1982 and all that: Wobbly, NGK and The Dynamic Duo

We all have memories of when we were most fanatical about our team. This is the period in time that evokes the fondest memories of the games, the players and the trappings. For me, despite the many great match days I have enjoyed since, the ‘golden’ days are the three seasons from 1980-81 culminating in our promotion to the old Division 3 in 1983. I had first gone to the OSG with my dad on a Friday night in September 1971 as a wide eyed 6 year old to watch us play out a goalless draw with Northampton. I was instantly hooked. My interest in all things football had been kindled by watching the 1971 Cup Final between Liverpool and Arsenal on TV, but this was the real deal. There was a 5,000+ crowd and the memory of the floodlights beaming down, the smells of embrocation, pipe smoke and Bovril, and the colourful shouts of encouragement and reproach remains strong.

My dad was never a committed Iron fan in the way I wanted to be and throughout the seventies we went to perhaps 6 games a season at the OSG. The big deal for me from about 1980 onwards was, by dint of an adolescent rite of passage, being granted the ability to go to games unaccompanied by a proper grown up. Sumpt, my partner in crime and I, took full advantage of this independence to pursue our passion for all things United. These were the end of bleak years for The Iron and for many were the dark ages for English football. England had failed to qualify for the World Cup in ’74 and ’78, crowds were on the slide and, pre-Bradford Fire and Hillsborough, football grounds were poorly maintained and sometimes dangerous places to be. Crowds at OSG were poor and often below 2,000. With a mediocre team, entertainment could not confined be to the pitch. Many of the strongest memories are of the characters on the terraces for whom we coined apt, but unimaginative nicknames. So there was the Dynamic Duo, a couple of highly vocal thirty something brothers, who spent the entire game in a state of apoplexy with brows furrowed, voices and veins straining through rage with bile flying from their mouths. With military precision they rostered their verbal assaults on opposition players and officials and, in an early prototype of Alex Ferguson, pounded their watch faces in unison, with wrists aloft, during any pause in the game. These pauses may have been attributable to the trivial, such as a ponderous goal kick or, the serious, such as a broken limb. The reason was immaterial. You could almost imagine them greeting a halt in play due to the apocalypse with similar indignity. The ferocity of their attacks was such that on occasions it was evident from opposition players’ body language that they were genuinely fazed by the experience. I often see one of the Duo at away matches and believe that he still practises his art to this day in the Grove Wharf, albeit at a more sedentary level.

Other characters included one of the first wave of Polish immigrants, an elderly gentleman with unfeasibly hairy ears and a Cossack style hat. He was known to us as Bloody Hell on account of the only words he was ever heard to utter and which he used at regular and frequent intervals from his vantage point in the Cantilever stand paddock-in an accent more Warsaw than Westcliff. Hence, the player’s name was added as a suffix (e.g. “Bloody Hell Partridge/Cam/Greeny”) every time that a passage of play concluded in disappointing fashion. Another cast member was Critic Kid. We only sought him out for eavesdropping purposes when we were winning, as it was the only time it was remotely bearable to listen to his gloomy pronouncements. What made him remarkable was his tendency to melancholy or disappointment in any situation: win, lose or draw. On one memorable occasion, a perfectly executed, match winning cup goal from Rick Green was greeted by Critic with an irony free and withering aside to his silent and no doubt long suffering companion: “should have been a bit more in the corner.”

It may have been our delicate sensibilities or that the sparse crowds made it more evident, but the Donny Road end was populated by an ensemble of characters that would have been perfectly cast to stage a massive improvised version of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. With largely voluntary crowd segregation and a small police presence, the tedium of a poor game was often enlivened by a knot of away supporters coming in to the Donny Road for a tear up with like minded ‘nutters’ from amongst the ranks of the home fans. These shows of strength usually involved a lot of to-ing, fro-ing and gesturing with little, if any, physical combat. There were some exceptions and a couple of times an isolated or foolhardy visitor took a beating. Like most supporters, we kept a safe distance from the business end of things on such occasions, but your adrenaline surged unpleasantly at the prospect of real danger. The realisation that these seemingly ritualistic skirmishes could degenerate into much worse was borne of experience of the hostilities that invariably occurred before, at and after local derbies and, most notoriously, when Sheffield United visited OSG in February 1982. This was during a brief sojourn by the Blades in Division 4 during our second worst ever season. They finished the season as champions and United second bottom. The season’s average gate of fewer than 2,000 was swelled to over 8,000 with Scunny fans outnumbered by nearly three to one. The scene was truly frightening with the visiting fans ‘taking’ the Donny Road and the police abandoning the scene in the 2nd half as they found themselves in the middle of groups of supporters involved in running battles. Such was the mayhem that Iron fans were eventually given a police escort out of the ground at the end of the game. What made matters worse was that although we won 2-1, it was impossible to enjoy the experience because of the ubiquity of Blades fans bent on violence. I have particularly vivid recollections of not feeling able to celebrate a goal by Paul Moss and even tried in vain to look cheerful when the visitors scored a penalty at the Donny Road end. We survived that day intact and the natural order was restored at the remaining home games of the season with the cast taking up their usual spots on the Donny Road. As was his wont, Sumpt would ask me if his state of the art photo chromic glasses had ‘gone cool’ (i.e. tinted) at any point where the sun broke through the gloom. Assessing the coolness of the said spectacles was often a welcome diversion from the fare served on the pitch.

Fashion trends on the OSG terraces at this time developed independently of national preferences and seemed to stem from a widespread obsession with the motorcycle. We were therefore often mystified by some of the de rigeur apparel. The most memorable trend amongst the young Donny Roader was unaccountably an ill-fitting black zip up, quilted jacket with the words ‘NGK Components’ emblazoned on a patch on the left breast. As far as we could tell the only place at which it was sold was not a boutique, but a motor parts shop on Doncaster Road. It was neither stylish nor a la mode and its popularity was as intriguing as it was puzzling.

The football was not incidental as may appear to be the case. We started to become more obsessive and going to away games on the official supporters’ coach. These were a great adventure with trips to places we would grow to know and, er, love such as Halifax, Rochdale, Crewe, York and Mansfield. (Away wins were very rare and it was not until November 1981 that we witnessed one-at Halifax. What made it all the more memorable was the game featuring on Match of The Day for reasons that were a mystery at the time and which have remained so ever since). Coach travel was not for the faint hearted with no air conditioning or ventilation to speak of and poor personal hygiene and chain smoking being practically compulsory. Various rituals were observed like flicking V’s at any soul spotted within a 10 mile radius of the away team’s ground and the notorious collection for the driver. The latter was usually administered by a man of dubious repute answering to the name of Wobbly. With some menace, Wobbly prefaced the collection by imploring all to give generously. I may be a little wide of the mark here, but I wager that he was so called on account of his ample girth and not because he was baptised thus by any minister of religion. If I can set the scene further, Wobbly would have been thrown out of Motorhead for looking slightly too unkempt and menacing, and because he could have devoured a tour’s worth of riders in one sitting. Under Wobbly’s watchful and unnerving gaze, as unwaged slackers, Sumpt and myself would take one of two options: feign the dropping of loose change by a gentle nudge of the inside of his coin laden bobble hat or, in extremis, drop a couple of coppers in. Our strategy was finally rumbled one bright spring Saturday late in the ’81 to ’82 season when a hatless Wobbly instead used his spade-like hands as a receptacle for the collection.

During holidays from school and sixth form, we would stalk the ground in the hope of encounters with players. So it was that we followed Steve Cammack until he bought a box of Radox bath salts! There’s more: we saw Vince Duffy playing Phoenix in the Showboat; Rick Green greeting us in apparent recognition; Malcolm Partridge and Alan Boxall were witnessed sharing a post-training fag; we bumped into Phil Ashworth and Vinny Grimes at a Headingley test match. I could write a book on the subject-okay, maybe not.

John Duncan’s arrival at OSG in 1981 as player-manager signalled the beginning of the end of the dark ages. Working on a meagre budget, he boxed and coxed with free transfers and loans, but the team struggled in his first season. The mantra from the terraces was: “get your boots on Duncan” which he seldom did because of injury before hanging them up for good. However, he managed to bring in players to strengthen the defence and midfield in the ’82 close season and laid the foundation for promotion in 1982/83 by bringing in the likes of Baines, Hunter, Leman and Parkinson to augment an existing core of established players like Cammack, Neenan, Cowling and O’Berg. This was something of a mini renaissance for the club with a return to a traditional claret and blue strip evoking better times. Despite the fact that Duncan fell undeserved victim to Chairman David Wraith’s obsession with Alan Clarke (Wraith’s dog was rumoured to be called Sniffer in tribute), and although Clarke replaced Duncan as manager for the final months of the season, the credit for promotion that year should go to the thoughtful Scotsman.

I left Scunthorpe for university in 1983, as did Sumpt, but we maintained our support through thick and thin. Whatever our fortunes since, the worst of times were never quite as bleak as 1980-82. I managed to attend perhaps a dozen games a season until I moved from Birmingham to Manchester in 1987. This coincided with the introduction of the play off system and our many flirtations with promotion through this route. Since then, I have maintained my passion for and commitment to the club, but with a greater appetite for away games than for visits to GP. Although GP was innovative and ambitious in its day, it has never had the allure, character or atmosphere of the OSG and it ultra utilitarian design puts it in an unfavourable light compared to most post-Taylor Report designed stadia. As I look back now, on the brink of middle age with a family, mortgage and increasingly hairy ears, I realise that my romance with the club has been steadfast and true. I never cast more than a glance at the bigger and more glamorous clubs in Birmingham or Manchester. Looking back to 1982/83 and the renaissance at that time, temporary though it was, I wonder whether we are about to see another on a grander scale as we savour the real prospect of promotion to the Championship. For those of us too young to remember the halcyon days of the fifties and early sixties, but old enough to have experienced the bleakest periods of the seventies and early eighties, this is the stuff of which dreams are made. Let’s hope that the dreams can be realised this year, that we are able to keep key players and are ambitious enough to go out and get the 2 or 3 additions to the squad necessary to secure promotion. If we do go up, stuff your ears with hair, don a Cossack hat and join me on promotion day shouting in a faux eastern European accent: “Blerrrrrdy ‘Ell Sharpy!”

Keep the faith!

Saleiron