverpool training top but I distinctly remember Steve leaving me a note on my car windscreen with his telephone number and words to the effect of him seeing my Liverpool sticker in the back of my car and did I want to “go the game” with him, which was of course a decidedly silly question. From then on, Steve and I or the “Two Steve’s” went everywhere, at least twice a month or two games out of every four or five, and everywhere we went, we went in my little Fiat Uno called “Freddie”. Now, in today’s world of computerised diagnostics and everything driven (pun intended) via microchip and computer, Freddie was a little different! Back in the mid 1990’s that little white car got us everywhere and only failed once as we were driving through the outskirts of London in the pouring rain with Steve perched on the passenger side floor holding the fuse box in place so the damn windscreen wipers would continue to work! That was a hairy one, as was the blown tire as we approached The City Ground, home to Nottingham Forest. But we’d left early enough to change the tyre and have a quick kick about on the neighbouring ground of “Meadow Lane”, home to Notts County before the match, but that’s another story for another day. We drove through the pouring rain for a Merseyside Derby that was postponed 90 minutes before kick-off and had to drive through the pouring rain 5 hours again immediately back in the opposite direction. We went to both Switzerland and France in the same season for our first European travels watching the Reds, tales that await in a separate “European Special” of this blog in the near future. We nearly always travelled by car, Freddie, but went via train to “Southampton Away” and London once, for an away game at Arsenal on an (in)famous night that saw cupid sling an arrow in the direction of my travelling companion and I hope that particular arrow and love tryst holds true to this day.
After I moved from my hometown in May 1999 life got much busier for me, changed a lot for varying reasons and in varying ways, and despite having a great time pre the game at Southampton in 2002 and we caught up on a lot of laughs and a lot of tall tales, we promised to stay in contact and go to more games again together and we never did. Which was and is, a shame. And considering that same cupid had played such an awful stunt on me on February 14th 1994 and even before the 4–2 Saints win in that particular St Valentines Day massacre you’d have thought we’d have stayed in touch. We did, after all, have an argument with Jamie Redknapp and Steve had to put out a fire.
Going to “Southampton Away” on such a special and romantic evening was inconsequential to Steve and I. It was Southampton away, end of discussion. Work all day, short train ride and with the advent of all seater stadia you were guaranteed a seat so no need to sit freezing outside waiting for the turnstile operators to give you a Steve Moran hologram ticket when you entered. We had seats for the massacre this night just to the left of the goal post, 7/8 rows back and plum position. I got lucky with the tickets (pot luck where you sit), and our tickets were, in the vernacular of a Liverpudlian, “absolutely boss”. So here we were, the 2 Steve’s, on the year’s most sacred of loving evenings sat in the grottiest, ramshackle football ground you can imagine, at freezing temperatures and passing the time as we often did, recounting stories, smoking too much, laughing a lot and taking the piss out of the other as only good friends can, and indeed do, appreciate. Following Liverpool was a past time for Steve and I and it wasn’t just the football. It was the night before in a pub in Portsmouth called “Owen’s” and while I played pool, Steve, the lothario taxi driver that he was, was always on the hunt for more of cupid’s arrows. It was the night after the match and a quick couple of drinks (probably Owen’s again) and the opportunity to (accidentally) show your match programme to everyone you possibly could and casually drop into conversation that God scored a four minute hat-trick right in front of me and not 20 yards away from me, and yes, here, let me show you my match programme! I worked in an office at the time and hated it to my very core, and I think Steve felt the same (or certainly the self employed pressures) of driving a taxi around all day. So football was our escape, a past time, a childhood ambition, a way of spending vast sums of money I didn’t have and a way of ensuring both my and indeed Steve’s love lives continued in a perilous relationship with the fairer sex.
And then, on February 14th of all days, cupid fired an arrow in my direction, or should I say a fiercely hit football, that just shaved that goal post I described earlier, you know, the goal post I was sitting just the other side from, and unbeknown to me I’d had an argument with Jamie Redknapp and it wasn’t an arrow from cupid that knocked me out, it was Jamie Redknapp’s balls. Luckily, as the teams were warming up and having a pre-match kick around I was sitting on my seat turned 45 degrees to the left otherwise I dread to think what would have happened to my nose, as Jamie Redknapp’s thunderbolt smashed me perfectly, full bore in the side of the face/head and knocked me clean from my seat! This has been the only time in my entire life to date that I have been knocked out or lost consciousness and I could embellish the tale and say I was out cold for minutes but I doubt for more than a few seconds, but I was, for a brief time, out cold. As I came around, Steve was stood over me with a huge concerned look on his face before bursting into uproarious laughter as soon as I was back in the world of the awake. As well as sitting at that 45 degree angle I was also smoking a cigarette at the time and must have been holding it up to my face at the point of footballing impact as Steve used to love regaling all and sundry the tale in future years of putting out a fire on my face as the burning cigarette was stuck to my face and singeing me rather well! “Your mate’s face is on fire!” wagged a Scouser and Fireman Steve came to the rescue!
So I had an argument with Jamie Redknapp’s balls. And lost. Then I watched a St Valentines Massacre and local hero (and so lovingly beloved in my hometown of Portsmouth………) Matthew Le Tissier scored a hat-trick and my Reds were not only beaten 4–2 but were utterly dreadful yet again. What a perfect way to spend the most romantic night of the year! Steve and I watched a lot of dreadful football from our Reds in a large portion of the 7/8 years travelling together, and a football to the face, freezing yourself beyond human warmth to the point where your feet just stop working, a Fiat Uno with varying degrees of predictability that the windscreen wipers would work or failing love lives wasn’t going to change that one iota.
It’s “Southampton Away” again soon.
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