At Home With The Dingles: A Soccer Story
Yesterday I went to the first football of the season: a "friendly" between derby rivals Villa and Wolves, at Wolves.
Though I've been to many Villa games, I had never been to a pre-season before, and was vaguely expecting three men and a dog and a gentle kick about.
But we show up at Molyneux and there are about 3,000 extremely vocal Villa fans queued up at the Away supporters' turnstiles, and another 10,000 Wolves fans waiting for us inside the ground. Rather ridiculously, there are only two turnstiles open, and one steward is trying to do full body searches of everyone in both queues. Realizing there were only seven minutes to go before kick off, the authorities decide to open two more turnstiles, with no body searches, at which point everyone in possession of drugs or offensive weapons charges over to those.
Going through the turnstiles into an Away End is quite terrifying. The turnstiles themselves are incredibly claustrophobic: tiny and virtually airtight, designed to ensure zero possibility of anyone without a ticket getting in. You feel rather like a sheep going into a pen at the slaughter house. (They would be impossible in America, of course - one third of the population would not be able to wedge their backsides through.)
Anyway, you finally squeeze through and out into the concourse under the stadium. Coming in from the outdoors, it's immediately dark, noisy and disorienting: like how one might imagine a Victorian Bedlam to have been (it also reminds me of the rioting prison Tally Atwater reports from in Up Close and Personal). Random howls and curses bounce off unfinished concrete floors and pillars and bare grey brick walls, and there is a permanent smell of stale cigarette smoke and lager.
Away End concourses are invaribly more cramped than the Home supporters' facilities, possibly only fifteen feet wide in some places, so to reach your section you must barge along through the hooded, tracksuited and be-trainered crowds, doing your best to dodge cigarette burn incursions onto your jeans, or pints of lager down your neck.
It is clear today that the lower Steve Bull Stand, and much of the upper, is going to be jammed full of Away support (so much for the three men and a dog). Supporters travelling away tend to be vocal and diehard anyway, and most of them have been drinking steadily since opening time, if the queue outside the Gents is anything to go by. The more hygenic, warm-up chants are first up: "Villa! Villa! Villa!" "D'Lo-s Claret and Blue Army" and "We're the Greatest Football Team..."Then the crowd move on to more dubious fare, most of it not even aimed at the Wolves but at "The Blue-Nosed Scum", aka Birmingham City: " ..walking in a Villa Wonderland; (s******g on the 'City as we go - oh) and "My old man said, be a Birmingham City fan and I said b******s., you're a...".
The singing gets a whole lot quieter when Villa (a Premiership team) go two easy ones down after only fifteen minutes to Wolves (only a Div 1/"Championship") team. Two men two rows in front of us start chain smoking. The fug drifts straight back into my face. I look round for a steward: at Villa Park smoking is strictly banned in the stands and I assume it's the case at Molyneux. But the steward is pretending to take no notice: he is, quite frankly, an even worse fat slob than the two smokers, but about six inches shorter.
Halftime comes: an unbelievable crush in the concourse as a ten-deep crowd fights its way to the bar to load up on more lager. There's no chance of me making it down the other end to the place where they sell Bovril, the traditional Midlands football beverage (which conveniently has no caffeine, alcohol or calories: maybe that's why it seems to be going out of fashion).
The crowd jammed into the narrow concrete corridor, with no place to go, starts singing again, to the tune of Yellow Submarine: Wolves Came Up But Went Straight Back Down , and also, mysteriously, Tracy Andrews Is Our Friend. (Later at home I consult my dictionary of football chants and discover it's about a battered wife called Tracy Andrews who killed her violent, Blue Nose, husband).
Back for the second half. The Villa fans around me are in a more contemplative mood. Villa are 2-1 down, and looking highly unlikely to score any more, so the singing has more or less stopped and the chat is beginning in earnest.
I should explain at this point that Villa fans are officially graded by the police - who are connoisseurs of these things - as being remarkably non-violent. Compared to most fans, they are a placid, low-key, pessimistic bunch: despite all their chanting they don't really ever expect to win. In fact, win, lose or draw they tend to leave the stadium with their heads down, trundling quietly home, flicking through their programmes and making the occasional quiet comment to their mates about how Hendrie was crap and O'Leary ought to get rid of him.
Whilst harboring no sincere expectations of their team's ability to win, however, Villa fans are possessed with a absolute conviction that Villa is the only club in the Midlands with a modicum of intelligence and class. In their view, Bluenoses are all thieving wife-beaters: either in jail, or just got out. The Baggies (West Bromwich Albion) are thick and useless. And Wolves are the Dingles, in reference to the ignorant, criminal family of Emmerdale fame. Here is a typical Villa fan conversation when it is quite clear their team is going down to the local rivals and there is nothing they can do about it...
Villa fan one: "God, the Dingles are soooo unbelievably stupid. It's the inbreeding, you know."
Villa fan two: "Yeah, you ask a yam [alternate descriptor of a Wolverhampton resident] for directions and it just looks at you with a dumb expression. They don't even know their way round their own f******g ground."
Villa fan one: "Can you imagine one on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?"
Villa fan two [laughing bitterly]: "Yeah, I'd love to hear Tarrant go "Sorry, you ignorant inbred Dingle, but you can't have £100."
And so on....
Though I've been to many Villa games, I had never been to a pre-season before, and was vaguely expecting three men and a dog and a gentle kick about.
But we show up at Molyneux and there are about 3,000 extremely vocal Villa fans queued up at the Away supporters' turnstiles, and another 10,000 Wolves fans waiting for us inside the ground. Rather ridiculously, there are only two turnstiles open, and one steward is trying to do full body searches of everyone in both queues. Realizing there were only seven minutes to go before kick off, the authorities decide to open two more turnstiles, with no body searches, at which point everyone in possession of drugs or offensive weapons charges over to those.
Going through the turnstiles into an Away End is quite terrifying. The turnstiles themselves are incredibly claustrophobic: tiny and virtually airtight, designed to ensure zero possibility of anyone without a ticket getting in. You feel rather like a sheep going into a pen at the slaughter house. (They would be impossible in America, of course - one third of the population would not be able to wedge their backsides through.)
Anyway, you finally squeeze through and out into the concourse under the stadium. Coming in from the outdoors, it's immediately dark, noisy and disorienting: like how one might imagine a Victorian Bedlam to have been (it also reminds me of the rioting prison Tally Atwater reports from in Up Close and Personal). Random howls and curses bounce off unfinished concrete floors and pillars and bare grey brick walls, and there is a permanent smell of stale cigarette smoke and lager.
Away End concourses are invaribly more cramped than the Home supporters' facilities, possibly only fifteen feet wide in some places, so to reach your section you must barge along through the hooded, tracksuited and be-trainered crowds, doing your best to dodge cigarette burn incursions onto your jeans, or pints of lager down your neck.
It is clear today that the lower Steve Bull Stand, and much of the upper, is going to be jammed full of Away support (so much for the three men and a dog). Supporters travelling away tend to be vocal and diehard anyway, and most of them have been drinking steadily since opening time, if the queue outside the Gents is anything to go by. The more hygenic, warm-up chants are first up: "Villa! Villa! Villa!" "D'Lo-s Claret and Blue Army" and "We're the Greatest Football Team..."Then the crowd move on to more dubious fare, most of it not even aimed at the Wolves but at "The Blue-Nosed Scum", aka Birmingham City: " ..walking in a Villa Wonderland; (s******g on the 'City as we go - oh) and "My old man said, be a Birmingham City fan and I said b******s., you're a...".
The singing gets a whole lot quieter when Villa (a Premiership team) go two easy ones down after only fifteen minutes to Wolves (only a Div 1/"Championship") team. Two men two rows in front of us start chain smoking. The fug drifts straight back into my face. I look round for a steward: at Villa Park smoking is strictly banned in the stands and I assume it's the case at Molyneux. But the steward is pretending to take no notice: he is, quite frankly, an even worse fat slob than the two smokers, but about six inches shorter.
Halftime comes: an unbelievable crush in the concourse as a ten-deep crowd fights its way to the bar to load up on more lager. There's no chance of me making it down the other end to the place where they sell Bovril, the traditional Midlands football beverage (which conveniently has no caffeine, alcohol or calories: maybe that's why it seems to be going out of fashion).
The crowd jammed into the narrow concrete corridor, with no place to go, starts singing again, to the tune of Yellow Submarine: Wolves Came Up But Went Straight Back Down , and also, mysteriously, Tracy Andrews Is Our Friend. (Later at home I consult my dictionary of football chants and discover it's about a battered wife called Tracy Andrews who killed her violent, Blue Nose, husband).
Back for the second half. The Villa fans around me are in a more contemplative mood. Villa are 2-1 down, and looking highly unlikely to score any more, so the singing has more or less stopped and the chat is beginning in earnest.
I should explain at this point that Villa fans are officially graded by the police - who are connoisseurs of these things - as being remarkably non-violent. Compared to most fans, they are a placid, low-key, pessimistic bunch: despite all their chanting they don't really ever expect to win. In fact, win, lose or draw they tend to leave the stadium with their heads down, trundling quietly home, flicking through their programmes and making the occasional quiet comment to their mates about how Hendrie was crap and O'Leary ought to get rid of him.
Whilst harboring no sincere expectations of their team's ability to win, however, Villa fans are possessed with a absolute conviction that Villa is the only club in the Midlands with a modicum of intelligence and class. In their view, Bluenoses are all thieving wife-beaters: either in jail, or just got out. The Baggies (West Bromwich Albion) are thick and useless. And Wolves are the Dingles, in reference to the ignorant, criminal family of Emmerdale fame. Here is a typical Villa fan conversation when it is quite clear their team is going down to the local rivals and there is nothing they can do about it...
Villa fan one: "God, the Dingles are soooo unbelievably stupid. It's the inbreeding, you know."
Villa fan two: "Yeah, you ask a yam [alternate descriptor of a Wolverhampton resident] for directions and it just looks at you with a dumb expression. They don't even know their way round their own f******g ground."
Villa fan one: "Can you imagine one on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?"
Villa fan two [laughing bitterly]: "Yeah, I'd love to hear Tarrant go "Sorry, you ignorant inbred Dingle, but you can't have £100."
And so on....
posted by alranson | 6:51 AM
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