Brilliant posting from RTG - The Lie

This says it all really. Haway the Lads and FTM, every last one of them, especially the Plastics!

A dozen or so years ago I hated mags. Mags hated me. That was fine. We understood and we “enjoyed” (if enjoyment includes painful agony) our derbies and our rivalry. In the early nineties NUFC was in a poor state. They generally tended to be in the top flight but they were having one of their brief sojourns in the second league. Their crowds were dropping below 10,000. But those 10,000 were the mags I hated - and the ones who hated me. Then the new all plastic mags were invented. They were told a lie by Sir John Hall and his successors: they were bigger than Man United; they were the Barcelona of the North; they were one of the seven biggest clubs in the world. And the plastic mags believe The Lie – because it is all they have.
Newcastle is the largest city with just one club (even quite a few smaller ones have two – Sheffield, Nottingham, Bristol). It is the economic and cultural centre of a whole region with the subsequent enormous catchment area for support. Consequently they get large crowds. They then conveniently forget the times not long ago when there were less than 10,000 of them there. They forget how even today European games deemed to be less attractive have only half the ground full. They also forget how 8,000 of them didn’t renew their season tickets because of the “failure” to qualify for the Champions League two seasons running (ah, to have such failure). The signing of Owen (to get World Cup fitness), after his current club had refused to play him and he had begged the top four English clubs to sign him, cured that of course. Like the signing of Kluivert it proved how “big” they are.
Our very existence damages the myth. We are a decent size club right nearby. If we get a whiff of anything like the success the mags have had (and two seventh place finishes followed by a drop back into the second league was the very slightest of whiffs) we get crowds up at their level. But that can’t be. It destroys the myth of the bigness. That is why the plastic mags if anything hate us even more than the genuine mags. They have to keep believing in The Lie. If they accepted what we were, they couldn’t also believe The Lie. And then what would the plastics have?
Worse we are there because we support our club. Not for the promise (so far laughingly unfulfilled) of glory. The very idea of a plastic or glory hunting SAFC supporter is a complete contradiction. We do it simply because it is our club. The plastics can’t bear to see us supporting our club – it highlights to them everything they are not.
So when I look across the Upper Leazes at the mags there, knowing at least one in five of them is plastic (possibly more in the Upper Leazes as it is one of the “newer” areas) do I feel hatred? Not any more. I feel contempt. When I think of the genuine mags who have lost their club to this lot, I can almost feel sympathy. When your club loses its soul and needs to rely on The Lie, what is the point of continuing to support it? If you don’t support your club just because it is your club, you might as well pack it all in.
For the record, we lost this game. How we did is still beyond me. I’d seen the mags on the telly the previous week because they were playing while we were in the pub before our game. I felt confident we could turn them over. In a fairly even first half (not according to Sourness mind – god is he an idiot! Long may his reign continue) there was a mad spell. First they got a corner from a ridiculous decision where two mag attackers were coming out so Breen had to try to head clear rather then leave it for Davis). How the hell can that be “not interfering” with play? The resulting corner turned into another one in which we left Ameobi a load of space to head in. Lawrence then scored a peacher. Then Ameobi “scored” again – this time using his arm to put the ball over the line. Elliott then scored an even better goal than Lawrence’s.
The second half was completely ours. We battered them. Various bits of Given’s body and bits of defenders bodies (including Taylor’s hand) stopped the ball from going in. Lawrence was upended in the box but the ref, who had a perfect view, waved play on. What exactly did he think he’d seen? Carr was booked for his second bookable offence. He stayed on the pitch because the ref had mistakenly booked Parker in the first half for an offence committed by Carr.
We gave away a free kick in our favourite place and the inevitable happened (how many bliddy goals are we going to concede before we put a man on that post?). The ball went over the wall and hit the post – and in a choice between slipping in and slipping out, it slipped in. Elliott picked up a through ball and lobbed Given. The ball hit the bar and in a choice between slipping in and slipping out, it slipped out. So that was it. One more coat of paint on the Gallowgate goalpost, one less coat of paint on the Leazes crossbar and we would have been the winners. What does it all matter? The papers this morning reflect only one thing – they get the three points and hence the bragging rights until April.
But this morning we woke up as SAFC supporters. They woke up as either plastic mags or genuine mags swamped by plastics. A dozen years ago I was pleased to be an SAFC supporter. But in all honesty I knew the mags enjoyed supporting NUFC as much as I enjoyed supporting SAFC. I would have struggled to describe any significant difference between us. Now I look at them with contempt and there is no way I would want to swap places with themPosted by Herts at October 24, 2005 07:22 AM
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