I have copied out Daniel Gray's Blizzard article about the joy he experienced in the away end at Meadow Lane when Alan Moore bagged his brace - a seminal moment for him, a rite of passage, embraced into the Boro away crowd and a lifelong passion for following football away from home.
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The Joy of Going Away
Daniel Gray
On the radio Gabrielle sings about dreams. Fluffy tassels protrude from the car window’s top edge, trapped rigid.
The rest of my scarf quivers outside, a red and white ensign lofted by the motorway headwind. One mishap with our new-fangled electric windows and it will skedaddle through the air and lay to rest in some South Yorkshire farmer’s field.
“I can’t stand this song,” says my Dad as he blindly jabs the ‘MW’ button. Quickly we are hearing pre-match tidings of Sheffield Wednesday’s trip to Anfield and Oldham’s hosting of Ipswich. Radio
Five is more our thing, the rhythms and crescendos of its Saturday coverage our much-loved album. Medium Wave 909 and 693; there were so many numbers then and all of them still offer comfort when recalled –Ceefax 302, Teletext 140, Middlesbrough ClubCall 0898 12 11 81…
Scarves hover from other cars on the M1, some we pass and some that pass by. Many are red and white, Boro like us or the Sunderland-minded bound for Derby. Encountering blues or maroons we try to guess the team; “Black and amber. Where are Hull today?” During term time, through all torturous school days I think in these colours – someone has a red and blue striped pencil case and I picture Selhurst Park on the telly, then a teacher’s quartered blouse summons Bristol Rovers. It is an obsession that makes real-life supporters queuing at the Burger King concession in Woodall Services seem impossibly exotic.
We reach Nottingham and I’m still thinking what a shame it is that neither of this city’s teams play in the green home colours of Robin Hood. Outside Meadow Lane, Dad buys me a programme, just like he does at Ayresome Park, and we are seduced by the vapours of a burger van, which happens there too. We perch on a wall to eat and watch people trickling towards the ground. Most wear black and white with the occasional yellow flicker. The programme contains some words from the manager, adverts for local businesses with straplines supporting the club and a centre-fold player interview. Yet the manager has hair like burnt Super Noodles and is called Mick (where is Lennie Lawrence?), in the ads local car dealerships are backing the Magpies and the featured player is goalkeeper Steve Cherry(“Obsessional about hoovering the house” and “a member of the Institute of Advanced Drivers” since 1984). Everything is the same and everything is different. There is blurred familiarity.
There have been away outings before – Boothferry Park, Elland Road, St James’ Park, even Wembley. Yet now we are in the uplands of that long summer when a blissfully distracted primary school boy becomes an anxious and vigilant secondary school lad; I am noticing more of the world around me, from girls to Grimsby Town tops. Plus, this is the first day of the season, always more vivid than any other and today embellished by fulsome August sun. I hand my pale red ticket – wrongly marked ‘The Barclays League Division One’, Endsleigh Insurance will be furious – to a grumpy man who seems older than God and we climb to the light.
Up in seat 86 of RowJJ, I consume more difference. To the left and ahead, behind the far goal, are pristine stands loaded with black seats. To the right is a barrelroofed old enclosure I can’t stop looking at. As the ground fills – we are early, we are always early – the soundscape shifts. At first Tannoy music (more bloody Gabrielle, some ubiquitous football ground Queen) dominates but it is soon challenged and then overcome by away end choristers.
Continuing the theme, our songs are the same but they sound somehow altered; more urgent, prickly, guttural. Perhaps this is always the case away from home, or perhaps it is because Middlesbrough have been lately relegated, vanquished in May from the first, alive and kicking, Premier League (or“Preem-ier”, as some are still pronouncing it). Things seem suddenly threadbare, bordering on desperate. Ayresome is crumbling and the squad is thin, shorn of wily Willie Falconer and solid Jimmy Phillips, likeable Gary Parkinson and blustery Bernie Slaven. Those last two were among the final links to an altogether different August, when our club almost disintegrated. The badge still reads 1986 after reformation in that year of calamity, but now we are among change and flux.
Substantiating that claim, Middlesbrough are one of four Division One teams who have this summer opted to abandon lining up in shirts one to 11 – Ye Gods! – and embraced squad numbers instead.
The future is half-here. As the teams run out, even from Row JJ we can see that design execution has not quite met concept; the players’ are wearing an oversized font so that Paul’s ‘Wilkinson’ arcs and drapes around his number 9 with all the delicacy of an ill-fitting, wind-interrupted toupee. At squad number three, Nottingham lad Richard Liburd will make his debut. Right now, just before three o’clock on August 14, we know nothing of his kamikaze approach to football. We are unaware of the right-footed left-back’s penchant for dribbling the ball through his own penalty area, a feat undertaken with the nonchalance of a cat parading across a wall. Neither do we know anything of the man playing in front of him, on the left wing. Number 17 Alan Moore’s name is not even on the back of the programme.
Moore is an 18-year-old Dubliner with just one substitute appearance to his name. Today, baggy short sleeves give him the look of a boy who has forgotten his PE kit and been told to dress from the lost property box. Waifish, handsome and, we later learn, cripplingly shy, something cosmic happens when a football goes near him. Suddenly, a meek jog becomes an almighty swagger and his boots illuminate the ball. It is as if he has been illustrated into life by a rogue soccer fan at Marvel Comics. Manchester United wanted him but our Chief Scout, Ron Bone, got him. Mind, it must be hard to say no to a man named Ron Bone.
After 19 minutes, by the centre circle inside the Boro half Moore squirrels the ball from County’s Phil Turner. Inside two seconds the Irishman has scurried clear with Turner in forlorn, pointless pursuit. Moore seems to hover over the pitch now, before splicing the defence with a pass from which Wilkinson scores. This is not my moment. Nor does my moment come one minute before half-time, when Moore purloins the ball again ,jives and hip sways a course through bloodthirsty defenders and spanks a peach beyond Steve ‘the Hoover’ Cherry.
My moment happens just after the interval when Craig Hignett hoists a corner towards the edge of the D. There, Alan Moore casually loiters as if outside the youth club awaiting a lift home from his Mum. The ball bounces once. Moore muffles it on his chest. It sinks downwards but gravity cannot win near a left foot like his. There is barely a word for the volley that follows. It isn’t ‘unleashed’ or ‘executed’; perhaps ‘tailored’ or‘ sculpted’. Whatever, it soars into the top corner. Steve Cherry doesn’t even move, perhaps avoiding the kind of muscle tear that might jeopardise a Sunday vacuuming session.
Technically and aesthetically, Moore’s second goal at Meadow Lane deserves to be a favourite moment in its own right. Yet that is not why I chose this burst of artistry from a boy none of us had hitherto heard of. I chose it because it happened in front of the away end and never before had I been among such incandescent delight as I was in the 20 or 30 seconds that followed. The red thousands hollered joyously and indecipherably and jumped up and down until the stand’s concrete seemed to pulsate. Cantankerous old sods grinned and people hugged, a rare sight in an 80s and 90s northern childhood.
This eruption was profoundly different to what happened at Ayresome Park, even when the old ground was at its rowdiest. It felt primal, boisterous, unfettered. A celebrating visitors’ end was an escape from the strictures and norms of being in the same seat or the usual terrace spot, the school trip instead of the classroom.
Moore’s goal, alongside the adventure and divergence of everything leading up to 3pm that day, matters enormously to me because it fired my curiosity. On that August afternoon in Nottingham, a desire to travel in search of football and its homes took root. Soon, I wanted to see and hear and smell the differences of other towns and grounds, often in this country’s more neglected crevices.
Preferably, I’d be watching Middlesbrough and encountering the sharp sense of identity and belonging that infects every away end. In time, though, I came to love it all; travelling to watch any team, anywhere and feeling part of this beguiling, infuriating and unifying game. Alan Moore’s sumptuous left foot: thank you.
Daniel Gray
