The Romantic Mid-Season City Break

by Joel Rookwood

"Babe, how about just taking one weekend off from the Liverpool matches so we can go away? It doesn't have to be far - just Scotland, maybe Edinburgh or somewhere."

Sound familiar? If you're a match-going lad, and one who has allowed a girl to enter into your strange football-filled world, then the answer is probably, yes. Even the most understanding of girlfriends expects the pleasure of your company for the odd weekend during the season. I know I am luckier than most in that regard. My girl has worked for the greatest club in the world for last eight years. In fact, that's where we met, coaching on Liverpool's 'Football in the Community' programme at the Vernie in 2002. Yep, Stanley Park can be romantic, if you have an imagination - and in the year we've officially been a couple, she's put up with me and my passion for football and travel better than any girl I've ever known.

When mentioning the idea of a 'city-break', she suggested staying in Britain, as she knew we couldn't go abroad, given that my passport has been at the Ghanaian embassy in London for the past two weeks, (whilst the embassy staff deliberate over whether or not to issue me with a visa for the African Nations in January). We were restricted therefore to a mainland location. Wales was out, as it's full of nuggets, and so Scotland was the obvious choice. The time-frame for this thought process was approaching the five-second mark, and I realised that I had considered her question long enough, and needed to offer something in the way of a response. I made some non-committal remark, more of a wordless noise, and disappeared to use the internet, no doubt with all the subtlety of a Djimi Traore first touch.

Following a brief glimpse at the SPL football fixtures for the weekend in question, I decided I should agree to the mini-break - it was our anniversary after all. "Maybe we could see some football in Edinburgh then?" I casually suggested. Sensing this represented an initial agreement to both the idea and to the proposed location, she didn't seem against the possibility of seeing "some football." I was careful with the phrasing of that line, making sure it represented sufficient fluidity to allow for an expansion beyond what might have initially been envisaged. For I had discovered not one, but two games that weekend, in touching distance from Scotland's capital city. Rangers were away at Falkirk on the Saturday, with Gretna hosting Hearts the following day. Hardly Old-firm-esque', but still, she wouldn't have been too impressed if I had suggested postponing our anniversary until Celtic travel to Rangers on 2nd January. None of the fixtures that fell on our anniversary weekend threatened to be particularly memorable, but a game's a game, especially when your forthcoming book about football fan culture is in need of an extra chapter or two.

We left work early on Friday, with the afternoon consumed by the north-bound journey. My eldest brother, who left Liverpool to work in Newcastle a couple of years ago, had agreed to put us up for the night. When he opened the door, he welcomed us with that menacing look that told me he was about to stitch me up with something ridiculous, as he has had a tendency to do over the last quarter of a century. He took us into his back yard and presented us with two recently shot pheasants.

God only knows where he got them from. So his idea of hospitality was to offer a couple of dead birds for tea, and tell us to get plucking. My girl, who had never met our kid, was slightly nervous but assumed he was joking. I was slightly embarrassed but knew he was not. Realising that a refusal was not an option, we got to work on the preparation of the meal, stripping the birds of anything attached to the surface of the skin. Our kid and his mate just stood in the kitchen, quietly congratulating one another at having successfully landing me in this predicament.

Once the appearance of the birds had been transformed from that of hippies to alopecia-victims, we were handed a knife each. The two lads in the house, one a doctor, the other a surgeon, then gave us explicit instructions for removing the 'insides' of the birds. Needless to say, they were more impressed with the intricacy of the intestine walls than we were. My girl had survived a truly acid test, and the food didn't kill us, which was a bonus. We did however go to bed a little conscious of the weirdness of the evening's events, and keen for the remainder of the weekend to represent something a little closer to normality. I was only too happy to oblige. Let the weekend of football commence.

The hardest part of the weekend of course was leaving Newcastle, at the time that many of my fellow Scousers would have been setting off for Tyneside from Liverpool to see the lunch-time kick off at St James' Park. Instead, we knew we were going to an insignificant game in the middle of nowhere played by two teams we didn't care about.

Just getting in the car that morning proved a true test of my resolve. We made our way to Falkirk, which in footballing terms was the Scottish equivalent of somewhere crap like, Colchester. The home supporters were housed in a stand running the length of the pitch, and the away fans were seated opposite and in the stand behind the goal. Behind the other goal, there was no stand, but just a field, which is something I can never understand. The architect should be sent to the Kop for a European Cup tie at Anfield, and then shot, or at least sued for professional negligence.

Anyway, in truth, we had only really come to see Rangers, who I was yet to see in the flesh. The Glaswegians won the game 3-1, without stringing five passes together. Aside from the football, which I expected to be crap, I was intrigued to see how passionate their fan base was. It turns out, not very. About 1800 travelled, and yet they barely mustered a song all afternoon. Big club my arse. They might have won more trophies than any club in the world, but they had a supporter-base that wouldn't have looked out of place in the third tier of the English league.

I suggested to my girl as we took our seats that we keep our identity a secret from those around us. This was largely because the few Rangers fans in the home end who had celebrated the opening goal were, let's just say, not well received.

Our attempt to maintain this secrecy went out of the window however, when I got a 'phone call, and then turned to my girl and exclaimed, "yes! 1-0. Gerrard, free-kick." We got a few looks, but I was past caring. There was only one game that mattered that day, and it wasn't at the imaginatively named 'Falkirk Stadium'. The contest between the team lying second from bottom against the one second from top was that poor in fact, that we even did the unthinkable and left early to avoid the match traffic.

Within a couple of minutes we were driving back to Edinburgh, listening to radio coverage of the Liverpool game, which was 3-0 by this time. As the commentators began to run through the afternoon's matches during a break in play, a glance of my watch told me it was 2:30 - and we were ten miles from the capital. I obviously had a look of intent, as my girl realised I was planning something. When she inquired, I simply said "Hibs are playing at home at three." She smiled, and said in that lovely way Halewood women do, "come ed then." Half an hour later, we were watching Hibernian v Dundee United. I decided it would be wise to delay the shout of 'happy anniversary' for a few more hours.

Now, Easter Road - that is a proper football ground. Four separate stands, built right up against the pitch. And both home and away supporters had taken virtually all the seats they were allocated, except for the corner of the 'Famous Five' stand where we managed to squeeze into. Unlike the Falkirk game however, we were not the only tourists present at the Hibs match. I had recently read Tony O'Neill's book 'The Men in Black'. A poor man's 'The Boys from the Mersey' it definitely was, but it gave a decent insight into Man United supporter culture.

There was a chapter in it called 'Superfirm', which talked about their international collaboration with Hibs. Serving as proof of the contemporary existence of this connection, I must have heard twenty Manc voices at the tea bar during the interval. I went and stood by a group of them and had a geg, pretending to be texting someone. One of them was on the 'phone to a fellow Manc at Bolton, where Man U had just conceded the opening and ultimately decisive goal from former Arsenal, Liverpool and Man City front man, Nicolas Anelka. The Man U lads must love him.

The few minutes that followed made for some interesting listening, as the United lads talked about their own regional identity, discussing the 'United is greater than England' banner that was apparently upsetting the locals at the Reebok stadium. My thoughts immediately turned to Newcastle, and the anti-England shouts that I'd been reliably informed were rampant from the Liverpool end earlier that afternoon, just as they had been last season. Last time around the context was provided by the response to the American takeover completed a few weeks earlier.

This time it was the anti-Gerrard nonsense from the Geordies that apparently saw some anti-England response from the Scouse support. With all this talk of identity, which even included a few well-timed questions from my girl, such as 'Why don't we care about England?', my mind began to digress away from anniversaries, Scottish football, and weird superfirm antics, to the notion of 'Englishness'.

In the majority of English towns, fans seem to love England more than anything in the world. Geordies, like Yorkshiremen, have a well developed sense of local pride, but clearly still put country before club. For Mancs it is definitely club before country, but for Scousers it is just club. When your identity is intricately intertwined with the fabric of such an idiosyncratic city, rather than lost in the expanse of a completely separate and increasingly unidentifiable homogenous nation-state, it is little surprising we just see ourselves as Scouse.

My girl was surprisingly receptive and appreciative of these ideas, as I tried, in somewhat simpler terms, to explain them to her in the car following a cracking 2-2 draw at Easter Road. When we arrived at the B&B, and the owners heard our accents, realising that we must love our football, they immediately felt the need to welcome us by empathizing and commiserating with us after 'our country' had failed to qualify for the European championships a few days earlier. We just smiled, the irony clearly not lost on either of us. I couldn't be arsed explaining the complexities of Scouse identity to some harmless middle-aged lady who would have just thought I was a nutter. Instead, we broke the mould of the football theme, and went into Edinburgh for the night.

The following day we reverted back to football, by going to see Gretna's 'home' match against Hearts, a fixture played at Motherwell's Fir Park, some 65 miles from Gretna. In each of the last three seasons, Gretna have celebrated a championship, winning the third, second and first division titles in succession en route to achieving Premier League status. Having never held such lofty status, their ground was not considered suitable to host SPL fixtures, (which must mean it's even worse than Falkirk's).

The temporary move north has proven popular and has clearly captured the imagination of the people. An incredible 1020 fans turned out for their recent league match against Inverness, which would make the support of Lancashire outfits Blackburn and Bolton look like seething masses of football fanaticism. We were not expecting a classic, and we were not disappointed. The match did see bottom placed Gretna earn a fifth league point in twelve games, although the standard of football made the Rangers game look entertaining.

Having seen half the teams in the SPL play in just two days, we headed back home, having had our fill of Scottish football. Knowing my luck, we'll draw Rangers in the next round of the European Cup (or was that UEFA Cup?). As usual, this trip 'abroad' saw me reflect on our own identity rather than consider the intricacies of the culture I had entered into. As I drove mile after monotonous mile down the M6, I thought of next summer's European Championships, free of ignorant English supporters, and under performing English players, and I couldn't help but smile. I found myself drifting into a daydream about drinking Hoegarden in sunny Klagenfurt, befriending the locals with our Scouse wit and entertaining them with tuneful songs detailing Liverpool's illustrious history, with the 'We're not English we are Scouse' banner waving in the light breeze behind us. It's a good time to be a Scouser all right.

Joel Rookwood

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