- This topic has 67 replies, 6 voices, and was last updated 12 years, 12 months ago by
.
- Posts
anabasis [əˈnæbəsɪs]
n pl –ses [-ˌsiːz]
1. (Historical Terms) the march of Cyrus the Younger and his Greek mercenaries from Sardis to Cunaxa in Babylonia in 401 bc, described by Xenophon in his Anabasis Compare katabasis
2. any military expedition, esp one from the coast to the interior
[from Greek: a going up, ascent, from anabainein to go up; see anabaena]I follow a football team that lives by the sea, every away trip (well, apart from Pompey and Southampton) involves a march into the interior with my seasoned mercenary troops – the wife. I will photograph and post every incursion through the rust belts and crumbling stadiums of this fine little island.
First up – Aston Villa on the 23rd January, more to follow
This will be my view at Villa Park:
The Albion fans will be in the opposite stand left side. There are only 2000 tickets left for sale to away fans and still 2500+ wanting some, including yours truly. The rest go on sale on the Brighton website Wednesday morning at 9am, when there will be a god almighty binfest of punters trying to get hold of them.
I thought “fuck that” and registered on the Aston Villa website instead. This means I now have two tickets for the home team’s biggest stand. I’ll have to sit among about 30000 Brummies cheering on the Villa!
Now, if that’s not in the spirit of “going where we ain’t supposed to” I don’t know what is :twisted:
@ROB wrote:
Do the Seagulls have a hooligan squad?
No, they’re not that sort of club (ahem, every team has lads who want a punch up). They used to have a good few bundles at the old Goldstone Ground, but being a genuinely dedicated football hooligan nowadays can earn you a lot of time spent at Her Majesty’s pleasure for surprisingly mundane offences. Plenty of poseurs of course dressed in Stone Island/Aquascutum, but the days of pitched battles at or outside football grounds are history. I blame the middle-class interest in the game from about 1990 onwards. Bastards.
Also, can we put in orders for the photos?
Naturally, this thread will be their home
If you can get a tooth, some blood and a blue shirt from the first match I will send you a botttle of rum from my upcoming rum social site. :shock:
Shouldn’t be too difficult :wink:
@flipflop wrote:
I’ll have to sit among about 30000 Brummies cheering on the Villa!
That’s dedication. I’m inspired.
It won’t be at all like the scene in Fever Pitch, where he, as a young lad, stood chatting among the Reading fans to watch the Gunners, because his mum bought him the wrong ticket.
But then you knew that, didn’t you.
:D
Hornby delivered the game to the chattering classes with “Fever Pitch”, served it up to them like a well-cut prawn sandwich. And for their sins they gobbled it down – only the oiks had to be tamed first; and so the police got smart and the courts harsh in no time. For that he should be eternally damned.
In my younger days in London, going to the odd football match was an exercise in escape and evasion – you were toast if the wrong mob caught up with you and you couldn’t pass as a local. It was genuinely scary, but fucking rocks-off exciting at the same time. That’s gone forever now.
I despair at some of the herberts I have to share stadia with nowadays. If you as much as get out of your seat to scratch a numb arse you’ll have some pillock in a hi-vis jerkin there in a nano-second quoting the “no standing” policy of whatever poxy football club happens to pay him £6 an hour to be a nazi steward. I’ve seen ejections for similar “incidents”.
Actually, I managed to pick up two tickets for the Brighton end before all 6000 sold out earlier today. I now have 4 tickets but only two arses to fill the 4 seats :shock:
Anyone want a cheap day sat with 30K miserable Midlanders? £10 each (I paid £15 for each)
Probably not, I’ll offload them on the Albion forum, I reckon half of the home seats will have Seagulls in them anyway :arrow: :arrow: :arrow: :arrow: :arrow:
So we had our big day out in the Midlands. Aston Villa – very friendly place, just under 40000 there and no hassle, great day though, GALLONS of ale consumed. We lost 3-2, excellent result for such a small club as ours.
Outside the ground:
An impromptu game under the stand prior to the real thing:
In the Doug Ellis Stand. Mascots = mentallists:
Seagulls:
Second half action:
The beaten Albion team take a bow:
Queueing for the train home, and more ale:
A few from the home turf – Withdean – on Saturday. Officially the shitest football ground in the whole Football League. I’m in no hurry to go back for £24 a ticket and a pile of wank on the pitch, accompanied by silence in the roofless “stands”.
Millwall beat us 1-0 BTW
The Millwall lot:
A bleak and frozen Withdean:
As we leave the ground deep into injury time Gustavo Poyet, our charismatic Uruguayan manager, tries to rally the wallies on the park. Alas, to no avail – off home for a warming shower then out for a sesh and a Thai restaurant downtown.
We’re off to London and Leyton Orient this weekend, always a good day oot 8)
Leyton Orient’s Brisbane Road ground in er, Leyton, North East London last Saturday. Drew a very hard fought game 1-1. No trouble anywhere except on the park itself. The next big awayday is on the 20th – Leeds!
“Down in the tube station at midday…….oooh….ooh…eee….oooh….oooh” (The Jam)
What the fucking hell is that?
Great view
Witty sign, shite food
Adidastastic
All in all Brisbane Road is a noisy little ground with a cracking end to end game almost guaranteed every time the Albion go there
This Saturday, Leeds 1 -1 Brighton. We led for 95 minutes and they equalised with the last kick of the ball. Gutted, but we’re playing well enough to avoid relegation. Another big clash tonight at Charlton. SEA-GULLLLLLLS!
Early start from a sunny but freezing London King’s Cross
Billy and me outside Elland Road
Post-match real ale action in this brilliant little Leeds backstreet pub
@coldharvest wrote:
Yet another brilliant idea for a book……just sayin’.
It’s been done mate, some bloke visited every ground in England and Wales, all 92 of them – started somewhere up north and went every week until the particular team got beat then went to the next ground and so on. Guess where he finished? You got it – Brighton & Hove Albion FC. I have to buy it soon, keep forgetting – full of pictures and stories of the people he met along the way. A great idea and hopefully a good look at the ancient and enduring phenomenon that is the working class passion for association football in the British Isles.
Anyway, Tuesday night past (23rd) I was up in Sarf London yet again for my first ever visit to Charlton Athletic and their impressive ground The Valley, and witnessed the Albion take apart their high-flying team, 2-1
Albion’s goalkeepers warming up. The guy on the left is our long-serving keeper and cult hero “Former Dutch Marine” Michel Kuipers, being that he is Dutch and formerly served with the Dutch Marine Corps.
Can’t get a better view in the house than this one. Our kiddies were winding up their ‘keeper (seen here), with shouts of “Oi, tangerine boy!” etc, etc. He took it well, until he let two in :wink:
Celebrating our second and decisive goal
Got back to Hove just before midnight, job done. We won again at home yesterday, looking good to avoid relegation again this year.
A few more from Planet Football. First up, a grim 0-0 draw up at Colchester last Monday night. Fucking freezing in a desolate near empty bowl on the edge of town. A shitehole.
Worst thing was this game was live on telly, but I went anyway – 3914 other cunts turned up. I got home at 2am, what a dickhead!
Back to today: losing 1-0 at home to Swindon Town (fuck me!). Why do I bother? Ask anyone who goes to football that, they can’t answer it satisfactorily, they just go.
Sometimes you’ve got to make your own fun:
Yesterday, took the train to Manchester, then the bus to Oldham – wet, damp, depressive Oldham. But we won 2-0!
We passed the City of Manchester stadium en route, home of some the billionaires of English football – Manchester City FC
This is the reality for the little clubs in and around Manchester though, a sad little ground with a decidedly shite team to follow.
Last night – tough game with relegation struggling Gillingham at their place, finished 1-1, and we missed a late penalty. :(
A football stadium literally in the heart of its local community, increasingly rare nowadays with the ongoing gentrification of the beautiful game
I managed to get the exact moment our player Adam El-Abd scored on camera. Nice close range header from a corner, eat your heart out sports snappers!
The penultimate away game of the season, 1333 Seagulls head to Southend so see us win 1-0, almost certainly keeping us up this year and sending Southend down. Oh, and there was a tear up between a small firm of Albion and the home lot before the game on the seafront, see here
Our local lad defender Tommy Elphick’s bizarre warm-up routine:
@ROB wrote:
Really? It should be equivalent to about 30mm I thought.
With 35mm film, you had a standardised angle of view (because 35mm film is always the same size). There is no standardised sensor size, but they are generally about 1.5 times larger. Hence the difference with lenses.
Cheers for that buddy. When I have time I’ll hunt down a proper wide angle lens for the Panasonic. Now that you can get 35mm onto CD on the high street, I might dust down my old Canon AT-1 and get a cheap lens for it for next season
SEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-GULLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLS
Well, it did rain at Withdean on Saturday. That’s it, last game of the 2009/2010 season, we won 1-0, finishing 13th in League One (the third tier of English Football). Everyone is expecting a promotion chasing season next time around, and in August 2011 we should be kicking off in our brand spanking new £90million stadium on the north east edge of Brighton.
I’m going to watch the club play in a friendly tournament in Portugal in July, so until then, if you think it’s all over…….it is for now
The new season is nearly upon us, and I’ve been over in the Algarve watching the Albion play two warm-up friendlies. Lots to report, but first a few pictures from last Wednesday’s match at the Municipal Stadium in Albufeira against Sunderland AFC, an English Premier League team. They were shite and we should have done better than the 1-1 draw we ended up with.
Out on the town. We met up with loads of fans from back home and were on the piss all week with them. Here’s a few from earlier in the week. I’ll get more up when I’ve got the time
The local beverage:
The ‘Lord of Albfeira’ – Sir Cliff Richard, whose face is everywhere here, he owns a pad up the road and the locals love him.
Could do this season – big things expected of this team this year and next. This is the last year (of ten) in our little athletics stadium before we move to the 22,500 capacity “Amex Stadium” (I’m still going to call it “Falmer”) on the outskirts of town.
From here:
To here:
But the club’s spiritual home will always be the Goldstone Ground, which was in the heart of the city. It was sold to developers by the scumbags who owned the club then and was knocked down in 1997. There’s a drive-in Burger King, JJB, DFS etc and a Toys-R-Us on the site now. :cry:
Last friendly of the pre-season back home in Brighton versus Aberdeen, a Scottish Premier League team. We won 1-0 in a very impressive display of the short-passing game.
Our new manager Gus Poyet in the foreground, and Mark McGhee with the grey hair behind him. McGhee, now in charge of Aberdeen, took the Albion to Wembley play-off glory and a promotion to the Championship in 2004 – the second tier of English Football. Unfortunatey we couldn’t compete at that level with our resources and the inevitable happened and when we got relegated in 2006, he was sacked. The fans still like him here though, including me.
Attila the Stockbroker (AKA John Baine) the famous Punk Poet, Brighton and Hove Albion stadium announcer, and fanatical supporter of the club. Top man.
My usual seat is at the back of the South Stand, seen here empty (at £10 a ticket too!)
516 Aberdeen fans made the long journey down for this one
Saturday 21st August, and my first away trip this season – Hillsborough, the home of Sheffield Wednesday FC. The away fans are put in the Leppings Lane stand, where on the 15th April 1989 a crush getting into an FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest ended with 96 Liverpool fans being crushed and trampled to death.
I watched the game live on TV back then when I was a young soldier – the pictures of people pressed up against the fence, others receiving CPR on the pitchside, no-one will ever forget. Lots of my Liverpudlian army mates were devastated. Football changed forever that day, terracing (wrongly IMO) was blamed, along with drink, but the Taylor Report exonerated the Liverpool fans and put the blame on inadequate policing that day. No matter, all-seater stadiums were slowly phased in, and now stadiums are a shadow of their former selves in terms of noise and atmosphere.
We lost this game 1-0 to a very decent Wednesday team. So far one win, one draw, and one defeat in this campaign – not exactly promotion form, but it’s still early doors.
I took these on Saturday 11th Sep (MK Dons at home – we won 2-0) on the new HTC phone I’ve been raving about, not a bad little picture taker for what it is.
Albion are joint top of League One after 7 games, this could be our year – fingers crossed we are in the Championship for the opening of 22,500 Falmer stadium next season :P
We are top of the league. The Albion are heading for promotion, three points clear at this stage. I went up to Liverpool two saturdays ago to watch the boys take on Tranmere Rovers in Birkenhead. Shitty game ended 1-1, but I stayed with an old mate I haven’t seen in two decades and we headed out on the town with another pal from those days.
I took these with my HTC phone as I was getting bladdered and didn’t want to break/lose my real snapper
The best named pub ever, in my old stomping ground in Bootle. The fucker was closed on a saturday night, WTF?
HTC Wildfire, mit 5mp camera. Some clubs employ frustrated coppers, i.e. stewards, who don’t like to see a “proper camera” in the stands, I’ve been threatened with eviction a few times from various grounds, but phone cams are ok.
Southampton FC (scummers) even went as far as to ban all photographers who weren’t directly employed by the club. Visiting newspapers and clubs took the piss and employed cartoonists, rather like the court artists, and some papers refused to report their home games at all, referring to them as “South Coast Club”. They relented after being a running joke for a few weeks.
Football – more than a game
Apparently I need a “permit” to photograph National PArks in my own fucking country.
Fuck that very much.
Actually I think Digital Camera Magazine has a downloadable “cheat sheet” of UK laws regarding photography for you guys. Probably worth printing out and putting in your camera bag for quick reference.
Unfortunately, I think football stadiums are private property so unless you are standing on public property, they have the right to stop you.
There is one here (the site is down at the monet so check back in a day or two.)
Cheers for that, I’ll keep checking it.
I always check my match ticket to see if it mentions cameras etc, most say fuck all. At Wednesday the ticket never mentioned photography. I asked the steward who was hassling me what right had he to ask me to stop taking pictures, he mumbled some shit about legal contracts and other stuff. I asked him to go and show me some written documentation showing this rule, he got the right hump and called his mate over, then he threatened to kick me out of the ground. With the plod there I was on a hiding to nothing, football fans are scum to most coppers on matchday, so I had to screw the nut and do nothing, I didn’t want to miss the match after all.
In the old days he would have got a boot up the arse and fucked off out of it
Anyway, big one tomorrow – Charlton away, the Albion are taking 3,400 up there, the pubs will be bursting, and Millwall are at Crystal Palace just down the road. South London will be buzzing tomorrow, days like these are the very essence of the game.
4-0 away to Charlton, then another two years off my liver’s life span spent in the bars of Southwark. Priceless. Next big awayday is Peterborough on Saturday 30th Oct, I’ll take the ‘proper camera’ to this one and try to stay sober enough to take some decent pictures – more from around the stadium and the surrounding areas (pubs).
Saturday 30th October, a trip up to play promotion rivals Peterborough at one of my all-time favourite football grounds, London Road. It’s a favourite because the away fans get the Moy’s End Terrace, that’s right – a terrace, where one can watch the beautiful game standing with one’s mates, the way football used to be before the middle class appropriation of our stadiums, and their need for somewhere quiet to sit and eat their prawn sandwiches. It is also free of the main scourge of today’s matchday experience – hassling stewards and their persistent demands of “Sit down!”.
We battered them (the team, not the stewards) 3-0, and as of now are still 6 points clear of the chasing pack.
Soon to be disappointed home fans queue for tickets
Old school fixtures and fittings at London Road, love it
My phone cam kept misting up in the damp conditions, but it was loud in here, and not a prawn wholemeal sandwich in sight
Game on
The almost full main home stand
Not me looking at the unfolding drama with rose-tinted glasses, but a flare going off – can’t get away with that in the seats mate
Another view (not mine, a proper camera was used) of the flare incident
How the away terrace looked from the far (North) stand, where we had even more fans sitting
It’s been a while since I’ve managed to attend an Albion away match. Yesterday we went up to what was a new ground for me, the Britannia Stadium – home of Premier League Stoke City FC. Fifth Round of the FA Cup, with a place in the quarter-finals for the winners.
We lost 3-0 against a very big, physical team. No worries, we’re still on track for promotion from Division 3.
This Stokie proposed to his bird at half-time in front of 21000 people, luckily for him she accepted
Match action:
The away fans hang grimly on at the end as the home support heads out to beat the rush outside
Our ever-brilliant away following applaud the team after the final whistle
Last game ever yesterday at Brighton’s “temporary” home of 12 years. No tears were shed, for although Withdean has been our most successful stadium in terms of footballing success, it always felt that we were merely lodging among the posh folk who had homes in BN1. We lost 3-2 to Huddersfield, but were awarded the League One trophy after the game, next season it’s a brand new 22,500 seater stadium and football among the second-tier teams in the Championship. Ole!
My arse will miss this, my old season ticketed seat:
Crowd and atmosphere shots:
Out with the trophy, we are the champions:
I might hook you up for a ticket for Millwall v Brighton next season, I’ll pm you when I know when it is.
There’s an open-top bus parading the League One trophy on Brighton & Hove seafront this Sunday, I’ll take the camera along. Before that it’s the last game at the season up at Notts County, I’ll be starting early on Saturday morning on the rattler. Stay tuned.
I love football but here we call it soccer, where that name came from I don’t know, and to think there is rednecks, here that only follow cricket or aus, rules, and think that football is a third world game. A channel here who shows all the football you want, from around the world, used to have an ad that went like this. Soccer the real football. it was a great little ad. One day I sang it to a redneck that umpired VFL and followed the team that every body loves to hate, Collingwood an AFL team. When I sang it to him he went red in the face and looked like he was going to hit me, that was a great moment, seeing him freak out like that. Fucking rednecks.
@Orion wrote:
I love football but here we call it soccer, where that name came from I don’t know, and to think there is rednecks, here that only follow cricket or aus, rules, and think that football is a third world game. A channel here who shows all the football you want, from around the world, used to have an ad that went like this. Soccer the real football. it was a great little ad. One day I sang it to a redneck that umpired VFL and followed the team that every body loves to hate, Collingwood an AFL team. When I sang it to him he went red in the face and looked like he was going to hit me, that was a great moment, seeing him freak out like that. Fucking rednecks.
Say what you will about Rugby League or AFL being rednecks but at least when we win/lose a game we don’t go trashing cities. Hell, on grand final day I can sit in the opposition’s club house wearing my own team’s colours and be perfectly safe. How many major soccer teams can you say that about?
I love pretty much any sport including soccer, but if you want to talk about redneckism, soccer has rugby and afl beat hands down.
I love you guys, but When I say rednecks I mean Anglo Saxons, Just don’t take it personally. Yes the extremists do follow the real football. and the AFL should be proud of it self for having great fans. Where I was born, your a fanatic if you fly your teams flag and a extremist if you fly the Union Jack. That place being Greece. I just prefer to watch a shit game of soccer rather a great game of AFL or rugby.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.