ok, another 'treat' for you (insert smiley face), pasted below id the bit in my Roots To The 92 book re Fratton Park.
12/92 - FRATTON PARK, Portsmouth 0 Southend United 0, Division Three, Saturday 30 January 1982
Funds had got a bit low towards the end of the previous term but I now had a part-time job in the Student Union bar and was feeling sufficiently flush to afford another away day, this time ‘just’ along the south coast at Portsmouth.
Have you ever tried the journey by train from Plymouth to Pompey? On the map it looks easy enough, by train it’s a different matter. Five hours if you are lucky, and the Hereford experience had scarred me sufficiently to be cautious, so it was another early start.
Fratton Park back in 1982 was a traditional looking ground and not too much has changed since. The locals were passionate yet unfriendly, and everything about the place seemed to say ‘get out quick’. Then add to the mix that it was a dark January day, a biting northerly wind blowing on another open terrace, a thoroughly forgettable 0-0 draw, the not unrealistic feeling that there were folk waiting outside to jump at you from the shadows, and the prospect of a long lonely train trip back. I looked on it as some kind of character building test and wondered whether the Duke of Edinburgh Award might take it up as an activity.
Pompey has never been a place I have warmed to. I can’t fault the loyalty and support they get from their fans, and love him or loathe him the fanaticism shown by John Portsmouth Football Club Westwood is quite remarkable. I once watched the man dance on top of the roofs of the executive boxes at Ipswich for virtually the whole game, the police unable to get him off due to fears that the roof would collapse. It was true entertainment Keystone Cops style. But the harshness of my first experience of Fratton Park has stayed with me and I was not overly enthusiastic when, on retiring to the Isle of Wight for an 18 year period, Dad became a Pompey regular. Ipswich aside, a Southend win against Pompey is now something I enjoy more than most when it happens.
My last visit to Fratton Park was indeed one of those occasions. We’ve all had times when getting to a game has been a bit fraught – well, 26 November 2013 fell in to that bracket. Things had started so smoothly too: drive to Shenfield, train in to London for a meeting which I made sure ended early, back to Shenfield, change clothes in the car trying to stay out of sight of any weirdo manning the security cameras, and I was on the M25 by 3.00 pm. Loads of time for a leisurely drive and a pint before the game, watch the match, then a short hop to Chichester to stay in a comfy hotel (as long as I could get Lenny Henry out of the bed) before a meeting there the next day.
It all started to go wrong on the A3 – the Hindhead Tunnel is a great improvement on the bottle neck that traditionally used to hold up traffic for hours in that location before, but when an accident occurs in it everything comes to a grinding halt for a very long time. One hour to kick-off and I was still north of the thing, but eventually I turned off and, along with many others, played Wacky Races along some one-track roads to eventually get through and arrive at the ground at 8.15 pm. Pompey were already one-up, and listening to the locally biased commentary had made the journey even more agonising.
Then there was nowhere to park, so ultimately I drove to the main gate and here it was where my luck changed as I found a reasonable steward who took pity on me and let me in to park next to the team bus. A second result was getting in the ground – the ticket office was in the process of closing but outside another late running Shrimper had just arrived and had missed meeting his mate to hand him a free ticket, so he gave it to me. Togetherness is within the clan.
Inside, the place was buzzing. Pompey fans, unused to winning at the time, were making plenty of noise, but Shrimpers had travelled in numbers and, with Fratton Park now affording the luxury of an away end roof, the din being made was terrific. But then another set-back – one of our subs gets sent off for knocking the head off a Pompey player after only just entering the pitch, and with 15 minutes to go the odds were firmly against us. Now, we all know that the predictable thing about football is that it can be unpredictable, and on 76 minutes the ten men equalised. Jubilation turns in to delirium a few minutes later as Big Bad Barry Corr stoops to head home the winner. Lovely stuff.
