PDU Comment - Peter Merchant
It is an obvious fact, perhaps unnecessarily stated, but these are rare and joyous times for Pompey fans. When great things happen it does us good to reflect on them, savour the moment(s) and imagine that everything is right with the world.
My tempestuous love affair with Portsmouth Football Club spans four decades. With no advance fanfare, my Dad took me along to a cold and windswept Fratton Park one Saturday afternoon in 1970. It was my first visit and the opponents that day were Bolton Wanderers. A 4 – 0 win for Pompey ignited my flames of passion for the cause. Subsequent trips that season included (if memory serves me correctly) a 5 – 0 thrashing of Watford, a 2 – 0 defeat at the hands of Norwich and most notably a 1 – 1 draw with Arsenal in the F.A. Cup. By seasons end, the Gunners had won the double, beating Pompey 3 – 2 at Highbury on the way, but Mike Trebilcock’s last-gasp equalizer for Pompey at Fratton was my first experience of the joyous frenzy that football can deliver.
My Dad lost interest after a season or two but my flame could not be extinguished and Dad’s younger brother took over my indoctrination and our fortnightly trips to Fratton became part of life. Trebilcock, Piper, McCann and Milkins were my heroes and I still remember the shiver down my spine as that strange drumming fanfare crackled out of the Fratton Park p.a., announcing the appearance of the team from the tunnel.
The old second division was a graveyard for old memories and was a rogue’s gallery of tough, grizzly players with few teeth, greasy hair and thighs like tree-trunks. Games almost exclusively kicked off at 3 o’clock on Saturday, with just a few midweek games each season. The ball was orange, uneven and hard. The echo of its impactFratton Park every now and again. I once saw legendary football presenter Brian Moore struggling through the Frogmore Road gate, trilby hat balancing precariously on his bald pate as star-struck kids held out their autograph books. However, Portsmouth was always a football backwater and our promised salvation drifted ever further away.
After the inevitability of our relegation to the third division in 1976 (made more painful by another Hampshire team winning the cup that year), we then dropped into the fourth division. Our rivals for promotion in our only season in the fourth included Grimsby, Newport County, Walsall and the league’s new boys Wimbledon. We secured promotion courtesy of a 2 – 0 away win at Northampton Town on the last day of the season – on a ground that had only 3 sides, all mostly filled with Pompey fans.
From that point on, despite some blips and a couple of backward steps, we began our incredibly slow progress up the football league. The old heroes were supplanted by the likes of Alan Biley, Vince Hilaire, Paul Merson and of course, “the legend”. It has taken the best part of thirty years but Pompey has, almost uniquely, climbed from 92nd place in the league (for 24 hours at least) to the heady heights of 6th place in arguably the best domestic league in the world.
So, the singing, chanting and unabashed joy that 25,000 Pompey fans will display at Wembley on 17th May is the culmination of decades of false promises, a few false messiahs and a character-building tour through every level of league football. We deserve this moment in the sun and I for one could not care less that the showpiece game is devoid of any of the presumed "big 4".
Even so, it would be nice if Brian Moore was around to commentate on the game!
|
|
|
|