I used to do it all the time, week after week, regular as clockwork.
However, it then became a very infrequent event, normally around Christmas or my birthday.
I could blame getting old, pressure of work, financial constraints, whatever, but those are just excuses. The truth is I just hadn’t wanted to do it as much anymore. It became just too much effort.
I am speaking of course about football away days.
Now these days I have a perfect excuse, because getting an away ticket is as rare as hen’s teeth, but we know, that if there is a will then there still is a way.
Watching the Newcastle United away end at Arsenal recently got me thinking about the effort those people put in to getting there. Did they do an 18 hour day trip, did they have an overnight stay in London, how much has that defeat cost them?
It’s a real commitment and hats off to every one of you who went. That used to be me but when did I last do it?
Has it been in the last couple of years? Nope.
Any since covid? Nope.
Any since the heart attack? Nope.
It dawned on me that I haven’t been to an away game for a decade. A man who has been all over the UK, to glamorous stadiums like Shrewsbury, Stoke and Oxford, hasn’t done an away game in approaching 10 years.
But at least that last away game was a big one to go out on.
Barnsley on a Tuesday night in the Championship, October 18th 2016 to be precise.
We won the game 2-0, Dwight Gayle scored twice and looked utterly jarred off by the 6,000 away fans hardly singing his name, rather they sang for Mitrovic, who was coming back from injury.
If it is to be my last away game then I am glad it is Barnsley, because it is one of those grounds that holds a lot of memories for lads of a certain age, with huge turnouts heading that way in the pre Sky days.
Back in 1991 was a “special one”, just a few weeks before the arrival of Keegan.
Actually it was a pretty miserable day out for a number of reasons.
One, if you made the mistake of parking your car in the sloping grass field situated next to the ground, the single exit meant that you would not be able to get it out again until about midnight.
Two, South Yorkshire constabulary treated us like terrorists, even taking cans of coke off 10 year old kids.
Three, Ossie’s Newcastle United tried to win the match with Steve Howey as centre forward and with a team whose average age was about 14.
We were heading for third division oblivion and we got absolutely gubbed 0-3.
Just to finish off a perfect day, Barnsley tried to poison the away fans with dodgy pies. The Oakwell terraces were strewn with literally hundreds of them, all with one bite missing. On closer inspection they were weeks out of date and obviously left over from the last match. However, my tight brother refused to chuck his and ate two of them, because he had paid for them and he was going to eat them.
We all paid for his belligerence on the car journey home.
Barnsley was, and I reckon will always be, old school football .
There was an article recently about how the game is “gone”. Well you won’t get me arguing about that but go down the pyramid and the football many of us grew up with still exists .
It exists in the hearts and souls of those Sheffield Wednesday fans who despite recording a ZERO point season still travelled in numbers across the country.
It exists in the hearts and souls of those Hartlepool and Gateshead fans who have never seen their club achieve anything whatsoever and they know they never will, yet, they still turn up.
And it exists in the hearts of the four thousand or so who will be there this weekend to watch South Shields hopefully make it to the National League.
I don’t pretend to be a Shields fan but I will be listening to the radio and willing them on to victory .
Let’s hope that we are to see Heed v Mariners derbies next season.
I also dream of one of them playing Sunderland in League One.
You can only hope.