Thursday 27 August 2009

Tranmere away

I won't be there on Saturday. A party at friends will be too good to miss and the road looks like the only way to get there. I got a match ticket for a friend who is back from Mexico for a couple of weeks but even he, in his desperate state to see us play, is having second thoughts because of the transport situation. That will be why we are likely to have as few as 400 fans at the game.

I first went to Prenton Park in the late 80's to see them play Wrexham. Charlton had a spare Saturday, which means it was probably fourth round F A Cup day, so a mate and I decided to visit a new ground. We met at Euston and picked Tranmere out from that day's fixture list in the Saturday paper. A drink on the train and we were in Liverpool. We walked into The Vines at 12.30 to be greeted by a quizzical-looking barman. He remembered us from a visit to Everton a few weeks before-hand and was obviously aware that Charlton weren't due in the City that day. Having explained, he still wore a quizzical look.

He gave us directions and we left after 2pm and took the metro under the Mersey and a bus to the ground. We arrived several minutes after kick-off and the ground was very quiet. The turnstiles were shut so we ran quickly around the ground. The main stand was open and there were signs of life so we ran into the bar lounge and asked for help to get into the game. The barman looked up and it seemed to go very quiet as those around us gave us a strange look. "Have you come far?" he muttered matter-of-factly, "the game's over." Having told him London, he at least had the decency to look a bit embarrassed and explained that kick-off had been brought forward to 1pm because the floodlights failed a few weeks before and hadn't been fixed.

So back to Liverpool on the ferry after a brief look around Tranmere - you know, a laugh at the estate agents window (terraced houses for £5,000)- and back to The Vines. By this time, the bar staff at the Vines had found out that the Tranmere game had already been played and were waiting for us on our return. Oh how we laughed.

1 comment:

  1. I did something like this back in the early 90s. I was at university in Canterbury and we decided to go to a local game. We drove to Maidstone to discover that the club were now playing at Darftord. We got there by about half way through the first half.

    Then there was that visit to Milan. A story for another day.

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