Supporting Cardiff is not just for the weekend – it’s a badge of honour
Being a Bluebirds fan is more than just going to the matches or following the results each week – it’s a state of mind, a shared passion, a rite of passage. Here, long-time fan and author Dan Tyte opens up on what it means to be a Cardiff City fan... and why clinching promotion this time around would be so much sweeter...
AS LOCATIONS for personal epiphanies go, a Fourth Division football league game between Cardiff City and Crewe Alexandra might not be the most glamorous, but we are who we are.
Thirty years ago this week my life was about to change forever. I went to my first live football match.
It was at Ninian Park. It was the second of May 1988. I was seven years old.
The world was different then. Football was different.
This was before Hillsborough. Before the Taylor Report. Pre-Premier League.
But some things remain the same. Every Cardiff City fan prays tomorrow’s game against Reading will be a promotion party.
Almost three decades to the day, my first game was just that.
That time, the deal was sealed before the last home game and my dad had decided that this celebratory season finale would ease me in.
Before then, my experience of football had been limited to playground flyaways and Mexico 86 sticker books, but I could feel this, sense it, smell it.
That day, City won 2-0 (the same would do tomorrow).
And from the second I sat in the rickety wooden seats of the grandstand until the final whistle, I was hooked.
The pitch at the end of the game was a sea of grown men with ‘80s perms and tight stonewash jeans, dancing around, punching the air and looking very happy.
I wanted to be that happy. Every Saturday, please.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. My dad had played a cruel trick.
It turns out we didn’t get promoted every Saturday.
Most Saturdays we lost and it rained and there was no dancing, and although there was punching, it was rarely just of the air. But I was hooked.
Four years later, my journalistic career began by interviewing then Cardiff captain Jason ‘Psycho’ Perry in the South Wales Echo’s Junior Bluebird pages.
(Q: “Roommate?”
A: “Carl Dale. Not only great fun but very professional”
Q: “Hardest opponents?”
A: “Roy Wegerle, Peter Beardsley and Steve Bull.”)
My easy manner around the superstars of the squad was spotted by the chief steward (helpfully, a family friend) and before I knew it I was invited to be a ball boy.
At just 11 years old I got to throw the ball to Nathan Blake and got paid for the privilege – a £2 voucher for the food kiosk.
If you’ve got a penchant for watching clips of early 90s Cardiff games on YouTube, you might be able to spot me on the last gate of the Bob Bank closest to the Grange End, the garishness of my oversized clubissued shellsuit not dulled by the graininess of the footage.
As I got older, I hung up the shellsuit and started going away, loving the buzz of travelling across the country, watching the City at most of the grounds in the leagues (less than 20 to go at last count), picking up (and forgetting) memories along the way.
A “tipsy” post-election Neil Kinnock at Fulham. Getting let in for free by a copper at Carlisle. Playing crown green bowls at Rochdale. Discovering Derby had a 24-hour Greggs.
I’ve seen things happen on 52seater coaches that can never be unseen.
Memorable moments making friends.
Much more than 11 men and a pig-skin.
Unless you support the Harlem Globetrotters, following a sports team is a rollercoaster of ups and downs.
But supporting Cardiff City over the past 30 years seems to have had more than a fair share of those.
Promotions. Relegations. Major cup finals. Play-off heartache.
Legends like Blake, Stant, Earnshaw, Kavanagh, Thorne, Ramsey, Whittingham, Bothroyd, Chopra. Add Warnock to that list.
If you’re superstitious, Cardiff teams have a habit of giving me anniversary presents.
City won Division Three in 1993 (five years), promotion via playoffs at Millennium Stadium (15 years), made the FA Cup final (20 years) and were last promoted to the Premier League to mark a quarter of a century since that late 80s afternoon against Crewe.
Most Cardiff City fans will tell you that supporting the club isn’t just something you do on the weekends to pass the time.
It’s not a hobby. It’s a badge of honour.
Your identity becomes wrapped up in it. An easy icebreaker when you bump into an old friend or acquaintance. Your face in the mind of many when they spot a result wherever they are in the world.
We might not be a privileged bunch, but we’re a proud bunch.
And Cardiff City fans have been hurting for a long while.
Whether you stopped going because of the red or whether you gritted your teeth, it affected you.
It changed relationships. With each other. With the club. With the outside world. This team, this manager, are repairing things. We’ve seen how success can conveniently build compliance, up to a point, but this time around, it’s been done right.
Even if we don’t go up tomorrow – or through the play-offs if that doesn’t work out – we’ve got our Cardiff City back.
And that might just be even more important.