Dramatic end to grim season and fans will be back for more
THE sense of relief was palpable.
After one of the most gut-wrenching afternoons of football for Rams fans, Derby County were safe. The unthinkable drop into the third tier of English football had been avoided.
People who do not follow the game must have wondered what all the fuss was about. For them, I’ll quote one of my favourite literary passages: “To say that these men paid their shillings to watch 22 hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink …”
For sure, 92 years after J.B. Priestley wrote The Good Companions, football has changed. Whereas for Priestley’s fan “it offered you more than a shilling’s worth of material for talk during the rest of the week’”, now you might need a bank loan to pay for a season ticket to watch Premier League football.
The equivalent of the workingclass Saturday heroes that we cheered as kids are now 21st-century football multi-millionaires.
If only all modern owners understood that a football club is not simply a business. It fills a unique gap in the emotional lives of hundreds of thousands of people – the supporters.
Players, managers, directors – across more than a century Derby County has been moulded by men whose talent has been revered (and sometimes jeered), management skills applauded (and sometimes criticised), and ownership motives often questioned by supporters who have invested a great part of their lives in following their club, because they care more than anyone who is not a fan can imagine.
The players are everything, although the days when the Rams’ Jack Parry spent more than 20 years (from Raich Carter to Kevin Hector) with his hometown club for a wage not much more than that of the average working man, are long gone.
Managers? Well, George Jobey built one of the best teams in the country, thanks to illegal bonuses being made available by an obliging Derby board.
Brian Clough and Peter Taylor delivered untold glory. Arthur Cox took us back to the top flight.
So did Jim Smith, whose wonderfully entertaining team on its day could beat anyone, and often did. Ask Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger.
But at the end of it all, players managers and owners come and go. Supporters are for ever, and if it is memories that sustain us, it is dreams of glories yet to come that carry us through hard times. Although when I stood behind the goal at Fellows Park in December 1962, braving sub-zero temperatures as Derby County lost 2-0 to Walsall in front of 9,000 spectators in the old
Second Division, even I couldn’t have imagined that, 10 years later, I would be among 38,000 at the Baseball Ground watching the Rams hammer Benfica 3-0 in the European Cup.
What dreams of the future now? The Rams escaped relegation, thanks in no small part to Cardiff City’s last-ditch equaliser against Rotherham United, let us not forget.
It was uncomfortable to watch players greeting survival in the Championship with celebrations that suggested we would now be in the FA Cup final this Saturday.
I’m pleased that they were pleased but let’s get it into perspective. The cracks have been papered over but the “to-do” list is ever-growing.
Whatever the future holds, supporters young and old – all of them, those who can just about remember the 1946 FA Cup final to those who weren’t born when we were “the worst team in history” – will be there.
As Priestley said, they will be “cheering together, thumping one another on the shoulders, swapping judgements like lords of the earth”.
They will still push their way through turnstiles “into another and altogether more splendid kind of life”.
It’s what being a supporter is about.