When was your first ever Saints game ? what made you support the club ? read about mine and then tell us all about your own first game.
The first visit to a football stadium is a magical event: the crowds; entering the stadium; and seeing that green pitch for the first time is an experience that you never forget. Most of all, it often moulds which team a person supports for the rest of their life.
Perhaps the whole experience has been diluted in the past decade or so. The introduction of so many live televised matches in full HD is far different than it was when I was a boy. We only had the highlights shown each week with just the FA Cup Final and the odd England International shown live on the box.
Indeed back then in the early 1970’s not everyone yet had colour TV. My impressions of football stadia were mainly in black and white. In consequence, it was the colour that struck me most when entering the Dell for the first time. The colour of the pitch, the colour of the stands, the colour of the supporters’ scarves.
So this article asks the question: ‘What was your first ever football game attended and if it wasn’t Saints, then what was it? Also, if so, what was your first ever Saints game? Tell your experience on here and let’s see who was around to share it with you.
To kick things off here is mine.
My first game was on 15 January 1972, and it was against Manchester United in the third round of the FA Cup: a great introduction to both live football and, of course, Southampton Football Club.
10 years old was, perhaps, a later age to go to a football game than many of my schoolmates. But I came from a Liverpool family and my father was a die-hard Liverpool fan. Sadly he had died three years earlier - just at a time when he would probably have taken me to my first match. Things could well have turned out differently in the team I supported had fate not taken a hand.
So, all the talk in the school playground back in the 1971/72 season was Saints. My mates were all starting to go to games - some with their parents and some on their own. But some went with older kids from the area. So I started to veer away from the team that had been drummed into me by family and want to support my local team as well, so I could go to a game week in week out.
So one of the older kids said he had a spare ticket for the Cup Tie with United and it was all systems go.
Thus I found myself entering the Dell for the first ever time for a sold out FA Cup third round tie with a Manchester United team who only four years previously had been Champions of Europe.
I can still remember entering the ground. The ticket was for the terracing under the West Stand and we were in there early. I sat on the wall in the corner of the terracing between the West Stand and the Archers Road. It was the bottom of that quirky piece of terracing that used to be under the old scoreboard. It meant that I had a great view of both the game and the crowd by being above their heads.
I was lucky that the ticket was for there because it was relatively under-cover and the game was played in torrential rain. Indeed there were puddles on the pitch and perhaps today it would have been called off. But this was 1972, and it needed a lot more than rain to call a game off.
28,160 were packed in the Dell. Some 2,000 shorter than it should have been for a sell-out. That excellent book In That Number suggests that the rain kept a couple of thousand away who already had tickets. But back then, manipulating the attendance figure at a game was commonplace so money could be pocketed without declaring it to the tax man. At least I was told this, mainly by Pompey fans who swear that they didn’t really have such poor averages in their 1950’s heyday.
Some of the names in both sides were legendary, Saints had Terry Paine, Mike Channon (always Mike back then, never Mick) and Ron Davies, whilst United had George Best, Bobby Charlton and Dennis Law.
United played in bright yellow shirts with blue shorts whilst we were, of course, in our iconic stripes with perhaps my favourite incarnation. We had a round red collar, black shorts and red socks with a solitary white hoop in the middle.
Saints kicked off towards the Milton Road end and the game was fast and furious. Although given that my only reference point at this time was the football played on Green Park in Millbrook, it was probably quite slow compared to today’s games!
It was United who opened the scoring on 37 minutes. A well-worked move involving Law and Best was finished off by Bobby Charlton. I thought it was all over but luckily it wasn’t: it was only half time.
The second half saw chances at both ends and it took a fantastic save from Eric Martin in the Saints goal to keep the deficit to one. However, ten minutes after the break it was all level and again I had a great view of the goal as it was up at my end.
It was classic Saints from that era, a Paine cross, this one from a free kick, to the far post. Ron Davies leaping and hanging in the air before heading the ball either at the goal or down for the knock in. This time it was the latter and it was Jimmy Gabriel who knocked it home to silence the United fans massed behind the goal.
But my eyes were on the opposite end where they were going crazy under the Toomers sign. I knew that for my next game I would be going there myself. And I did! For several years later it was the Milton end for me.
There were other chances but the game was now scrappy due to the weather and the mud and the score stayed level. This meant that the teams would meet four days later for the replay which United won 4-1 after extra time in front of 50,966 ( it would have been 50,967 but my mum wouldn’t let me go lol).
But the die was cast, I would return a few weeks later to stand on the Milton Road terraces, little knowing that this would not be the last time I would see Bobby Stokes and Alex Stepney in an FA Cup tie. A little over four years later and they would meet again and this time there would be no replay.
Below Shows Saints Take On Manchester United At The Dell In A Vital Relegation Clash In April 1974.
Thanks to Duncan Holley and Gary Chalk for their excellent book, In That Number. This has enabled me to fill in the blanks that almost 44 years and somewhere between 1,500 & 2,000 subsequent games has dimmed my memory.
So what was everyone else’s first ever game? What do you remember? If you can’t remember it all, I will try to fill in the gaps courtesy of In That Number.