Why Swansea's first Premier win united a shattered community

By Ian Winwood

Published 10:24 23/09/11

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Toward the end of the 1970s, Barnsley Football Club manager and former Leeds striker Allan Clarke took his squad of lower-league journeymen down the mineshaft of one of the many South Yorkshire collieries.

His message was plain and simple: that each weekend the men who spent their working lives mired in grime and coal dust chose to give some of their wages to the team that played at Oakwell. It was, then, beholden upon the team’s players to work as hard on the pitch as their fans did underground.

More than a generation on and this seems like a story from a bygone age. It has been almost 20 years since Michael Heseltine’s pit closure programme decimated one of this nation’s most storied industries, and the image of the soot-faced miner as one of Britain’s most identifiable faces has receded into the past.

This month, though, grim circumstances proved that the link between coal and community has not been severed entirely.

Last week, four miners – Phillip Hill, 45, Gary Jenkins, 39. David Powell, 50, and Charles Breslin, 62 – died after they became trapped in the flooded Gleison Colliery, one of the remaining mines of the South Wales coalfields.

Three other miners managed to escape with their lives, one of whom was taken to Morriston Hospital in Swansea.

It was in this same location that on Saturday afternoon the fans of Swansea City gathered at the Liberty Stadium to see their team kick-off against West Bromwich Albion.

Since being promoted to the Premier League following a victory over Reading in May’s Playoff Final, the Swans had amassed just two points, and scored no goals.

Last weekend, though, the side from the Principality put things right with an emphatic 3-0 win over their Black Country opponents.

It might seem that in 2011 the link between a football club and the community it represents – especially when played out at Premier League level – is one that has been weakened to the point of breaking. How are fans supposed to relate to players that earn more in a week than many do in a year? How are they supposed to see anything of themselves in the club that they support?

This may be true. But you can bet that it’s true that the tragedy that befell South Wales immediately before Swansea City’s first victory of the season hung over the Liberty Stadium like an unquiet ghost.

It’s also a safe bet that in the crowd were sons of men who spent their entire working lives underground. Some of these men would have been in the crowd themselves, and would have known first-hand the perils of being a miner and the cost as well as the rewards of working in what is still today one of the world’s most dangerous occupations.

And while it would be entirely facile to suggest that Swansea City’s 3-0 win last weekend was of any comfort at all to the families and friends of the workers who lost their lives just hours previously, it remains true to say that such a joyous gathering proves the notion that working class communities can be brought together by events other than calamity and loss.

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