Cod Almighty | Diary

Inflate. Deflate. Re-inflate

14 July 2015

Middle-Aged Diary was looking not long ago at photographs from the Town match at Plough Lane in 1989. At first, I must confess, I was underwhelmed. It was not quite the striking image of innocent intent on enjoying a big day that I remember. The photos had a discordant note about them, and it took me a while to figure out what it was: the perimeter fence. Were someone to remake Escape to Victory (this is not a suggestion), they might want to borrow the scene. With the gap of 26 years, football fans waving inflatables on a terrace isolated in steel fencing come to look like prisoners of war in an uplifting scene of defiance. Moral victory amid actual defeat.

The suggestion is not so wide of the mark. Throughout the 1980s, football supporters were regarded as walking public order offences. We were all guilty. We were all hooligans. Against the stream, it was the heyday of the printed football fanzine. Along with the bitter polemic at the way we were treated, fans showed a keen sense of their own inherent ridiculousness. If the articles from that time are often over-written (yes, that is Middle-Aged Diary throwing a stone, and yes that is my greenhouse. What of it?), it was part of a conscious or unconscious effort to straighten up the stick that said all football fans were mindless thugs.

Less articulate perhaps, but no less eloquent, was the act of taking an inflatable toy to a game.

Yesterday, Town fan Ken Meech was found guilty of common assault for striking a steward at the Barnet game on 21 February with an inflatable shark. The case and the verdict have earned us the 'And finally' slot on many a media platform, highlighting the ludicrous nature of the case. In other words, another moral victory amid an actual defeat.

I was planning to play the case for cheap laughs without getting too far into it, having not heard the evidence or seen the incident. However, the Telegraph's coverage makes clear the essence of the case. The steward, Cgagi Gladyng, was taken unawares by a surge of Town fans towards the pitch to celebrate a goal with the Town players. He admits to being "terrified" when he was trapped. It seems that Ken Meech's problem was to commit an act that could be turned into an offence, but the source of the distress was Gladying finding himself pinned by the crowd against the fence, more than the blows with the inflatable.

It was Gladyng's second football match. Certainly anyone who has even been in the away end when a late goal is scored would have known a surge was likely, and would be entirely innocent. Certainly anyone sympathetic to the human possibilities of the occasion - a large, boisterous crowd - would have been expecting rather more than polite applause. That is not to lay blame on Gladying, but those responsible for policing at Barnet should be asking themselves why they deployed an inexperienced steward at the away end for a team with a large, lively following.

Then there is a broader question, especially when taken with the incident two weeks earlier when a Town fan was forcibly ejected at Forest Green for playing with another inflatable. Twenty-six years after not just Plough Lane but also Hillsborough, are some of those who police football matches beginning to forget that football fans are people? Arguments are not settled forever. Some we need to win over and over again.

On a happier note, I'm delighted to read that 17-year-old midfielder Harry Clifton has been offered a two-year contract. I've no idea if he's any good, but it's a splendid old-fashioned footballer's name, and one's heart always quickens at the idea of a local talent competing for a place. Tonight, he may or may not have the chance to show us what he is capable of at North Ferriby United.