Stuck Between Stations

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Supporter

An extortionate public transport system provides cheap fares that run out before match tickets go on sale while the suits make it even harder to support the club. To call it difficult being a long-distance fan is sad and self-indulgent. It is just different. It makes seeing matches difficult, my last being Lillestrom at home (with the chap next to me berating Stephen Carr for 90 minutes…) and the last before that was the 3-3 draw at Southampton. Even then I had to sit in the Southampton end, right next to the Newcastle fans; I must have been the only person sat down when Kevin Phillips came on.

Isolation breeds contempt, which creates solidarity. My best friend supports Leeds United and I yearn for the days we play them again, those games mattered, what does Wigan away even mean? Crap football, crap fans, crap town. Another good friend is from Norwich and I went with him to Carrow Road for the Birmingham match, Kevin Phillips joined us and I revelled in the fact 20,000 others were willing him to fail. The trouble with the SKY generation, of which I am a paid-up member, is that while it has seen an improvement in the quality of player on show it has created the ‘hybrid’ football fan who has too much time on their hands and foams at the mouth as they hammer at keyboards and text the ‘cracking banter’ brigade on the BBC website’s Live Text.

These morons encircle local boozers when you just want to keep your head down during the Chelsea home match as every taxi driver in Canterbury sneers at your back that Damien Duff knows which side his bread is buttered on. The press frustrate with their clamouring ridicule but it is nothing compared to hearing these ‘opinions’ filter through the masses. They can’t string together a semblance of an argument, during the 4-1 Villa defeat last season I was distracted from the match by a volley of questions about Dennis Wise and his legions of orcs. Wearing the shirt south of Washington seems to encourage these people and their unrepentant missive of bile and ignorance.

I have no love for southern football fans, whenever I visit Portsmouth I am aware of it teeming with wannabe east-enders, the same people who tormented my youth with accusatory questions at birthday parties and tea-time visits as my non-support for Southampton, Chelsea or Manchester United became a sticking point for friends and parents alike. Darren Peacock is swift to point out that the 95/96 defence weren’t rubbish but this didn’t stop the Spanish inquisition at school (again, from Southampton fans). Despite my dad being a Geordie supporting the club has always been an intense, personal, affair, whether it is my first live match, of which I remember nothing bar the chap behind me apologising to my dad at half-time for swearing too much, or Ian Woan, the shot of doom and my subsequent tantrum. I am still ashamed to this day that my reaction upon arriving home from the pub was to hurl my shirt on the ground then kick and spit on it. My mother, appalled, said I wasn’t going to watch football any more if this is how I behaved. I am the same now, minus the delinquency.

The decline of the last few years has seen a strange coincidence with my first real forays into the club’s history. I had ridden on my blood ties to the club for too long and realised there was more to Newcastle United than Alan Shearer, Kevin Keegan and the Champions League. Not growing up in the area has made me question whether I deserve the club in the past, I sulked after losing 3-0 to West Ham but what did the club owe me, what had I invested in it? When I was growing up there were only one or two other Newcastle fans at school, hangers on from the Keegan years who soon tailed off with Dalglish and Gullit, claiming they weren’t interested anymore.

It is difficult to decide whether supporting Newcastle United has made me better or bitter. My Alan Shearer poster reminded me of my responsibilities as a boy and Mike Ashley reinforces them within me now. The apathy that this regime has created hasn’t taken hold of me (although I no longer expect wins against teams with smaller grounds than ours), desire to own the purple shirt dissipates and I am happy to buy tickets and nothing else. Sticking with the club whilst people posture how many years since Newcastle won the league?, you lot think you’re a big club, makes abandoning it now seem a churlish idea. I’ve taken on southern football fans for years, I can take on Mike Ashley. They’re all bottlers anyway.