Ipswich Town v Norwich City

DERBY DAZE

Ipswich Town 1-5 Norwich City (21:04:11)

After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, Chris Mills reports on the Ipswich v Norwich abomination before stabbing a fork into his thigh... 

THERE are some things that cannot be unseen. There are some things all records of which must be shredded, ground into dust and buried 60 metres down in a lead-lined, concrete sarcophagus. Then dug up and fired into the centre of the sun.

No, what I saw was not Hans Bressinck dad-dancing with Danny Last to Céline Dion at 3am in the back room of a dodgy Antwerp boozer. No, what I saw was more horrific even than that.

What I saw was an internet page displaying the inexplicable scoreline: Ipswich Town 1 Norwich City 5. I attended the match in my role of video monkey (saving clips for the half- and full-time highlights reels) but I wasn’t really watching.

I did look up at one point, however, to see Ipswich Town player James “Jimmy” Bullard smack in a 40-metre screamer past a motionless keeper. Someone told me that apparently whoever we were playing also scored a few times but it was agreed across the global football community that Bully’s goal was by far the best of the night.

And it had all started so well.

I had arranged what is referred to in the groundhopper community as the “Triple Crown” – drinking with three different nationalities before a game; in this case three Dutchmen, a Swede and a Belgian, namely the up-and-coming EFW youngster and probationary Bronze Member “Super” Hans Bressinck.

Glass-hoppers: From left, Dutchman Hugo and (obscured), Joost, a Swede and new convert to Suffolk’s Adnams Best bitter, Hans

After a visit to the club shop – the violent-sounding World of Punch – Ipswich Town is now Hans’s 27^th favourite team

Crowd-favourite Hansy, a product of the much-respected EFW Academy, has been careering recklessly between Euro stadions since his he came on as a sub to complete a remarkable debut three years ago, aged only 18.

“I have many old friends,” the cheeky youngster explained at over a pint of Adnams bitter, stating that by this he means friends who are old, not friends he has known for a long time. “This is how I can fit in with the EFW demographic.”

Not realising the Dutchmen and the Swede were so well organised they had scheduled a Pizza Express run, I kept the boy Bressinck waiting almost one hour past our 16:00 meeting time, thinking he’d be surrounded by Euro-pals as he languished pre-match. As it goes, the Phlegmish enfant terrible eventually confessed he’d been 20 minutes late himself and then quite happily wiled away the time by trying beer for the first time and listening to the charming chants of the Town fans present at Mannings bar in the Buttermarket, the Grande Place of Ipswich.

The world-weary manageress of the joint told me she’d moved on the braying drunkards about half an hour earlier when they began to scare the horses and disconcert elderly patrons trying to enjoy their tripe and onion paninis and halves of Mild.

And, indeed, on my way into the town centre, I had been delighted to hear the charming melodies of a hundred or so Tractor boys, now herded into The County pub as a good proportion of the 300 or so Suffolk, Norfolk and British Transport police on duty kept watch. There was also a helicopter buzzing the centrum to make sure no football supporter hurt somebody’s feelings.

There were 300 coppers and horses wearing skate board gear on duty for the Town v Canaries derby (and 19 arrests)

There was a “carnival” atmosphere on the training pitch behind the Britannia Stand. Right, the training pitch is also used to graze huge horses

Turns out this probably wasn’t overkill. There were 19 arrests (despite what you may have heard, NOT Hans) and 13 people were ejected from the stadion. Most fans were fine and dandy but cops said “a significant minority” were throwing bottles, glasses, coins, batteries and fireworks at police and away supporters. What a waste of useful stuff.

Segregation rules meant the stade’s 30,000 capacity could not be breached so there were officially 29,258 there that night, of whom more than 2,100 were in Canary yellow. Predictably, they were loud and abusive.

Top cop Supt John Everett told tired and emotional journalists later: “At times, certainly immediately prior to kick-off and outside the visitors’, and on the way back to the railway station after the match, it was very challenging for police officers… we were very stretched…”

But back in the convivial atmosphere of Mannings, things were very different. I soon realised my fellow drinkers were righteous G-hoppers. Although at first I thought they were simply clearing their throats, I gradually became aware they were discussing football in Dutch. It went something along the lines of: “*Unintelligible* *unintelligible* Wesht Brom *unintelligible* *unintelligible* *unintelligible* Foresht Green Roversh *unintelligible* *unintelligible* *unintelligible* ”… and so on.

It turns out Dutchman Hugo hooked up with Super-Hans in the Phoenix footy chatroom – a Dutch groundhopping message board – and every year he, Joost and Yves (for it was they) act as sponsor to what they call “the Phoenix match” – teams so far have included Yeading FC, Wokingham and Marlow (Bucks). I love the image of local PA men struggling with the Dutch names over 1930s Tannoy systems. You can read about these hijinksh on Hugo’s excellent webshite (the Dutch word for “website”). This site has links with EFW’s adopted German team 1.FC Union Berlin.

The late, great Sir Robert “Bobby” Robson emblazoned across the corner of the North and Cobbold stands at Portman Road

My uncle Mick with a young Ian Rush circa 1982, as seen on the stairway to the media centre and VIP areas at Portman Road

And so it came to pass that part-time undertaker Hans – already legendary thanks to his stories of defrosting corpses with a hair-dryer and being named as a necrophile in an Israeli newspaper – was impelled to chug his final two-thirds of Adnams bitter when the Swede announced we should head for Portman Road with an hour to spare “to take pictures”.

And what shots they were, depicting glories past in the form of statues of former Ipswich and England managers Sir Robert “Bobby” Robson and Sir Ernest Alfred “Alf” Ramsey and the Sir Bobby Robson stand (formerly “North Stand” with its giant Sir Bob mural over the club shop), illuminated by the soft sunlight of a late-spring evening.

Then out came the stars, shining and twinkling against a glorious night sky. A stunning backdrop; so black… black… BLAAACK… so dark! So endless! So empty! So much despair… so much sadness… My eyes are pies! My eyes are pies! What shall we do with the football, mother? Pop it like a broken heart and post it to horrid Nanny Farquar with a luncheon voucher. Yes! Post it to Nanny! She waits for me in the nursery; pointing and laughing! Laughing and pointing! No! Not the green shorts again, Nanny! Don’t make me put them on! I’ll be a good boy! I’ll be a…

(*An hour passes. A clock chimes softly in the drawing room. Dust motes dance above a mahogany sideboard. The muffled sound of voices and the doors of a white Morris Oxford van being slammed. An engine starts...*)

Now, I know there are probably some Norwich fans who might read this. Maybe even some among the EFW membership. But you ain’t getting zip out of me here. If you want a match report, Google it.

My view of the match – mostly the cameras of Anglia TV, beaming the game back to a giant screen at Carrow Road, Norwich. Turned out to be the best view 

Diary of the broken-hearted: My notes for the highlights reels. At one particularly horrific moment I slammed down my half-time coffee, resulting a distinctly strange stain  

 

Fading to black: The lights of Portman Road as fans stream home – at this stage the ecstatic and tedious Norwich contingent were still being held captive inside the stadium by the Filth

You can follow European Football Weekends on Twitter

- Feel free to comment/share the pain/gloat below - 

England v Argentina World Cup Memories

Sweet Revenge

by Chris Mills

I DON’T trust men who say they don’t like football. I have nothing against men who don’t like football; I just don’t see why they have to say they don’t like it. If you can’t say something nice…

That’s why I particularly love the World Cup. Every four years everybody has to like football – or pretend they do. Men who say they don’t like football are rebuked on all fronts, even by… uh-hum… women.

Everything changes. There is a feeling of togetherness wherever you go like the feeling you get when you’re walking to your home team’s ground, in your home town surrounded people all going to the same place and all wearing the same colour (unless they feel they have to protest against colonising Americans/Thais/Icelanders).

It’s better than the Olympics because, here in England, we know about football and we know all the rules. We don’t have to Google “skeleton bob” or “fencing points system”. My favourite image of Germany 06 was Al Murray, The Pub Landlord, clutching a replica of the trophy with a little plaque on it reading: “It was our idea.”

Even if it’s for the wrong reasons, everyone pays attention to football and we’re all reduced (surely elevated? - Ed.) to flag-waving, leisurewear-fixated neo-chavs while the thoughts of Alan Hansen become more relevant than those of David Cameron (Mark Lawrenson remains less pertinent than Nick Clegg, though).

Football gets the respect it deserves during the Coupe du Monde. In my view, sport generally, and “soccer” in particular, has prevented many a war… and started at least one (in Honduras, I think it was)…

For most of the last few tournaments, I was fortunate enough to work at a newspaper with a sports-addled editor. This was in Ipswich, a town I describe to people around the world by first asking them: “Do you follow football?” (…no, not: “Do you follow serial killers?”).

Such was the editor’s football mentalism I was able settle into a role that allowed me devote every Tuesday to drinking with the sports desk hacks and lead one new guy to tell me that for the first few months he’d thought my job was “to watch Sky TV on the sports desk telly”. Even if England weren’t in it, there was usually a Town player knocking around the World Cup somewhere. I remember massed newsroom celebrations when Boncho Guenchev scored a penalty for Bulgaria in USA 94.

But it was Japorea 02 and David Beckham which together led to my most dubious achievement in journalism – knocking out two high-profile sports pages after a five-pint breakfast.

As a morning newspaper (which is made in the afternoon and night) absenteeism hadn’t been a huge problem for this particular tournament. But the early morning matches combined with Ipswich magistrates’ open-minded approach to the licensing laws and an existing cast of tired and emotional hacks were a heady cocktail.

I remember we were locked into The Plough, a goal-kick from the newsroom, seemingly as dawn was breaking for the group match Argentina versus Inglaterra. We’d had to buy tickets for the privilege of being trapped inside this pisspore boozer. It infamous variously for once accidentally running a fairly long section of a porno on the bar TVs, having had a urinal with a bucket under it since around the time we’d jammed into the function room for the Argentina penalty shoot-out tragedy of France 98 and for using 400-watt arc lights and German Shepherds at chucking-out time.

So it came to pass that there was something of an extended pre-match build-up and – using the imagination that has won England fans friends across the globe – much of this was spent standing and drinking, drinking and standing (we were too late to get seats). And while The Case Is Altered – an ITFC/Newcastle United pub much further out of the centrum – laid on a slap-up full English for the Japorea morning games, there was little at The Plough to soak up the ale.

(The Case later went downhill when a Terry Tibbs character turned it into a karaoke bar – but it will always have a place in my heart as the location of my bearing witness to Germany 1 England 5, an epic, gonzo night during which the pub’s whist team pig-headedly played on while hundreds lurched and screeched around them.)

Fewer pints were consumed during “England-Argentina: The Re-Match”, but some beer was called for – mainly to steady the nerves. I saw a new side of the co-worker pals there with me. A Millwall boy and a Pompey fan, they had ditched their usually cheerful badinage in favour of barely concealed skittishness as both openly confessed to wanting a victory by any means; just scraping it if need be, no finesse necessary.

I, strangely, was in a state of grace. I had no doubt that we would win; God knows why. And despite being only vaguely aware I had to do some work post-match, I made but a token effort at maintaining sobriety.

Beckham’s penalty success did little to relieve the tension and when it was all over and the doors finally unlocked my old mates seemed to have aged significantly. But after a respectful period of disbelief, a bravura mood of celebration took over as we staggered back across the bus station and into the newsroom.

Quite reasonably, I thought, I was ready for a bit of a nap in an outer office. Imagine my horror, then, when the editor hove into view, clearly excitable and, like us, rather worse for wear: “OK, I want you to do the back and Page 56 – England page-lead and the quotes piece et cetera…” With that, he wobbled away as I tried to recall how to switch on my PC.

The upside was that the deadline was a good nine hours away, the downside was the fact that my screen appeared to be undulating. I set about creating a cut-out of Beckham while mainlining caffeine. Confidence was high after I manage to keep my stand-alone Becks away from the Edward Scissorhands end of the cut-out spectrum.

Page design I can do using the same part of the brain that controls automatic functions such as breathing and burping, but correcting text is a different matter. I was re-reading the copy for the seventh time when the editor blundered back.

I reacted to his peering over my shoulder with: “Yeah, I’m just searching for the perfect heading. Something timeless; something reflecting the occasion… I’ll float it across six columns over the main pic… I was thinking maybe just: ‘We win!’”

“Naah…” The editor was not one to sugar the pill. “Too American. ‘Sweet revenge’. Make it: ‘Sweet revenge’.”