I don’t really remember when I first became aware of soccer as a child. He was always there. Every piece of wasteland was a pitch, every battered can a ball. WBA, Wolves and Villa graffiti were painted all over the walls of the pub car parks and slashed across most of the red leather seats of the buses in the Midland Red fleet. In the Black Country, the heavily industrialized core of West Midlands football is totally tribal.
West Bromwich Albion formed in 1880, one of the founding clubs of the first Football League, starting out as West Bromwich Strollers in 1878 formed by a dedicated group of manufacturing workers at the Salter Spring Works in West Bromwich. Thus, the club’s roots are firmly tied to the area’s industrial heritage and, in its early years, workers from nearby heavy industry flooded the Hawthorns turnstiles, their heavy industrial protective clothing giving rise to the label ” the Baggies” which has long been used to refer to both the club and the fans.
For me, football dominated childhood Saturdays during the season and there was always talk of Albion. Legendary names like Jeff Astle and Ronnie Allen were as familiar as any on the streets where I grew up. Our path was an ‘Albion path’ and all the scarves were navy blue and white. On Saturday home games, the garage doors would go up in unison and Ford Cortinas and Escorts would reverse in formation before the masses made their way to West Bromwich at the ground we Albion fans now call “The Shrine”. Even to this day, 30 years later, the sight of those Hawthorns floodlights still sends a chill down my spine that takes me back to the days when the crew ran out of Harry J’s old reggae song ‘The Liquidator’ Allstars and Bryan Robson wore the Captain’s number 7 jersey.
West Brom in the veins. So it has always been. The emotional attachment you feel to your local football club, especially when it’s been passed down the family line, is hard to explain to non-fans, but you can never walk away and, oh my gosh, sometimes you want to run. Supporting “The Baggies” is not for lilies. You have to be stoic, very stoic.
Albion are as important to my family as any of us. Dad and Grandpa were huge Albion fans and this was passed down to me and my brother as the last name through streaked DNA. At games today I often think of Dad, back in the 1950s, sitting on the train ties that were wedged into the bank that is now the Birmingham “Brummie” Road End looking up at his beloved Throstles after putting down his bike. near “someone’s entrance.” down. And then there’s my much-loved grandfather, Daniel Nock, long gone, standing in front of where I stand now, flat cap and raincoat, cigar in hand in the Hawthorns of the ’60s when Albion was flying high, winning the League Cup in ’66 and the FA Cup in ’68. The floor gives me the strange feeling of being ‘home’ sounds corny but it’s true. For me, there is something very special in that place and I know that this essential feeling will not fade away.
When I was a kid, soccer was everything and it was everywhere. Saturday afternoons were spent at my grandmother’s and grandfather’s house in Blackheath. Nan and I were listening to the game on the radio, waiting for Dad, Grandpa, my brother, and twin neighbors Ernie and Ivan, champion onion growers, to return from the game. If we won, and in the late 70’s this was very often, Grandpa would walk in the back door armed with tokens and stories from my childhood hero, Cyrille Regis, and total Albion legend, Tony ‘Bomber’ Brown. These were the days when they told me he was too young to go and Dad absolutely forbade it. Therefore, I had to rely on my brother’s accounts of his experiences at the Smethwick End stand. Stories he cherished, accounts of the crowded stands and the sporadic violence that was by then emerging in the English game, of bricks and coins hurled at sparsely segregated fans.
In the late 1970s West Brom were quite a golden team and this was a great time to be a fan, a welcome distraction from many of the pains of a severe economic depression that was hitting the Black Country hard, with old steel and manufacturing. industries that had propped up our communities for a century or more beginning to falter and crumble. Soccer took on an even stronger role for local people who needed focus and escape.
In 1979, the WBA finished third in First Division 1 and qualified for European football. This was the style team that fans still celebrate today and it’s only in the last two seasons that we’ve seen (with some joy) an Albion team come close to their level. Albion then fielded three black players in the same team, something then totally unknown in English football: Cyrille Regis, Brendon Batson and the wonderfully talented, sadly deceased, Laurie Cunningham. These incredibly talented footballers became known to fans as ‘The Three Degrees’ and acted as pioneers for black players in football, inspiring a generation.
Cyrille was and still is a tower of man and is still greatly loved and admired by Albion fans. An extraordinarily strong and powerful player, he would become for many the true benchmark of what a center forward should be. He’s gutsy, big, fast and the scorer of some outright hitting belts from distance and beyond. He didn’t get knocked down very often. In late 2011, I was lucky enough to meet Cyrille while he was raising money for charity outside the Hawthorns before a home game. It was wonderful to tell him that he was my hero of Albion and I nervously but proudly showed him the back of my shirt as proof, emblazoned as it was with ‘Regis 9’. He seemed very surprised to see a fan with his name emblazoned on a recent home jersey and it was every bit as dapper as he had always imagined. It was a great moment for that WBA-loving kid who is still very much like me.
Players like Regis, Batson and Cunningham had to face horrible racism just to do what they did best, week after week. There is a much-watched video of West Brom’s famous 1978 5-3 win over Man Utd at Old Trafford on You Tube. In the footage, Laurie Cunningham in particular can be clearly heard being booed repeatedly by Man Utd fans. Undoubtedly, it is due to the color of her skin and, something unusual for the time, it is even mentioned by commentator Gerald Sinstadt, who refers to the “repeated booing of black players”. The skill displayed by Cunningham as he cuts through the United midfield is impressive. He just carries on through it all and is described by Sinstadt as ‘booed but unfazed’, proving that he was a truly skilled and wonderful football player. Ignorance and meaningless chants. our club a little more special and we take them to our hearts.
In terms of Albion’s history, the years that followed the success of the late 1970s were mixed and difficult for Baggies fans. My first league game was West Brom v Liverpool in February 1981. We won that game 2-0 against the then league champions with a miraculous back-heel goal from Bryan Robson. I guess when I was a kid, I thought it would always be like this. It didn’t work out so well. I had to wait another thirty years to sit back and watch my club do something truly special, when I was lucky enough to see Albion beat Arsenal at the Emirates in a Premier League game in September 2010. But the wait was worth it. . It was a joy to hear Albion fans on the phone with their loved ones after the game shouting “I feel like we won the Cup!”… other young 20 year old fans proudly proclaimed on Facebook “This is the best day “. of my life!” It sounds ridiculous, but I know what they mean. That day in 1981 at the old Rainbow Stand with my dad with his little tartan bag full of packet soup and mini pork pies was one of mine and I’ve never seen it. i will forget
In 1992, I persuaded my dad to come with me to watch Albion together for the first time in years. By then we were languishing in what was the old Division 3. The Hawthorns was run down and attendance was poor. We were playing Leyton Orient and the performance was lackluster to say the least. I remember being devastated to see the club on its knees after what we had been through and I know it was even harder for my dad, who would see the happy days of Jeff Astle. However, I was still buoyed by the chant from the Brummie Rd and Smethwick End stands and the fact that the hardcore supporters had stayed with the club. At halftime, I went and touched the grass of the Hawthorns court, no one seemed to care that I jumped the barrier. It wasn’t the wonderful style of football I’d seen Albion play as a kid, but at least we managed a draw. There were many ups and downs to follow, too many to catalog here, as Albion was to be crowned the classic ‘yo yo’ club, with successive promotion and relegation stressing out Albion fans season after season.
I met one of Albion’s promotion-winning bosses, Roberto di Matteo, at Wembley in August 2010. Albion had seen promotion to the Premier League under Di Matteo during the 2009-2010 Championship season. My friend approached Di Matteo and brought him to take a picture with me ‘for my dad’ as she told him. I remember greeting him by muttering something about being a West Brom fan, probably with the kind of face a Chilean miner would look at his savior. God knows what he thought, but he complied with grace and good humor, I guess he was remembering that cold dark day in November 1992 and being so grateful for what he and others like Chipmunks and Megson and Roy Hodgson after him had brought to our club. .
In 2010, my annual WBA membership renewal came with a club promotional brochure emblazoned with a picture of the Hawthorns and Jeff Astle and had the words, “You were born a Baggie and have been a part of the team ever since.” written through him. At first I thought it was a bit cheesy, then I was surprised that it brought a tear to my eyes, because it’s quite true. It’s about belonging and that’s what the local football clubs we love do for us.
The club I was ‘born’ in has at times been the bathroom of my life, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. Blue and white striped veins, or “Albion ’til I die,” that’s just the way it is.
I hope to God that the days of 1992 are gone forever, but if they come back, I know I will still love the club and always will. But I was moaning and we like a good moan when we get going. That’s why we’ll keep singing Psalm 23 whatever the score: you never know when you’ll need help getting to those green pastures and still waters. To this day, I will never get tired of hearing thousands of people sing ‘The Lord’s My Shepherd’ in Black Country accents. It can’t be a coincidence that this is Albion’s footballing ‘anthem’ and you’ll hear it sung by the fans at every match. If ever there was an anthem to the need for faith when faced with the dark nights of the soul, then this is it and oh my gosh, there have been plenty of those for us Albion fans. 3-0 up at half time, do you think you’re safe? Think again. It’s what we call “typical damn Albion”, but try to make us stay away, we can’t. We are Albion.
