Saturday, September 10, 2005
Back in the U... K
29th August ECFC v FGR
As a couple of years have passed since that day in May 2003 when we were dumped out of the football league, and now that our future is looking slightly more secure, it’s relatively safe to talk about the fateful day itself, and the plan that was hatched in the gloomy aftermath.
Unlike the usual last day scramble to avoid relegation, hope was long gone by the final whistle as our game had kicked off late due to crowd congestion. The last 15 minutes are still very vivid in the mind as our worst nightmare became stark reality and we were going to be relegated. With relegation came the very real possibility that our football club would not exist to take its place in any division the following season. A late Steve Flack winner barely raised a cheer from the 9000 plus crowd: too little, too late.
Soon after the game I found myself with a group of people in a pub just up the road from the ground. We were dissecting where it had all gone wrong and trying to convince each other that it wasn’t the end of the world, despite the fact we’d be playing in a league below Torquay. Discussion turned to what we would do should ECFC cease to exist. It was at this point that we decided to steal Torquay United.
For the first game of the new season, 3000 Exeter City fans would turn up at Plainmoor (“New St James’ Park”) well before kick off, cunningly disguised as your average Torquay fan. (This was the bit that most troubled us as few had actually seen a Torquay fan: they are a rare species.) Once inside the ground we would reveal our red and white stripes and begin to chant the usual City songs, supporting the home team and being surprised by the daring change of kit design and colour. Initially the players would be referred to as City players from the previous season. This would gradually change over the course of the campaign as “new signings” took the places of our former heroes. At the end of the season, the fans would decide that the change in colour of the kit was a bad idea and that we should revert back to the traditional red and white stripes.
As you can see, the plan was flawless. Evidence of City fans’ ingenuity in a crisis (and in a pub).
Thankfully, we didn’t have to put it into action as the Supporters’ Trust and the fans in general managed somehow to get the club through the summer. We kicked off the 2003/2004 campaign in the Nationwide Conference at home against Halifax in front of a healthy crowd of 3723.
We’ve come a long way since that first Conference game and, while not everything has gone perfectly, the club is in much better shape now than it was in May 2003. The change in the general atmosphere surrounding the club and the sense of ownership now felt by many is best demonstrated by the significant rise in season ticket sales over the last few years (from under 400 two season ago to over 1000 this) and in membership of the Trust (from a few hundred to over 2000).
These figures bode well for the future of ECFC. Let’s hope we continue to make progress on and off the field so we don’t ever have to make the trip to “New St James’ Park”, Torquay.
When you are reading this I will hopefully have just arrived back in the country from a couple of weeks holiday in the Pyrenees, meaning that I won’t have been able to make it to the Park for the match today. I’ll only have been out of the country for one game (last week at Dagenham) so I won’t have spent too much time running around trying to find an Internet café or English newspaper whilst abroad (although while I’ve been away there have been 2 other big sporting events taking place which I will have been trying to follow as well: in tennis there has been the US Open and in cricket the final Ashes Test at the Oval).
Trying to find out results can be a problem when you go on holiday for a relatively long period during the season, especially if you’re moving around a lot. I spent 4 weeks backpacking around Eastern Europe from early August through to the beginning of September in 2003. It was bad timing really as that was the start of our first Nationwide Conference campaign and it would have been fantastic to have witnessed the first match after all the hard work that had been put in to even get us to that point. The trip was a great experience but every Saturday afternoon my thoughts would be focused on what was going on back in England in the football. It wasn’t always easy to find out the result, as there never seemed to be any English newspapers around.
The only hope was a nearby Internet café, but these can be difficult to locate. For example, I didn’t get to one until the Tuesday after the first game of the season when we reached Dubrovnik in south Croatia. This meant I was left with a few days to ponder over what might have happened. The possible result was never far from my mind so that every day during those few days I would attempt to unearth an Internet connection. This doesn’t mean I spent all day looking for one to the detriment of site seeing or whatever else there was to do, but it would mean I’d constantly have an eye out for some method of finding out the result.
Now this may sound just a little obsessive and to perhaps undermine part of the point of taking a holiday, which is to get away from it all and to relax. That’s probably true, but to be honest, there’s no way I was going to go 4 weeks without knowing how City were getting on. And not knowing the results would have affected any chance I had of relaxing. I would have been on edge, constantly thinking about what had happened and how I could find out. In other words I would have been suffering from “City withdrawal symptoms”. Going “cold turkey” is never easy and it’s never good to try and give something up when you’re on holiday.
Does this mean than I’m a City addict? Possibly. I’ve never tried to give up ECFC so I don’t know for sure, but some of the efforts I put into finding out the results when in Eastern Europe could be signs of addiction. If I am, I don’t think I’ll be going cold turkey anytime soon, even if some might suggest that being a City fan is bad for your health.
