Home truth is going away isn't all it's cracked up to be

By Ian Winwood

Published 12:51 04/02/11

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Every football fan whose car has ever broken down on the M1 knows there is a world of difference between seeing your club play at home and seeing them on the road.

Seeing your team at home, well, you know what you’re gonna get.

You know the ground, you know the people around you, you know the pubs. And more to the point, you know that, statistically speaking, there’s a greater chance of seeing your team come away with the points they set out to earn.

But seeing your team away from home is a different prospect entirely.

For one, unless it’s a local derby the chances are the journey will be time-consuming and inconvenient.

If you’re going to Reading’s Madejski Stadium, for example, you’ll have to affect a Berkshire accent to fool the security guards manning the doors of the adjacent hotel in order to get a pre-match pint.

Same deal at Coventry’s Ricoh Arena.

Travelling away, there’s more chance of being treated with suspicion, even like a criminal.

And there’s more chance of coming home from your away-day with nothing more than an empty purse or wallet.

But there is the camaraderie.

There is the notion that by being in some distant corner of some far-away ground, that you and your fellow travelers are hardcore supporters. You are the ones who have really paid your dues: in time and with cash.

You imagine yourselves to be a noisy bunch, impressing all the home supporters with the noise you’re able to make. And even your wit.

Last Friday, I sat with about 800 Barnsley fans in the away end of Millwall’s New Den singing “You’re not scary any more” to the south London locals.

Tiring of this, we then sang about ourselves.

“We’re not going down, we’re not going up, we’re Barnsley FC, we don’t give a…” well you can imagine the rest.

What a sight we must have been!

How impressive we must have sounded!

Trouble is, that’s probably not true at all.

I say this because on the first weekend of the new year I was able to do something that few visiting supporters get to do – I got to view my own team’s away fans from a seat in the home section.

So it was on a mild winter’s afternoon that I tried to keep my mouth shut as I sat in the main stand at Upton Park watching the Hammers take on the Tykes in the third round of the FA Cup.

(Why was I in the home section? Cos the ticket was free. I’m not proud, alright?)

I can’t lie, I felt a bit like an adulterer. There I was among the Londoners, while in a separate part of the ground something like 2,000 Barnsley fans tried to make their presence felt.

Every now and again they’d burst into song, usually something to do with the home fans being quiet.

You could hear the visitors sing, but it wasn’t all that impressive.

It would have sounded like thunder in the away section, of course, but the fact that this noise didn’t carry all the way around the stadium was for me a hard one to swallow.

There are, of course, exceptions that prove every rule, and in the Championship this exception comes in the form of Leeds United.

Just as there are some teams who are too good for the division in which they play, so too there are away fans who are superior to the grounds they visit.

In the case of football’s second tier, this accolade goes to Leeds.

As for the rest of us? Sad to say, but we’re just not as loud or as proud as we think we are.

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