Better facilities at new grounds come at cost of lost atmosphere

If, like me, you are nearer forty than thirty and a supporter suffering from a bit of a footballing identity crisis, please read on.

Modern-day football: Yes, the facilities are very good, make that superb at a host of grounds, the pitches like bowling greens and the spectator environment far better and safer than it ever was – and the football’s not half bad either. But while it’s got everything, paradoxically it’s got nothing.

Many grounds that were once community hubs now resemble soulless corporate arenas with a spot of football every fortnight as an afterthought. Where’s the heartbeat gone?

Where once there was the fan, now there is the customer. Where once there was the big match, now there’s the Category A, B, C, D match-day package. More Houston Oilers than Hartlepool United.

There is no sense of belonging. Small wonder nostalgia in football is a boom industry where once it was pigeon-holed as being the sole domain of those who slavishly collected football programmes – anoraks, as many used to call them.

Maybe they knew something at the time that we didn’t, eh?

Memories of yesteryear may have gathered dust in many an attic, but they were evocatively brought into real life again during a bit of a retro revolution in football in the mid-1990s – kick-started by the BBC’s brilliant Match of the Seventies series.

We had the soundtracks, the archive footage, personalities, the sideburns, the testosterone...We even had The Sweeney legend Dennis Waterman doing the voiceovers for heaven’s sake – how kitsch.

And then it began. Companies quickly identified a niche to exploit with the proliferation of retro football tops which the fans lapped up.

Go to any Leeds match and you will see a fair few iconic Admiral training tops as once iconically worn by Messrs Bremner, Gray and Clarke. Nip over the Pennines to Man City and you’ll see a fair smattering of those white away shirts with the famous red and white sash which adorned shirts worn by the likes of Bell and Summerbee.

At Anfield, the Candy-sponsored home shirt of the Reds’ vintage 1980s is proudly worn by loads of Kopites.

Why, a fair few old strips have even been reprised as modern-day designs by Premier League clubs in recent years. Not daft those marketing folk in boardrooms, are they?

And the retro beat goes on...Hundreds of YouTube videos dedicated to football from the glory days of regional TV, the Big Match Revisited screenings at weekend’s, the excellent Backpass magazine wholly dedicated to football nostalgia, websites... you name it.

Just as backstreet boozers’ charm and idiosyncrasies have been sacrificed in favour of one-room pubs with coffee machines, wi-fi and paninis when all you want is a quiet pint in a nicely presented alehouse, so the 21st century football ground has shown a pronounced inability to mix the best qualities of the old with the new.

Football is about place, home and belonging, first and foremost. That’s what’s important with 90 minutes’ football just the cherry on the cake.

Take Bristol Rovers, who after leaving their traditional home in the mid-Eighties, popped up 20 miles down the road in Bath before eventually returning to a rugby stadium in their city.

No matter where they reside, they are – and always will be – the Gas in reference to their former Eastville ground being close to a gasholder.

The football is often peripheral. Let’s face it, only a handful of clubs are successful on a year-on-year basis and we all know who they are.

For the rest of us there is just gallows humour as we nurse a pie at our favourite spot at the home ground or a pint in an unpretentious local – if we are lucky.

As for the future, it’s not yet a completely bleak horizon. Some embrace the olde world charm within the all-seater environment. Fratton Park as your starter for 10? Absolutely love it. Pompey might have no brass, but they have got something special there. Loftus Road: tight, hemmed in, atmospheric. Small wonder an old-schooler like Neil Warnock lapped it up.

Proper grounds, with atmospheres far from nondescript.

With apologies to Colchester supporters, what claim to fame will the Weston Homes Community Stadium ever have apart from a daft name? Just another purpose-built stadium on the edge of town and the sort that are compact, bijou, nice but ten-a-penny.

Ugly can be beautiful. I’ve actually a confession to make. Along with a hardcore of around 1,500 others, on a fortnightly basis I regularly watched football in the late Eighties and early Nineties at the crumbling edifice that was Doncaster Rovers’ Belle Vue ground – my hometown club. If ever a stadium didn’t fit it’s name, this was it. But while it may have been a dump, it was our dump.

Yes, the pop side represented a bus shelter and the main stand had seen better days, made worse by the infamous fire which saw reviled former owner Ken Richardson jailed for conspiracy to commit arson. That’s another story.

But the ground had character. something that the Keepmoat, for all its visual appeal, still hasn’t managed to quite create yet in my humble opinion. There was the old lass who used to shout ‘Alpha Tote’, the bloke who bellowed ‘Bloody rubbish, Rovers’ at two-minute intervals, and the avuncular tannoy announcer, the late Ken Avis and his regular utterance of ‘No smoking in the main stand and we do ask for your co-operation’. He sounded like he should have been a continuity announcer on Anglia Television.

But back to the here and now. In mid-summer, I went to the first game at Rotherham United’s New York Stadium. The beaming pride of Millers fans waiting to enter was obvious, rightly so after several years of what for many was disenfranchisement playing ‘over the border’ in Sheffield. For a fair few Millers, it was a time to renew their vows.

Smack bang in the middle of town and just over the dual carriageway from their former Millmoor home, with pre-match habits probably still applying and the same Eric Twigg pukka pies, maybe it has a chance. Can the spiritual atmosphere of the Tivoli be transferred to the NYS? We’ll see; early days and the honeymoon set to ensue for a good while yet.

And the next Yorkshire cab on the rank in the new ground status? Step forward York City, with plans to move from Bootham Crescent to the outskirts. A charming landmark in a great city, I’ll miss the place when it goes. Like I miss Feethams, Leeds Road, Ayresome Park et al.