Your reading a pre 2010-11 archived article
Normally when faced with writing up my footy days out I do it as quickly as possible, not this time. I have needed nay on a week to recover enough from this game to be able to write owt.
It is my fortune (if that is the right word) to have mates supporting what they call “real football”, the kind of football I occasionally saw until 2007 (when all of a sudden Leeds United were part of it). So about once a year I see Lincoln City (that was much more fun when that game was a play-off final) or Port Vale. The Vale side of things allows me to see the rabid animal side of one of my mates (only ever comes out at Vale games or on stags), but as he is a very decent bloke he won’t really feature in this (you will just have to try work out where I’m talking about him) despite him being omnipresent throughout the ordeal.
Ordeal is the right word, Underhill is not the nicest of grounds at the best of times, it’s even worse when its peeing it down. Luckily I had been fortified by a decent real ale house up the road, with its separate football watching shed where I saw Liverpool show why they won’t finish top 4 and why Man City won’t either until they dump Mark Hughes. As an aside, whilst I will always have a soft spot for the 80’s style of footy day out I used to enjoy, being able to enjoy my beer without threat of disorder is one modern day tendency I can cope with.
Having got to Underhill just before kick-off, paying £15 for the privilege of getting in with an option of an extra pound to get a seat under a canopy (declined), I was instantly reminded why I consider it the weirdest of grounds. A slopping pitch, the oldest main stand left in professional football, views of trees as far as the eye can see over one stand, suburbia all around and some standing areas that would look tacky in the Rymans. Oh and you can take a pee without queing, no not because they provide a lot of facilities, because only 1900 people could be arsed to make it (although to be fair those that did must have regretted it early).
As the game kicked off it became apparent very early we were in for a turgid afternoon, two shocking teams trading velvet glove slaps with each other whilst the supporters ran the gauntlet of sideways rain. Both sides were so awful I only need to use this paragraph to describe the game. Chances were at a premium, passing woeful, goalkeepers redundant. I had to remind myself that one of the Barnet players played PL with Watford and one of the Vale players ran Leeds ragged once at Elland Road whilst with Barnsley. Not an ounce of quality to show, although to be fair the Vale right-back, Griffiths, normally a midfielder, had something about him that suggested he was better than the pub team fare on display.
So in the absence of decent football what else was there to entertain? Well the dodgiest linesman I have ever seen, if his flag went up the player was onside, if it didn’t he was clearly off. To be fair he was consistently bad to both sides but was very bad. After about 70 minutes two Vale fans exploded at the same time, one had such a squeaky voice I thought it must be a girl but girls are not normally bald, round and turning purple. The other waited until the lino was within 2 feet of him and then bellowed a critique that would have been massively impressive if it hadn’t ended with the words “you c88t”. Memo to hecklers, get your c88t out early, if it comes on the end of a long diatribe it sounds forced.
So very little else to say except to mention the sending off, Tommy Frasier, relation of some bloke called Frankie, managed to get himself sent off deep into injury time with a tackle that wasn’t only stupid because of the part of the pitch he was in (i.e. nowhere dangerous) but was also rubbish because he missed his intended victim of his two footed knee high lunge by about 6 feet! 30 seconds later (well 30 seconds after it had all calmed down) the ref blew for full time. This cued up one of the strangest sites I have seen at a game for a long while; hundreds of Vale fans clapping a team that has just served up a bucket of pee for longer than I have seen Leeds clapped off after an away win. Talk about OTT, and the best bit was the Vale player that milked it the most (Richards) was probably their laziest player in the 90 minutes. Sometimes fans in this game will tolerate too much.
So the end of another real football extravaganza, the Lincoln City fan hasn’t decided on a game yet, no rush mate, no rush.
