It is 4.20am on a Saturday morning, two weeks before Christmas Day. In Plymouth’s city centre, Lisa is having an unusually busy night.
As well as ferrying late-night revellers from the Christmas party overspill back home, her taxi has made two trips to a car park a mile north of the city. She laughs when I explain the reason and gives me the same look in her rear-view mirror that you might offer to a child feeling sick after eating too many sweets: but-it’s-your-own-fault sympathy.
Outside the Devonport End of Home Park, a trickle of supporters wearing green-and-white scarves grows in number until they reach 100. Two coaches, sat silent in the night, lurch into life and open their doors. Plymouth Argyle are playing away from home and it’s time to leave. Kick off is in 10 hours and we don’t want to be late.
Plymouth are a club placed in unique geographical circumstances. They are the remotest league club in England, but this season has thrown up a series of coincidences to exacerbate their alienation. Exeter City didn’t get promotion from League Two. Bristol Rovers were relegated from League One. Bristol City survived relegation from the Championship. Plymouth will travel 12,268 miles for their 23 away league games this season, an average of 533 miles per trip.
But Sunderland is the big one. This is an 806-mile round trip; the only possible longer away journey in English football would be Newcastle United, and even then only by four miles. On the coach, supporters joke about beating Birmingham City in the FA Cup third round and drawing Newcastle away. There is no thought of the financial strain, the time spent or the immense dedication required. They love their football team, their football team has no choice and so neither do they. In the space of seven days, they have travelled 1,866 miles to Rochdale, Milton Keynes and Sunderland and back.
It has not been an easy few weeks for Plymouth. On 13 November, after a 4-1 win away at Accrington (626 miles, if you’re keeping up), Ryan Lowe’s side were top of League One and on a 16-game unbeaten league run. Since then, they have taken one point from four games, fallen to fifth and Lowe has walked out to join Championship side Preston North End. Assistant Steven Schumacher has been promoted to first-team manager; “Schuey’s at the wheel” is the chant, fitting on the final weekend of the Formula One season.
At around 7am, when night is finally being persuaded to pack up and make room for a grey, drizzly winter’s day, the sound of foil being opened to reveal pre-prepared breakfast fills my area of the coach. It marks the point at which some have given up their resolutions to “Get a few hours kip on the way up”; it was always a thinly-disguised lie.
In front of me, Tony never even tried. He recently went semi-retired, allowing him to focus on Plymouth away trips as well as home games. Tony says that Covid-19, and the lack of supporters at games, re-emphasised how much going to the match had become a vital part of his life and he doesn’t intend to waste the opportunity by missing out on any of it.
Jill walks up and down the bus like a mother hen, checking on her brood. She is effectively the bus monitor, checking the passengers on and off at service stations, many of whom she has come to know personally. Jill started as a volunteer photographer for an Argyle fan website but has slowly become submerged in the club’s away culture. “It gets under your skin and suddenly you realise you’re wanting to go every week,” Jill says. In any other context, that might be a weary assessment; Jill is beaming.
Before I took my seat on the coach, I had a misguided notion that I might be one of the weariest on board. In preparation for the trip, I had travelled from Loughborough, via Derby, on a six-hour train journey and got some piecemeal sleep in a Plymouth hotel that hosted a Christmas party downstairs. At 2am, I had been awoken by the sound of someone in the square outside screaming “Just go to bed, get some sleep” in the midst of a friendly post-party argument. The irony did not fail to land.
But I should have known better. Sitting next to me are Josh, Liam and Connor, three early twenty-somethings who have only started going away with Plymouth this season. The kicker is that the trio live in Cambourne in Cornwall. They got the last train to Plymouth at 10pm on Friday night and sat outside Home Park for four hours until the coaches arrived, because there was no other choice. I decide to keep my tale of Midlands-Devon travel to myself for now.
Plymouth fans are not unique, and the ones I speak to are keen to stress that. Around the United Kingdom, weekends are dominated by travel via increasingly expensive means to far-flung corners of the country. They meet at service stations and railway stations, occasionally allowing tribal pride to spill over but generally conversing in cliched mutual admiration: “I’ve always had time for [Club X]”; “Where are you lot today?”; “Good luck for the rest of the season”.
But Plymouth’s monumental trip changes the rules. At Strensham services in Worcestershire, where we have the only lengthy stop of the outward journey, a guy washing his hands in the toilets asks where the green-and-white army will watch their football today. After hearing the answer, he opens his mouth in a cartoonish fashion. “Did you hear that?” he shouts to a mate in a cubicle. “They’re going to Sunderland. F__king nutters.” The word “Sunderland” is bestowed special emphasis, as if it could easily be interchanged for Timbuktu or Mordor.
The journey itself is mercifully delay-free, barring a short hold-up on the M1 as we pass Sheffield’s Meadowhall. Connor expresses disbelief at the number of cars in the car park at a shopping centre a fortnight before Christmas, as if to imply that these people must be mad to waste their day in such a way. Sometimes the punchlines are best left unsaid.
One of the emotional foundations of being an away supporter is the bubbling excitement as you near the ground. How early this happens is roughly proportional to the length of the journey; on our coach the first sight of a Sunderland road sign creates a buzz. But it is always present, no matter how far the trip, the importance of the match or how many times you have made the same trek before. It reminds of the “First one to see the sea wins” game played by families with young children in the car, and the reaction is just as excited. Without it, they would not be here in the first place.
It is 1.05pm on a Saturday afternoon and Sunderland is cold. At first the temperature shock, like stepping off a plane after returning from some summer sun, wakes up those who have been sitting with knees bent and minds weary for the last nine hours. But the restorative powers of the chill soon loses its charm. A biting wind whips around the Stadium of Light, the type that makes you think about all the times you moaned about being too hot and curse yourself in hindsight for such entitlement.
Plymouth’s ticket office estimates that around 1,100 supporters have made this trip. Alongside the official coaches, friends have arranged minibuses, some families have driven and others booked early trains to avoid the ludicrous rise in prices and others flew from either Newquay or Bristol to Newcastle airport. Plenty, like Paul and Kathie, have made a long weekend of it. They flew to Newcastle on Thursday and spent two days in the city. But the weekend’s star attraction was obvious; they arrived in Sunderland at 11am, four hours before the game.
One fan, as he proudly crows at the end of the game, lives six miles from the Stadium of Light. On Sunday at Derby station, waiting for the last train of a long return journey, I meet Chris and Emily, father and daughter who live in Wellingborough. They are Plymouth fans who went up for the match and stayed overnight. Emily points out – almost as an apology – that living in Northamptonshire makes the away trips easier. At which point Chris points out that she has a home season ticket too. Every one of these supporters has undervalued their loyalty.
The reasons behind the trip vary, even if all are formed around a deep love of their football club. For some it is a rite of passage, the equivalent of the all-you-can-eat challenge that comes with the novelty T-shirt for completion. Some are merely ticking off a new stadium – Sunderland have hosted Plymouth twice since 2007 but their last game was behind closed doors as Covid-19 raged.
But most of them have no grand reason because they do not need one; they are here because why wouldn’t they be here? Like Amanda and Karen, cousins who first started going to watch Plymouth in 1970 with Karen’s Dad. They admit – again with an air of apology – that they only do every other away game, which makes me laugh involuntarily, and they always go on the coach.
Karen now lives in Exeter, but she drives the 90 minutes south to Plymouth to get onto the coach. For her, these journeys are a chance for familial reconnection, to continue a relationship with Plymouth that started over 50 years ago and to shoot the breeze about any domestic soap operas. Some go for a coffee or a walk; they go 403 miles to Sunderland. Today is a special occasion: Karen’s son is flying in from the Outer Hebrides for the match.
There is no protagonist of this story; this is a communal experience. But if we must pick one star, it is surely the Plymouth fan who came up on one of the minibuses, had too many cans and was refused entry to the stadium by stewards. He is forced to wait outside for his mates to endure the nine-hour return journey and the reminders from his friends about his misfortune for years to come. Is travelling for 806 miles to not watch a game a better anecdote than going the same distance to watch one? Probably. But that probably wasn’t much consolation at 3pm.
The game starts badly and doesn’t improve much from that point. Plymouth are a goal down inside four minutes and two down after 13, a combination of quick Sunderland passing and defensive sleepiness. Schumacher’s side have plenty of the ball but are unsure what to do with it; slow passing around the back invariably ends with a direct ball to a striker that is overhit or misplaced. After 35 minutes, the away end chants with glee that they have had a shot.
But it does not matter. This is not a piece about a match and Plymouth supporters have watched their team for too long to let its result define the experience of the day. They delight in Dan Scarr’s header that offers hope of the comeback that never materialised. They remind Lowe with some vigour that he left them in the lurch. They curse infrequent spurned opportunities to equalise. They jump and they sing to keep warm and they earn the respect of the Sunderland supporters who will make the return trip in April.
And the best moment – and least for a casual observer – comes not with the goal but at full-time. Plymouth’s players and manager dwell at one end of the pitch, looking high into the Gods to applaud those who have made the trip in their hundreds and are saluted in return. You wonder at times like these what those footballers who are not quite as obsessed with the game make of such devotion; it must be a little humbling.
It is 5.15pm and we are back on the coach. The air is thick with hangover energy; so much time spent enjoying the excitement that nobody stopped to think of the consequences despite dancing this same dance on an almost fortnightly basis. There are moans disguised as dark humour – “He’s 20 stone lighter than me and I’d still beat him in a race” – but on the whole there is an acceptance of defeat as part of supporting a club without vast wealth or the backing of a billionaire. And it’s only a nine-hour journey home.
The coach, with its air conditioning on full blast to provide ventilation amid a climate of rising Omicron cases, has the feel and white noise of a long-haul flight. Its passengers drop off one by one, some watching Norwich City vs Manchester United on their phones and some concluding that they have probably had enough football for one day. At 9pm, Connor points out that we aren’t even halfway home yet. At 10pm, he realises that he’s been on the move for 24 hours; a little less dark humour and little more darkness this time.
But do not mistake weariness for regret. At a time when elite football clubs are seeking to further exploit the loyalty of supporters with non-fungible tokens and social media engagement maximisation, there is no better way to feel closer to your team than by travelling the length and breadth of the country to watch them. They do not do it through expectation of victory or entitlement – another modern trait – but because you wish to be there for them in their bad times and a witness to their best. The confused looks of friends, family members and work colleagues as they proudly detail the length of the round trip will be reward enough.
I am a mess. It is 1am and we are 45 minutes from Plymouth. I work out that I have had five hours sleep in the last 44 hours and been travelling for 25 of them. My brain enters half-sleep stage, where thoughts connect with each other automatically and you can’t remember the last one nor predict the next. Five hours ago, we passed seven miles from my house on the M1 and I say as much. Back comes the wounding reply: “Thing is, mate, we have to do this; you don’t.”
And that’s the whole day in microcosm. Of course they don’t have to be there; Sunderland vs Plymouth Argyle would have happened without them and been largely the same affair. There is no contract with your club that you must follow them home and away. But they do have to be there, because this stopped being a choice a long time ago. They are hopelessly in love and hopelessly addicted and their club lies miles away from every other club in their league. They are the Pilgrims and pilgrims make pilgrimages.
It is 1.45am and the coaches have pulled up outside Home Park. It is more than 21 hours since we left, but the circumstances of our arrival trick the mind into thinking we have merely been transported back to the start and Bill Murray’s bedside alarm is about to ring. The scene is identical: black night, damp air, sleepy faces and smiles that convey friendship rather than reflecting any energy behind them.
Connor, Josh and Liam will, finally, sleep in a hotel before a morning train home to Cornwall. Tony will walk back to his house, pace quickened only by the thought of pillows. Karen will drive back in the direction we have come to Exeter, because missing out the first and last hours of the trip with her cousin would make it imperfect. Their journeys – and the journeys of the other 1,100 like them, have simultaneously been comically foolhardy and yet entirely commonplace when placed into the context of their commitment to Plymouth Argyle.
And on Boxing Day, there’s another away day; there’s always another away day. Football provides structure and escape at a time when plenty of people desire both and that makes it worth the time, money and effort.
The good news is that the next trip is to Argyle’s nearest League One neighbours. The bad news is that Cheltenham is still 157 miles away. Somehow, and for some inexplicable but yet understandable reason, you know that they wouldn’t have it any other way.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/30p1tt3
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