Hit the ground running

When I was in my late teens I went to a lot of football matches. Many of them were away games. All of them were to watch Huddersfield Town.

There was a lot of bravado surrounding all these expeditions. I could go on for hours about the football hooligan related anecdotes, but the most scary for me always happened when you travelled by train to an away game.

This generally involved a football special. The police liked this, since by dropping the price of travel to a ridiculously low level , they could more or less ensure they had 90% plus of the travelling support in one place, on one train, where they could be contained safely (sometimes stuck on a branch line standing still for several hours until they decide we were ready to arrive).

On pulling in to the station, you were once again in the public domain, and it was considered your duty as a Town supporter to make as much noise as possible in as dramatic a way as possible as quickly as you could on arrival.

This meant that everyone wanted to get off the train as soon as they could, so everyone left their seats at the first sign of the station - usually there were loads of people hanging out of the windows anyway.

The trains were usually old ones and had the old style doors - these had a window that could be pulled down, and a door handle on the outside that could be opened by leaning out and twisting. The doors were flung open as soon as the train got alongside a platform - but well before it stopped. As soon as this happened everyone surged for the doors. If you were next in line - you jumped off - as simple as that, which meant that the whole train 'debussed' in a matter of seconds.

This was bloody terrifying - you had to run along the platform as quick as you could to avoid falling flat on your face, and also knowing that there were people in front of you that might fall over, and people behind you running fast into you as well.

Whilst doing this you were obliged to sing ! Usually the chant was "We're here again, We're here again" - as soon as you'd got your footing this changed to "Huuud eeers fieeeeeld, Huuud eeers fieeeeeld"

I never ever bit the dust, but someone always did - usually pretty painful and causing split lips and grazed knees and forearms. But hey ! We were hard ! so what did we care ?