blades blog Little Boy Soldiers

Posted: January 29th 2009
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30 years since the Boxing Day Massacre . . . promotion play-off place in the balance . . .filling the Beattie vacuum . . .are you ready for this Jamie Ward . . .44-40 what a game . . . has there ever been more riding on The Steel City Derby? (cue BBC Radio Sheffield and Basement Jaxx’s ‘Good Luck’)

Well of course the answer is yes but it suits every derby game to build up the atmos to a level deserving of the fixture whatever the relative merits of the context in which its played. It’s not difficult to attach extra baggage this season, or indeed any season, because at least one of the two annual fixtures always coincide with a vitally important time of the season. The win-at-all-costs flavour is no exception this time around because, with the promotion places so tight, you have to keep on winning just to tread water.

Games involving local rivalries are peculiarly introverted and self-absorbed. The average supporter outside the city cocks an eye to the result because he knows someone he might rip over it but inevitably these games are ultra significant only to people associated with Sheffield.

As a kid I was starved of derby games. The clubs only shared the same division in only six out of the 29 seasons before the year 2000. Thus, apart from the old, cutesy county cup competitions and friendlies, my first real taste of league combat with the old enemy was as a 16-year-old in the return fixture after the Boxing Day Massacre which they won 4-0. It was 1979, the Jam were at their peak with Weller thrashing out songs of greater intensity and complexity and the accompanying two-tone revival was in its infancy. Secret Affair said it was Time for Action and it was. I’d discovered football, music pubs and girls – everything in the world was perfect. Both United and Wednesday were languishing in the old third division but a combined crowd of 92,000 saw both games and Wednesday’s home-tie figure still holds as a record the for the division.

It’s the biggest crowd I ever stood in at Bramall Lane. I was part of a kop which swayed, surged  and growled as if it were a single large animal. We devoured small children and spat out scarves and anything which wasn’t anchored to the concrete. My shoulders ached from the pressure from both sides. We rose like meer cats at the merest hint of violence somewhere else in the ground. Questionable liquids streamed down the steps. You could cut the testosterone with a knife. It was positively medieval and I loved it, feeling as I did, that I’d been blooded, like the young fox hunter, into a barbaric pastime (. . . and you tell the  young people of today and they don’t believe you). As a bloke of more mature years, and a parent, I can now say that the all-American, family fun-day-out football experience has a lot to recommend it (and I’m not ignoring the fact that people had to lose their lives before supporters were offered safe and humane facilities) but it is also a sanitised version of the game and lacks the full-bodied spice of yesteryear with all its inherent faults.

Although I distinctly remember the split second that big John McPhail connected with the ball for United’s goal in 1979, I didn’t see the ball hit the net nor any of the celebrations. The re-start and subsequent passages of play were a blur because of the derby tsunami which hit. I was facing the wrong way when I finally managed to regain my feet. Of the mates who were comrades-in-arms at my shoulder before the goal, one was now on the floor, one arm wrapped around my leg, another two were now a good 20 metres further down the kop (with a far superior view for the rest of the game) and another was bemoaning the half eaten hot pie he’d dropped at the moment of ecstasy (we never let him forget the incident because if he’d not been so focused on the food he might have sensed the oncoming wave and braced himself for the aftershocks with one hand, thus preserving what was left of the pie with the other). He eats pies much quicker these days but as he does so, interestingly, still has a tendency to look furtively about him, flinching occasionally, perhaps trapped in some post-traumatic pie disorder.

The derby-day pie incident turned out, sadly, to be the highlight  because bubble-permed Terry Curran, of alleged wandering and nomadic Romany origins, came in from the left flank, migrated past two statuesque Blades midfielders, weaved his witchcraft and let rip with an effort which screamed, yelled and taunted us all the way to bulging the net, behind which the Wendies went mental – the 1-1 draw ruined our afternoon and Curran’s goal was the re-record-and-not-fade-away moment of the TV coverage. I never forgave him . . .until he joined us three years later. Even then I bore a grudge.

Anyway, I digress, although we’ve done reasonably well in the meetings this century, the last three games have seen us lose two and draw one (thanks largely to James BT’s sublime free-kick last season) but the only figure that really matters (because we lead it) is the one which says that since 1893, we’re winning the victory total 44-40 although 38 draws says a lot about the quality, or lack of it, of traditional blood-n-thunder derbies..

Of course it’s never just about the result alone is it. Going back to that 1979 season, after the humiliation of Boxing Day and the draw at the Lane, the Wendies were promoted, we finished 12th and the following season were relegated to football’s basement. The pair of us never met again for more than a decade because we were crap. They enjoyed the generational superiority of which we are currently custodians and that’s what February 7th is about.

The portents are ominous this time round but then, I always say that as a kind of default mechanism in the build up. Perhaps this time it’s actually true though, Wednesday do seem to be proverbially ‘turning the corner’. They’ve endured the chairman-sues-the-fans ignomy, they’ve clawed their way back up to the Championship and now seem able to push on with Brian Laws. They stray on to our forums admitting that the last decade has seen wasted years but claim that’s the past.  This may, or may not, be true but I’d prefer us to keep the upper hand for now.

Since three members of my family this year gave up their season tickets due to ‘The Crunch’, it means I’m now in the scrap for an ordinary ticket in a strict criteria-based free-for-all jamboree. We’re currently on the day when I would have to have 340 supporter points, buy additional tickets for the Barnsley and Doncaster home matches, watch three reserve games, buy a United soap-on-a-rope and produce a programme and empty pie wrapper from the Maltby versus Frickley Colliery game – then, and only then, might I qualify to join a queue for a lucky dip to see if I can be means tested and assessed for a ticket for the game.

Fear not, I was in a similar position last year but kept my cool and wandered into the ticket office 20 mins before kick-off only to pick up very easily one of a raft of last-minute returns, a stunt I’ve pulled on more than occasion at so-called ‘sell-out’ matches.

Commercially, I think someone’s missing out on these games because of the police restrictions and modern ground regulations. It’s unlikely the combined attendance this season will reach 65,000 and with a new restriction emptying the first half dozen rows of the upper tier of the Bramall Lane Stand (so people stop dropping things on the Wendies), the home figure may only be 30,000 – creating nothing like the raucous and anarchistic atmosphere of those 1979 matches.

Wednesday arrive at a pivotal point in our season coming on the back of a series of wins for us against lowly league opposition inflating our chances of a play-off place. I stand by what I blogged  recently that we are pretenders to promotion this season and that it doesn’t feel like it’s really on for us but I do have to concede that we are actually making a fist of it. As I said in the last blog, the early signs are that BT’s sale has not dimmed the flame rather banked us some cash and freed us from the shackles of his weekly wage bill. However, in the next five weeks we face Preston away and Wednesday and Birmingham at home with the additional topping of South Yorkshire derbies at home with Doncaster and Barnsley before QPR away. Much more than the derby day, it is those half dozen games which will define our season.

I suppose you could say that two-team-city supporters live in hope of developing a co-existence rather like Forest and County where one club is so clearly in the permanent ascendancy that it’s not even up for discussion any more. But that would be boring and I’d rather we were both stylish and exciting teams performing this ritual on a much bigger stage.

I’ll finish with one of my favourite pieces of journalism this season which sums up the current state of play between Sheffield’s two clubs – well, it did at the time. It was a piece by Amy Lawrence in the Observer on the day of the Hillsborough derby earlier this season (which Wednesday won 1-0). I leave you to decide whether it rings quite as true as it did back in October last year:

“Wednesday are so rudderless they do not have a chairman. Their board have all but dissolved as the major shareholders desperately seek someone to buy them out and have a crack at turning round a club with a skeleton thin squad, a dated stadium and a fan base who are finding it difficult to put themselves through much more punishment.”

Thanks Amy, I couldn’t have put it better myself.