Advertisement
Published: March 24th 2008
Edit Blog Post
My sister Jaimee flats with her boyfriend Joel and three other lads. One of them - Simon is a huge West Bromwich Albion football team supporter. They have a huge rivalry with a neighbouring team the Wolverhampton Wanderers. The clash is known as the Black Country Derby. Sounds menacing doesn’t it. And it is, I have just now read Wikipedia and it states: ‘In 2008 it was listed as the fiercest rivalry in English football.’
Simon managed to score us some tickets for the game so we decided to make a weekend of it. Friday night I met up with Jaimee and Joel and trained out to Heathrow, where Simon and Ryan had picked up a rental car. About 3 hours later after listening to hard rock, talking about sport and a huge feed of KFC Jaimee was sick of us boys and we were in Birmingham.
Simon’s relatives live just out of the city; I can’t remember the name of the village. They have a really nice place that is split into two houses, so we had the whole back house to ourselves. After dropping off our bags we decided to pay a visit to the local. On
first inspection I was a bit worried, the locals were eyeballing us as if we didn’t belong, they probably only see a few visitors a year. I was scanning the seats looking for somewhere suitable to sit, thinking that if one of us sat in the wrong seat we may have been chopped up and fed to the parrot in the corner. In actuality they were nice and Simon told us a few stories of his times here over the years, he also told us of a stalker he used to have, now she sounds like someone you would want to be scared of.
The following morning we fannied around watching sports news on TV before deciding we should do something. So we drove into Lichfield, found a pub and watched Liverpool v Newcastle! We did also have a gander round the markets, check out some really old houses and a church.
Later on that night we trained into the city. We strolled through the Bullring which is a humongous shopping mall (busiest in the UK), a Christmas market and ended up having a feed and drinks at a central bar. The old ducks sitting next to us
couldn’t finish their meals so kindly gave them to us. I was very full by the time we left. An 80’s disco bar took our interest on the way back to the train so we went in for a bit. Inside there were some strange characters but on the plus side some good music videos, well if you love denim, check out Rick Astley’s ‘Never gonna give you up’ it is a cracker.
For the train ride back into Lichfield we grabbed a few beers and tried to name every Simpsons character we could think of. The time flew by and we were soon out in Lichfield, the first pub, apart from having a toilet full of porn, wasn’t that great so we tried to get into the nightclub next door. The bouncers said it was packed so we told them we were Kiwis and had flown over especially. They once again proved that bouncers aren’t the smartest and let us in believing our story to be true.
The following morning, Simon was so excited about the upcoming game he cooked us all breakfast. Straight after the game we were to head home so we packed all our
gear into the car. Simon made sure he had the car stereo on the local talkback station so we could get fired up for the game, I think it got him excited and the rest of us a little scared, some of those callers had genuine hatred for the Wolves team. We arrived and found a car parking spot, it was not only near the stadium but also cheap, I think that may have been due to the fact it was in the front yard of a factory that makes gravestones!
Our seats were really good ones close to the field in one of the corners, and not too close to the Wolves fans! The West Brom team got a huge cheer when it entered the stadium and the Wolves got plenty of stick. In fact throughout the match there were plenty of chants directed towards the wolves. I forget most of them, but ‘stand up if you hate the Wolves’ was said and done enough times I could never forget it. I was desperate to see West Brom score a goal because they do a boing boing dance. It was a pretty even game with both sides creating
half chances but no real clear cut ones. The game started to get heated towards the end and a few minutes from time West Brom were awarded a penalty. The crowd erupted. Zolton Gera stepped up and … had his penalty saved. The reaction from the Wolves fans was amazing, you have to watch the video!
So we headed home, all of us a little dejected, Simon due to the nil-all draw, the rest of us because we didn’t get to do the boing boing baggies dance.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.244s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 35; qc: 114; dbt: 0.1345s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.4mb