Читать книгу For The Claret & Blue - Mickey Smith - Страница 5

Sitting here in my office, I start to think about how symbolic of modern football my situation is today. A combination of the ridiculous, TV-dictated 12pm kick-off for a game at the other end of the country and my own need to pick and choose away games these days has turned what at one time would’ve been a ‘can’t miss’ game for me into a complete non-starter.

It doesn’t feel good.

Whatever the positive and negative points of today’s football, there is no doubting that the sport has changed beyond recognition since the first time I clicked through a turnstile in the 1960s.

Local heroes who you could reasonably expect to run into during the week in your local pub, lads who knew what a local derby meant to the fans and bled for the cause, have been replaced by distant young millionaires far removed from the day-to-day environment and, often these days, the culture of the people who pay their wages.

Satellite and cable TV companies move fixtures around almost at will, the improved quality and depth of their coverage negated by the sheer inconvenience they cause to the long-suffering supporter.

The terrace culture that has been so much a part of the lives of ‘lads’ for the last forty years has changed beyond recognition too.

Much has been written in the last few years about the subject of hooliganism/terrace culture, some of it from preaching or apologist sociologists, some of it from wide boys telling tall tales, some of it from ex-terrace ‘soldiers’ or ‘generals’ whether written by them or through ghost writers.

Some of it has even been good.

One thing most of these books miss – and one thing the commentators, pundits and journalists dare not voice too loudly for fear of being branded soft on ‘yobs’ – is what has been buried in the scramble to sanitise the people’s game for its new middle-class audience.

What has been lost is the game’s soul.

The fabulous new stadia in this country have soared ever skyward in the unprecedented building rush that has followed Hillsborough and the later inception of the Premier League, yet all too often these new temples to the people’s game are bereft of the very atmosphere and charge that made a weekly trip to the game such a vital part of the lives of so many.

There are too many sterile, regulated and cowed bums on the shiny new plastic seats, overseen by CCTV cameras and police and stewards with almost unbelievable powers of restraint, censure and arrest.

All this loss of liberty and the supporters are paying far too much for the privilege. In what seems a classic case of ‘throwing the baby out with the bath water’ we have seen what was a necessary and long-overdue change to improve supporters’ safety and comfort parlayed and manipulated into a wholesale revolution, one where the ordinary fan has been raped of his and her cultural heritage.

The insidious march of middle-class values and the regulations of successive governments have ensured the success of this revolution, leaving the original fans to either swim with the tide or sink into their armchairs or pub lounges with nothing but a pale imitation of the original match-day experience left.

That, and their memories.

Covering a period of forty years we are taken from the embryonic and rebellious days of the firm through to today’s mobile-phone-and-Internet-fuelled last hurrah of what will surely now become a lost subculture.

Using his formidable memory bank and calling on an unprecedented amount of reliable first-hand anecdotes for this project, Micky has weaved his magic again.

Trying to get a true, accurate story of the ICF is indeed a hard task. (For more see Cass Pennant’s book Congratulations, You Have Just Met The ICF.) Many stories are best left untouched and forgotten. Some may incriminate people. Some are just everyday fans’ tales of what they saw on and off the pitch. For this reason Micky has chosen to leave out a few other tales and just add everyday lads that were there, and hopes you will understand.

Twofold.

Yours in Football

Castle Street Charlie

London