Child of the lights: supporting Aston Villa and a football upbringing between eras
Finding football on a historical fault line
Issue 100. Madness.
Before we get into the meat of this week’s slightly self-indulgent newsletter, a quick shout-out to Mark Jardine and Misery Hunters, a St Mirren podcast on which I appeared at the end of last week to talk about my visit to Paisley and the article I wrote on the back of it.
It was a pleasure and a privilege, and I can say the same about today’s episode of The Sound of Football, which should be available this evening and features me talking about Aston Villa and Bluesky. Lovely stuff.
On we go.
Don’t miss this week’s Beefy Bites!
Child of the lights: supporting Aston Villa and a football upbringing between eras
Above all else, football is a game of generations. Our individual places within the collective experience is determined by seismic rule changes, by matches made or missed, by the evolution of the very bricks and buildings around us.
Matchday memories are the inner rings of a tree trunk. Through them we can be aged and positioned, our football wear and tear automatically recognisable based on where we've been, when we were there, and what we saw.
The birth of the Premier League and the inseparable introduction of its coverage on satellite television combined with the Taylor Report, the cultural impact of Italia ‘90 and the imminent hosting of the European Championship combined to draw a generational divide in the social history of English football.
Somewhere in the first half of the 1990s lies not only the greatest generational before-and-after in football’s living memory, but the cleanest.
There are before generations. They grew up on terraces watching football best described as rough and ready – decade after decade after decade of it – and they either stuck with the very different football of the after or they didn't. But the before is what they really know.
There are after generations. They're too young to have stood on terraces, at least at the highest level, and the mistakes and imperfections of the game as it was would make their eyes bleed. They can't know the before. They simply live in the after.
I'm from the generation in between. My formative football years spanned the start of the Premier League. I learned the game with my team in the First Division and attended a match there for the first time in the first season of the Premier League, though I’d been to matches elsewhere by that point.
One of my earliest memories of football is sitting on the floor in the living room of my parents’ house. It’s morning but dawn is still an hour away. The darkness is pierced by the flashing of the television in the corner of the room as a VHS tape documenting the history of Aston Villa Football Club plays, and not for the first time.
The title sequence begins with the illumination of one of the unmistakable sights of my football infancy. Between 1971 and 1990, Villa Park was adorned by floodlights arranged in the shape of the club’s initials. Their glare burst through the TV and into my physical world and dragged me into 115 years of claret and blue blood, sweat and tears.
By the time I went to Villa Park for the first time the AV pylons had been torn from the skyline, the beginnings of the ground’s transformation in football’s new age. I don’t know which match was my first but I sat in the beautiful old Trinity Road Stand and the copy of the Heroes & Villains fanzine I acquired that day remained in my possession for at least another decade.
I stood on the old Holte End terrace a handful of times before it too was demolished. I was probably too young to be there. I’m full of gratitude that I was – there aren’t many Villa supporters my age who can say they've been on those terrace steps and I feel lucky to be one of them.
Those first few years have converged in my memory now. One match becomes another becomes another, just a singular matchday experience so intoxicating, so utterly vital, that it remains the reason I’m still in love with football today. It’s the first high I can’t replicate. It’s my dragon.
Going to the football will never be like it was in the first half of the nineties. I’m much older now. That’s part of it. But the game and the world have changed too. The routines and habits, the rituals, have gone.
I went to matches with my dad. After a long drive from the south coast or a short one after visiting family, he parked his car on Aston Lane and we walked towards Villa Park.
The club moved to the stadium at Aston Lower Grounds in 1897. Almost a century later, the Upper Grounds was our pre-match pub. No ifs, buts or maybes – rain or shine, Manchester United or Gravesend & Northfleet, we were there.
They don’t build pubs like the Rat Pan anymore. It was a matchday boozer and nothing more, empty for thirteen days every fortnight but buzzing for one. It was a pub for football supporters who wanted to stand up, drink lager and piss up a wall before the game.
To the right of the entrance was the smoking lounge. Uncles, cousins and friends were barely visible across a table through the pungent fog. I miss a lot about how football used to be on the pitch but none of it as much as I miss that one disgusting room.
The Rat Pan was home base as Villa went through the highs and lows, the near-misses and close calls, of the nineties.
I was there when Ron Atkinson’s wonderful team built a title challenge in the first season of the Premier League and I was there when it fell apart.
I was there when they slid towards relegation and when they avoided it.
I was there for the Tranmere Rovers game and at Wembley to see them win the Coca-Cola Cup in 1994.
I was there when they won it again two years later under Brian Little.
I watched Gordon Cowans and Paul McGrath, Dean Saunders and Dalian Atkinson, Shaun Teale and Kevin Richardson, Nigel Spink and Mark Bosnich.
It was a special decade for Villa in a lot of ways but what really matters to me are those childhood connections with my club and a million memories of matchdays. Those are the real ties that bind and they made me the football supporter I am today.
Ten years and two days ago, Villa marked their 140th anniversary by unveiling the Founding Lamp. Standing in the shadow of the Holte End, the monument represents the gas lamp under which the club was formed in 1874.
The lamp is a symbol of everything that unites Villa generations – the very old and the very new and the in-betweeners who lived the best and worst of all worlds and consider it a privilege to have experienced something approaching the fullness of English football.
I’m not the kid transfixed by footage of those floodlights anymore. My direct involvement as a supporter of Aston Villa has drifted and dwindled; life and football have evolved in the intervening years and that’s just how it is.
But the power of football lies in the love it laces through our lives. That doesn’t go away. That’s what it’s all about and why it’s important in spite of its inherent triviality.
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Salty beef extracts
Oxford United know the pain suicide causes – now they’re uniting to save lives (i)
‘I’m 21, but I’ve had lows’: How Stockport revived Barca’s first English prodigy (i)
Man City are fooling no one – this is crisis mode (i)
Dumbarton FC and a "get-rich quick pipe dream" (Unexpected Delirium)
What will Football Bluesky look like after the Great Xodus? (Unexpected Delirium)
Harriers v Halesowen (Terrace Edition)
Aston Villa - four tactical problems for Emery to solve (BBC Sport)
Is over-reliance on a certain player a good or bad thing? (Goodnight Vienna)
“Should a promoted manager adapt? Perhaps; it worked for Thomas Frank at Brentford. But there is a danger in sudden switches. Why should players assembled to play in a particular way be able to adjust to playing another? While it possibly is true that a simpler, more risk-averse style might benefit a team low on confidence, it’s very unlikely to help a struggling side if they stop playing to their strengths.”
Jonathan Wilson’s piece for The Guardian puts Southampton manager Russell Martin in a slightly different spotlight than the one that will presumably see him sacked in short order. Fair points, too.
Dessert
Holy moly. That’s all I have to say about that.
That’s your lot. Thanks for reading. Please subscribe if you enjoyed it and haven’t done so yet.
Have a week.