My dad is the living proof that you can only really support one team. In his case, despite the proximity of the then Proud Preston, featuring the immortal Tom Finney, who ran the team, had the best penalty technique until Shola Ameobi and dominated the town but had to depend on his plumbing business for his own financial security, typically he chose Southport FC instead. They were closer to his Lancashire village home and had the grand boulevards of Lord Street, modelled on the Rue de Rivoli, where there was more cultural side of the British seaside experience than proletarian Blackpool who copied the Eiffel Tower instead.
We used to go to visit the family there and Southport hosts our fondest family reminiscences; walking miles across sandy beach trying to find the sea, singing the songs from Oliver after the pictures, steering a real motorboat on the lake, climbing in the back window of the B&B when we were late back and being nicknamed “The Cat Burglar” for a while. I recall the dark terraces in what seemed like a huge Haig Avenue, and seeing my team Newcastle United, play his team and don’t remember much apart from the crowd, the green of the pitch under the floodlights and standing right next to my big dad. I’m always reminded of Sir Bobby Robson’s famous saying:-
“It’s the noise, the passion, the feeling of belonging, the pride in your city. It’s a small boy clambering up stadium steps for the very first time, gripping his father’s hand, gawping at the hallowed stretch of turf beneath him, and without being able to do a thing about it, falling in love.”
Newcastle and Southport
My love was always for Newcastle United and I was fighting on a foreign field that night, but there’s a sliver of my heart that will always beat for Southport too, especially as we will probably never play them again. These days, Southport subsist in the National League North, the one below what used to be called the Conference, so are two unlikely promotions away from their former position in the Football League and their non-geographical “Northern league” (Note, not “The Northen League”, the world’s second oldest football league and that’s an argument that even I at my most disputatious don’t want to go anywhere near), contains the indisputable southern Oxford City, Kings Lynn and Hereford which shows where the centre of economic, social and therefore footballing power has gone lately.
Spennymoor and footballing love
That said, if the ten-degree cold of a County Durham summer is anything to go by, Spennymoor Town’s Brewery Field could be an inhospitable place for teams unused to such tundra-like conditions, and that weather might help rebalance things. It’s like playing Chelsea or Spurs at St. James in winter in a snowy St. James Park, we the crowd always seem to take heart from the sight of our short sleeved Brazilian midfielders getting tore into their long sleeved, gloved-up, stocking-wearing Brazilian midfielders and we usually win those games. There’s not much logic in being a football fan.
That regional hostility apart, and there wasn’t a speck of it that I saw on Tuesday, I want to follow Sir Bobby’s theme of footballing love. Apart from the second half rain and the first bite of autumn in the air, it was a beautiful clear night. The sunset over the ground, the floodlights on the green of the composite grass pitch and the freshness of the facilities at the start of a new season all show the community values that football can bring. Because Southport was playing, it was also a night when the recent tragic murders there of the poor little girls, their friends and families who were injured and their communities who endured the pain of both bereavement was marked. The dignity and compassion of Spennymoor and Tudhoe people, who did what they could, quietly and without fuss contrasted with the fury and noise of the parasites, fools and thugs, some who provoked and others who committed the recent violence in our streets. This contrasting dignity was expressed by the announcement of a collection for the Alder Hay Hospital, where the kids and their protectors were treated, which raised £2,260, made up of a levy on ticket sales, the half-time raffle, a bucket collection on the way out and a donation from the club chairman.
The match: “as wholesome as a Hovis advert”
The match itself showed Spennymoor Town and its people as exemplars of what we might consider a bygone age of gentility and community but done better now with a women’s team and diversity on and off the pitch. A crowd of c 1,200 saw Spennymoor deservedly win 2-0 with goals by the proper skilful and rumbustious centre forward Glen Taylor. Southport was tidy in possession in patches but carried no real attacking threat and from our seats bang on the half-way line me and my dad shared the old footballing joke that Southport’s substitute centre-half Keenan Quansah, the brother of the famous Liverpool Quansah, may have looked as imposing as an Easter Island statue, but unfortunately played like one too. It was the kind of night where you could fetch a coffee to your seat, chat to the feller next to you, people had pints on the standing terraces and all was well. It was a wholesome as a Hovis advert and I never even heard a swear word all night, no matter what they thought the referee did (to be fair apart from a strange drop-ball in the second half, he was alright).
Spennymoor, town and team, did well on Tuesday night. They have a good team, a really good pitch that rewards the balance, control and artistic flair of our beautiful game, they do things right and anyone could go along and enjoy the football, the pies and peas and the lucky bags sweets for the kids. It is the kind of institution that punches above its weight within their locality and region. I think that all the other football teams whose grounds I’ve been too recently, Gateshead, Morpeth, Sunderland, Ashington and Newcastle United do the same. They are sporting institutions which represent their places full of their people of all identities, opinions and origins, but all with the capacity to put a coin in a collection bucket to help or share a cheery or commiserating word with another fan. I said “Enjoy your visit…apart from the football obviously” to a laughing Southampton fan last Saturday as he put a pound in the foodbank collection. The Southport fans got a similar smiling welcome and commiserations and all had that internal shared warmth of sporting comradeship which marks the almost invisible threads that hold a society together in tough times.
Spennymoor also play in black and white stripes so for me, sitting next to my dad as we did, it was a reminder of Haig Avenue all those years ago when the black’n’whites won too. We got home late, because of the closure of the A1 and the mess they’re making of the Tyne Bridge, but I’ll never forget it and I hope to return to Spennymoor United’s Brewery Field this winter. It’s a beautiful place to watch a clear winter sky darkening as you clutch a Bovril for comfort, but I’d recommend very warm clothing and if you go, it may just repair the cynicism of a jaded soul. Winter is coming, but Spring will be along after that. Let’s stick together in comradeship and be ready for the good times again.
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