The Vikings are coming — Awaydays

At the end of September 2,000 QPR fans hopped aboard the Ninky Nonk down to Yeovil for a bit of a culture shock. LFW went with them en masse.

I think it was Frankie Boyle, in amongst the jibes at the expense of profoundly disabled children, who said that relegating Glasgow Rangers to the bottom division of Scottish football would take small towns across the country back to the time of the Vikings.

Elgin, Peterhead, Annan — these places are little more than hamlets. They’re staging posts for caravaners hunting independent fish restaurants and life savers for motorists who become stranded in heavy snow. Tucked away in their back streets are former Highland League teams of semi-professional status with average gates measured in the small hundreds. Then suddenly, for one season only, thanks to financial mismanagement akin to a thousand Gianni Paladinis all working at once for a thousand days and nights, they become venues for Glasgow Rangers and a baying mob of five thousand beered up Protestants intent on spreading the word of Ally McCoist and the music of Tina Turner.

It was once my misfortune to spend nine months of my life living in Corby. Back in the day, they opened a steel works in Corby and brought 30,000 Scottish people with industry experience down to work in it. Then they closed it all down, leaving the Scottish people marooned in the middle of rural Northamptonshire with little to do with their time other than wait for the pubs and Asda to open.

There was a Glasgow Rangers Supporters Club at one end of my road and a Glasgow Celtic one at the other. A rare Saturday morning lie in for me was once interrupted by a brass band marching past my rented accommodation — an Orange Order march as it turned out — and the gentleman who lived next door frequently had angry disagreements with the keys to his house at three in the morning which often ended with him sipping tins of Tennents in his front garden until he either passed out or the sun came up. There’s one train in and out an hour, and even if you get on further down the line at Kettering or Luton you can tell where it’s been to because of all the empty Iron Bru cans strewn about the standard class accommodation.

The office I worked in there was a large out of town complex sandwiched between the A14 and Kettering Crematorium where, two or three times a week, regular as clockwork, a funeral procession would arrive decked in blue and the poor sod in the box would be lowered into the ground while Tina’s Simply The Best was blasted out across the graveyard via a loudspeaker system they’d had installed specifically for the purpose.
That’s Corby.

While I kept it fairly quiet during my time there — never have I worked on a newspaper before where I found myself writing "a car was set on fire” quite so often — I’ve never really had much time for either Rangers or Celtic. All this sectarian nonsense over whose version of the imaginary friend story is better, infiltrating football crowds with frequently vile and lamentable consequences, isn’t really to my taste. Admit them to the Premier League? I’d give them another shove off towards Iceland if at all possible.

But I must admit, I did have a little pang of jealousy for the Rangers regulars last season. I mean, watching the financial obliteration of your club, leaving a bitter rival just across the city to mop up all the trophies totally unchallenged and no doubt gloat about it a fair bit, isn’t a great way to begin a season admittedly. But once the dust had settled, I’ll bet it was bloody riot going around all those little grounds they’d never been to before — literally and figuratively.

A team that contested the 2008 UEFA Cup final having a game postponed at Elgin because the cheeky hosts had tried to cash in by selling 1,000 tickets more than the ground had space for. It was all so beautifully small time. And surely made a change from endless trips to Aberdeen and Dundee United.

And then we went to Yeovil, a sort of Can’t Believe It’s Not Royston Vasey kind of a place. A place made famous first of all for making decent gloves, then decent aircraft, and more recently one of modern day football’s great success stories.

This is a place that quite happily hosted the sort of lower non-league football only the players’ friends and family pay any passing attention to for the best part of a hundred years but has suddenly found itself catapulted up the leagues during a remarkable decade. The local club is now just one division below the Premier League. Two separate spells under their current manager Gary Johnson have done the trick but having got here in double quick time the town and infrastructure is rather struggling to catch up. Yeovil is the rural lottery syndicate attempting to cash their giant novelty winners’ cheque from the Euromillions people at the village post office.

It’s another one train an hour sort of a place — a train you have to make sure you’re in the right bit of when it trundles out of Waterloo as they chop it in half midway through the journey because ordinarily there’s no call to send anything much bigger than a horse and cart down to Yeovil and beyond on that line. Delays occurred outside a place called Templecombe because a good portion of the trip is completed on a single line and we had to wait for another train to pass going the other way. Never complain about the Northern Line again.

Terraced fun, but you try getting that lot on one train later.

When we finally pitched in just after 11.30, with what seemed like everybody who’d been to a QPR away game since 1986 all crammed into the same train, we found ourselves at Yeovil Junction — an optimistically named little spot given that it’s neither a junction nor in Yeovil. A small railway museum attached to the station advertised on its future events board a "train day” — presumably for fear of somebody turning up expecting a grouse shoot or a chance to artificially inseminate a killer whale or something.

A fleet of a million taxis jammed the station yard, each driver holding up a card with a name you sort of recognised from the back of a seat in the Upper Loft. My surname stretched all the way along the top of my driver’s card, down the side, and then back on itself upside down along the bottom so you had to turn your neck to see it end to end. Paul Finney’s was roundly booed by a crowd of well-wishers. It looked like a refugee camp.

Taxis are required for everything in Yeovil, because when you’ve got a lot of space to use you spread things out a bit. Our driver, last seen playing Ray Von in Pheonix Nights, attacked the single lane road away from the station at pace, treating the occasional wider passing places as a happy coincidence. "It’s been a bloody nightmare,” he cheerfully said of Yeovil’s promotion and the subsequent onset of 2,000 visiting supporters every week.

He took us to The Armoury, billed as Yeovil’s "premier sports bar” which, to complete a cyclical theme for the piece, one would expect is a competition about as tough as the SPL post-Rangers demise. The onset of two groups of QPR fans numbering 14 boosted the numbers in the bar to 18 including staff and the shock of the whole thing sent the landlord scurrying off to his kitchen to prepare a pie and peas lunch for everybody. He and his bar maid, much like Ray Von, and the nice person at Radio Cars who’d booked our cab earlier in the week before launching into a seven minute conversation about whether I was related to Guy Whittingham and what sort of a job I thought he was doing at Portsmouth, couldn’t do enough for us.

It’s a logistical nightmare of a trip really. Totally ill-equipped for a large following of football fans, spaced out over a large area necessitating taxis every time you want to go for a piss, and served by one train an hour that halves in size on the way there and, bizarrely, on the way back as well. You couldn’t help but wonder whether the bloody train just did that all day, trundling back and forth to Yeovil and halving in size each time until the last service of the day is just the driver pushing you back to London on a luggage trolley. The railway company's policy of not making any extra provision for football matches in this part of the world meant QPR fans were crammed into intimate, sweltering conditions on the way home having paid anywhere up to £34 return for the privilege. South West Trains were, are, and always will be, incompetent, money grabbing, fuckpigs.

What’s wrong with you? There’s loads of room.

Those conditions were not a great mood improver having nearly missed the thing in the first place. A dramatic traffic accident near the ground, leaving one car looking like it had fallen 300 feet out of the air, snarled the whole town up and brought the military-style taxi operation to a suddering halt. An orderly queue of people with booked taxis outside the local Asda quickly became an every-man-for-himself scrum where the solidarity of all being QPR fans, or indeed the common courtesy of leaving a taxi that somebody has booked to the person who has booked it, went out the window in favour of dick swinging, veiled threats and making sure you and your pissed up mates are alright Jack and on your way back to the station thanks very much indeed.

On arrival back at the "junction” we found a memorial service being held for a crate of Peroni, sadly lost (apparently to the hilarity of everybody else on the platform) to the crass stupidity of one group member who believed he could carry it with one finger.

When the late comers made the mistake of asking what had happened to the beer, Young North staged a demonstration and inadvertently dropped the second crate as well. Not a good day for the man they call Lacoste all round really — beginning with him expressing surprise that Yeovil wasn’t on the Isle of Wight as he’d initially thought, and ending like that with an incident in the middle where he put the last four digits of his bank account into a betting site rather than the amount he wanted to deposit and, but for a remarkably swift phone call from HSBC security, would have put the best part of £10,000 on four aways in League Two.

But you’ll struggle to find a friendlier place. Everybody from the moment we stepped off the train was keen to chat and to help, a stark difference from the impersonal nature of the Premier League. It was tempting, approaching Huish Park which looks like a low security women’s prison from behind the away end, to get rather down in the mouth about being here so soon after trips to Anfield and Villa Park. But frankly the atmosphere at the game and the attitude of everybody we met was far superior to almost anything we had in the top flight.

At one stage in the second half home team left back Luke Ayling leant on the goal post and asked the QPR fans on the terrace if they’d enjoyed their day out. You don’t get that from Ashley Cole. Yeovil is that sort of place.

I saw Jack Robert Parkin - 20, of Ashburnham Road in Richmond - at Yeovil, running up to the back of the terrace, smoke bomb in hand. I didn’t know him from Adam at the time but now he’s appeared in court and been banned from all football matches for three years, and from coming within two miles of my QPR match, we know all manner of details about him.

The immediate reaction to his sentence, indeed the opinion of the majority on our message board, was "good.” The sudden fad of letting off flares and smoke bombs at English football matches is spreading fast, for reasons known only to the morons throwing them around. They’re little more than a mild irritant - obscuring the view of the pitch briefly, blowing smoke in your face, delaying the game for the time it takes a bucket of sand to be located — but we could certainly do without them all the same. Sooner or later somebody will get hold of a dodgy batch, somebody else will have their hand blown off, and we’ll be treated to a hackneyed emotional outpouring about what a lovely sensible lad he was really.

The sight of the home end at Galatasaray or Fenerbahce, aflame with the light of a thousand flares, swarming with flags and deafening everybody in its path, is one to behold. It’s not something we’re ever going to be able to replicate in this country. It’s much like the Crystal Palace "Ultras” — who are, at the end of the day, 200 youths fighting off the puberty hormone blues by whistling their shirts off and holding onto each other’s bare shoulders while jumping in unison and singing "wherever you will goooooo” on repeat. Laughable stuff, especially when you see the likes of Napoli and Lazio coming over here for European games with the original version. Flares, smoke bombs, elaborate flags, jumping in unison — this is Johnny Foreigner behaviour. In this country we sit quietly save for moaning occasionally about a referee or Bobby Zamora. If Parkin’s sentence helps nip this all in the bud, at QPR games at least, then bloody good job.

But then, I have to confess, my heart went out to the lad a little bit. We’ve all done stupid things, particularly when we were that age. It’s part of the learning curve towards being a better person. Parkin will essentially now always be seen as a football hooligan — not only in the eyes of the people who police the sport but with future employers as well. Every application form he fills out for the next five years, he’s going to have to put this on, and immediately dent his chances of getting the job. All for throwing a couple of smoke bombs around on a terrace at Yeovil while, presumably, under the influence.

I’m not sympathetic often — it is after all very easy to not be arrested for throwing a smoke bomb on the pitch at Yeovil Town, simply by not throwing a smoke bomb on the pitch at Yeovil Town — but I am a bit here. A young lad’s life changed significantly over something so trivial. A lesson to others, which is the intention, but a shame all the same.

On the pitch >>> QPR performance 5/10 >>> Referee performance 7/10 >>> Match 5/10

On the train >>> Journey 4/10 >>> Cost 6/10

Tweet - @loftforwords

Pictures — Action Images, Allan Klo Norwegian R’s, LFW Team

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