Booted and Suited. Chris Brown
we hovered like flies and mercilessly put the boot in with the best of them once an unfortunate visiting wretch found himself prostrate on the terrace. The Tote End was to become my stage where, hopefully, if I performed well and followed the script, I would become a star. But in 1970, participating only from the sidelines like the rest of my mates, I was nothing more than an extra, a bit-player. One, though, who was ever willing to learn from the real star turns and legends whom I studied, worshipped and longed to emulate.
I’d been a Rovers fan since 1968, in the days when ‘Ziggar zagger! Zigger zagger! Oi! Oi! Oi!’ bellowed out from the terraces. Unbelievably though, and to my eternal shame, my first ever football match was at Ashton Gate – Bristol fucking City versus Blackburn Rovers, 0–0, fucking crap. Was this really what they were eventually to call the beautiful game? I don’t know why I went to Ashton – peer pressure seems such a lame excuse. At the time, all the rest of the kids in our street were City fans, England were holders of the World Cup and every snotty-nosed kid the length and breadth of England wanted to be the next Geoff Hurst, George Best or, in Bristol’s case, the next John Atyeo or Alfie Biggs. Football, football, football, that’s all I wanted out of life; instead, I got some ponces in red shirts making arses of themselves, and to top it all it was south of the river.
Now that football has become accepted, a compulsory topic for the chattering classes to discuss over dinner, celebrity supporters will regale one another and seek each other’s approval for the reason they followed a particular club. ‘It was in my blood, my father took me to Highbury when I was only two days old’; ‘My great-uncle Ernie played for Liverpool’; ‘I’ve followed Manchester United even when they were bottom of the league’ (and just when was that exactly?). It was their destiny; bollocks was it mine! My old man was only concerned with putting food on the table and tending his fuchsias, while my older brother didn’t know the difference between a flat back four and flatulence.
‘Who do you support then, Dad?’ I had asked my old man, thinking I could stir up some inspiration from him. ‘City or Rovers?’
‘Neither, son,’ he said matter-of-factly, ‘they’re both crap.’
Couldn’t argue with that, they were crap, with City languishing at the foot of the old Second Division and Rovers middle of the Third. Still, it had been worth a try. No, the reason I changed my allegiance and became a die-hard, true-blue Rovers fan wasn’t destiny or fate or any other such claptrap that the latter-day middle-class supporters of the Premier League espouse. It was because, quite simply, Eastville Stadium, the home of Bristol Rovers, was on the bus route.
It was a rainy day in the middle of the winter of 1968. The opposition, some dreary northern-town cloggers. Our legendary beer-swilling, fag-smoking, grossly underrated centre-forward Alfie Biggs (now that’s what I call a footballer’s name) led the line for Rovers. And that’s about it – as much as I can remember about my first game at Eastville. I’ve always thought it odd, I can remember the opposition at Ashton Gate and the score in that first ever game, but not my first furtive fumblings with what was to become the love of my life. What I do recall, however, was the stadium. What a place, what an atmosphere, what an ambience, but, above all else, what a smell – it was near a gasworks. The permanent rain from the cooling tower that fell at Eastville even on the sunniest of days, permeated your clothes, your hair, even your skin. It was like a drug. I needed that intake of gas every fortnight and I couldn’t get enough of it. The place was nothing like Ashton Gate, which at that time was only covered on two sides. Eastville had a long and somewhat decrepit old wooden South Stand, a large and more impressive North Stand, a huge open terrace and the pièce de résistance, the covered Tote End. To me Eastville Stadium was the Wembley of the West Country.
Violence at football started simmering in the mid-Sixties. It was natural – working-class kids, bit of money in their pocket for the first time and easy access to the rest of the country through the ever-expanding motorway network and rail system. But what it needed to really take off was a catalyst, something to bring it all together and to unleash its full potential to the unsuspecting world. That catalyst had arrived in 1969 in the form of the skinhead. At last, a cult that was actually based on, and more importantly thrived on, violence. Sure, the mods weren’t opposed to the odd rumble at the seaside with the rockers, but the skinheads perfected the idea and found the obvious battleground to carry out their conquests every week, not just on Bank Holidays. But unlike all the other teenage cults that had troubled Britain over the previous 30 years, they had found their perfect and ever-ready enemy – each other.
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