Why late kick-offs and no trains mean Northerners will stop supporting England

By Simon Bird

Published 23:00 06/09/10

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Does anyone in the North care passionately about Fabio Capello's England anymore?

I ask the question because it appears that, even more than ever, supporting the national team at our "home" of football Wembley is now a luxury pursuit for Southerner-based fans.

Oop north we are not unpatriotic. There is plenty of satisfaction at seeing our England players put on a decent performance and romp home 4-0 winners against Bulgaria.

Especially when you consider that seven of the starting XI were from clubs 200 miles away from Wembley.

But is anyone thinking about supporters from clubs like Manchester City, Liverpool, Newcastle, Manchester United when they try to fill Wembley? How many at Wembley on Friday night were from Sheffield, Leeds Bolton or Blackburn, or the dozens of lower league Northern clubs?

Unless you are prepared to blow a wad on a London hotel room, drive through the night to get home, or take an overnight train journey lasting eight hours, supporting England is an expensive away game that plenty up here can do without.

Experiencing the £700 million new Wembley is way out of reach, geographically and financially, for supporters from clubs who provide the majority of the team, and very little, if anything, is being done to help.

Playing Euro 2012 qualifiers (admittedly at FIFA's request) at 8pm on a Friday night is excluding half the country from making an occasion of it.

At least when games were played on a Saturday afternoons more Northerners could travel south, and get back in a day.

Take a look at our national rail network to illustrate the problems. Assuming you stay at Wembley until the end on a Friday night, then somehow manage to get the Underground to Kings Cross by 11.35pm, you CAN catch a train home. It is an overnighter crawling into Newcastle at 7.39am

Get to Euston by 11pm and you have the luxury of two trains to Manchester... each taking eight hours to get home.

Get to Kings Cross by 11.30pm and you can at least get to Leeds just before 3am.

But how about home to Sheffield after a night game at Wembley? Catch the 11.30pm from Kings Cross and your home just after 6am.

So it's not surprising that many fans from our Northern cities, bar a few brave, ultra-dedicated souls, leave it to the fans of West Ham, Arsenal and Spurs to wave the St George's Cross.

With the London Olympics two years away, and the organisers promising it will be a games for the whole nation, I hope attention is being paid to these transport problems by the Government.

I'd love a trip down from Newcastle to see some athletics. Will I have any chance of getting home that night on a train at midnight?

If we want to put on the perfect World Cup in 2018 a key element must be getting fans around our rail system late at night after matches. Germany did it brilliantly in 2006. We must do the same.

Extra provision must be made on our railways to get fans back up North. How about some special fast trains running after midnight on match days?

How about some rail ticket deals linked with buying England match tickets? Experiment with it now, and someone could come up with a workable model for the Olympics.

Wembley's website trumpets a 15 coach routes direct to the stadium on match-days covering 46 towns and cities. Sadly my home town of Newcastle not included on their route map.

Of course these are not just problems on international nights. Try getting home to Newcastle on the train after a weekend 5.15pm TV kick off.

Northerners are often accused of having a chip on their shoulders when they grumble about the dominance of London in our national life. It's not grim up North, far from it. We've got the most of the top clubs, the best players, and the bedrock of the football league on our doorstep.

But we'll keep complaining until the London-centric supposed national organisations realise there is life outside the M25.

The argument to keep England "on the road" and playing games at club grounds around the country (a huge success that reinvigorated England's support) was lost, so this one mustn't be.

In these days when Wembley is becoming harder to fill, surely it is time to make England our national team again, not a team we can only watch at home on the TV

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