 Friday, 7th Sep 2012 00:22 by Awaydays What better way to spend a bank holiday weekend than a double trip to the eastern lowlands for pies, regurgitated chilli burgers, dusty bottles of Peroni and two football matches of varying quality? When former QPR defender Glenn Roeder was sacked as Norwich manager in 2009 the chief executive at Carrow Road at the time, Neil Doncaster, accused him of being rude and arrogant and said that any replacement would have to understand and embrace “The Norfolk Way.” And you can all do your own sleeping with a family member joke at this point. Agh Jesus, my determination to get through a season of Awaydays without offending vast swathes of the country lasted all of a paragraph. It’s certainly a gentile part of the world. Norwich is a city with a church for every Sunday, and a pub for every day of the year; a place for God fearing people who like real ale. You find a lot of people with big sideburns in those pubs, and a lot of fairly large men walking with a limp. But people talk to you in Norwich: people you haven’t met before. It’s revelatory to those of us, like Glenn Roeder, who were brought up in parts of the world where everybody you see is likely to steal your iPhone and distribute the pictures from it onto Leon Knight’s Twitter feed. There’s a fully electrified rail route linking London and Norwich – a rare concession to the pace of city life at one end of it – but in typically contrary style the rolling stock that operates it has been around since the days of the Roman Empire when invading forces would board in scores to travel north and conquer Diss, Cromer and Stamford. Perhaps. It’s proper ‘don’t build em like they used to’ on the East Anglia service with nine carriages each weighing as much as a foreign embassy hauled along by a thousand year old unit at the front powered by a lawn mower engine. You realise people overuse the term “creaking” when you entrust your life into something that literally creaks. A LFW travelling party of seven paused briefly to remember those lost in the 2008 Battle of Maningtree when the triumphant Ruislip brigade of the fourth QPR corps used the element of surprise to swiftly and spectacularly defeat the oppressive forces of the station bar staff and their customers, razing the place to the ground. In actual fact Maningtree Station bar is more of a tea room, occupied on our journey through mainly by elderly people who like to sit with a scone and watch the trains go by because it gets them out of the house. Quite what QPR fans old enough to know better would want with the place is beyond right thinking individuals. They were beaten back by a barmaid clutching a broom handle at the time, and then jailed later. A moment to look back on with pride. A further stop at Ipswich to take on more coal and another orphan to shovel it added to the delay. More stereotypes for you - message board regular Charlie, who works in the city, turned up with a bottle of (sort of) champagne he had “lying around”. The plastic cups that came with it were later used for Neil to provide a tactical run down of where exactly we’d gone wrong against Swansea. He frowned when Charlie stood one on top of the other and said it was Peter Crouch, and started to get annoyed when another was fashioned into a Marouane Fellaini. In his haste to replace the vandalised cups our resident photographer (unsalaried) poured the remainder of the champagne into Tracey’s lap. I hate what we’ve all become. Twattish behaviour. Once at Norwich station the baying hordes of QPR fans streamed down the platform. Those who apparently enjoy attention from the police and being told which pub to go in, what to do, where to go and when to leave gave a triumphant cry of “You R’s” so the Norfolk constabulary waiting on the concourse knew exactly who they were. Those who like to choose what to do with their pre-match kept quiet and doubled back on ourselves out of the station to slide quietly into our regular haunt around these parts - The Coach and Horses. Norfolk’s the kind of place where people drink liquid you can’t see all the way through. The Coach and Horses brews its own version in bath tubs and collects barrels of the stuff in the horse and cart park out the back. The bottles of Peroni we ordered came from a dusty box under the bar that looked suspiciously like the dusty box under the bar the Peronis came from the last time we were here in October. The pub went quiet and the barman frowned when we ordered them. Tracey angered the natives further by ordering a vodka and diet coke from the cocktail menu. An excellent chilli burger was consumed while Welshman James Collins suspiciously instigated a complete and utter collapse of his new West Ham team against Swansea City in the lunchtime Sky game. The burger was later returned, enthusiastically and dramatically, into the bath tub at LFW Towers, although that’s entirely to do with my misjudgement of the solids to liquids ratio on the train home rather than the quality of the food which was excellent as always. The locals offered us spare seats at their table, and chatted to us amiably about the respective situations of the two clubs. What a time to be alive. No wonder Roeder didn’t get on well up here; in London people stop pregnant women sitting next to them on a crowded tube train because they need somewhere to put their copy of the Financial Times. Stick your six fingered stereotype, maybe there’s something in this Norfolk Way after all. Teaching Tracey (@pimmsinacann) to Tweet. Lesson one – don’t send pictures to Leon Knight. Then it was time for the match. QPR have had 14 attempts at winning one of these “away game” things over the last ten months and haven’t really come close to succeeding in one yet. They certainly didn’t trouble the scorers unduly here, managing just one goal that should have been disallowed and rarely threatening apart from that. Norwich scored first and subsequently struck the woodwork every four minutes for the rest of the match - or so our old chum Mick Dennis in The Express reckoned anyway. Hard to argue that QPR were a shambles, and Mark Hughes’ assertion afterwards that as his first away point as QPR manager it had to be a positive was as unconvincing as it was factually incorrect – the brand new, shiny, completely dysfunctional official website soon corrected the quote to reflect a memorable 2-2 draw at Aston Villa in February. Come on Mark, keep up, it’s not like we’ve a whole host of spectacular away results and performances to try and remember here is it? The away end wasn’t short of an empty row of seats or three down the front, making those who’d pestered the club to take the higher allocation of tickets look rather foolish. Hardly surprising though, given the extortionate and entirely unjustified charge of £45 for a ticket to a game that cost £32 last season. Are you hearing that Dennis you sanctimonious prick? I’d suggest charging a father and son £70 to watch Norwich and Queens Park Bloody Rangers is a bit worse than you not being able to get a sodding cup of tea in the School End in 1962 wouldn’t you? Get back to writing about what Princess Diana would have made of it all and leave our club the fuck alone for a bit will you please. It occurred to us, as we watched an elderly gent dragged away from a pitchside window of the adjacent Holiday Inn by a wife intent on either debauchery or scones at Manningtree Station, that we could get a room with a view of the game next season for a lot less than seven match tickets cost and we’d be able to drink our way through the spectacle. We’ve set a research team to work on that one. Mick Dennis taking one in the eye. Should have been disallowed as well. Marvellous. Anyway, we went back to the pub for the last of the Peroni and a good moan. Then Neil Armstrong died. All in all we’d had a reasonable day, and things only got better when, on Sunday evening, I met a man at the checkout in Sainsbury’s North Finchley branch clutching three 24-packs of Fosters lager because, quote, “I don’t have to go to work tomorrow do I?”. Ye Gods, we had a Bank Holiday Monday to look forward to. *** Well, the East of England had treated the LFW travelling party so well on Saturday that it seemed only right and proper to jump on the First Crapital Connect service – rolling stock assembled Scrapheap Challenge-style from the spare parts of the antiques on the East Anglia route and bits of stuff they found lying around on poorly guarded construction sites – from Oakleigh Park up to Cambridge. Now QPR, on the downward bit of their bungee jump Football League existence over the last 15 years, have played at Cambridge United recently in a competitive fixture and I’m sure you’ll recall it all went terribly well. A young Dave Kitson scored in a 2-1 victory for the home side, and on the way out afterwards a police officer decided it would be a good idea to pick up a conker thrown onto the pitch and heave it back into the departing Hooped masses with plenty of interest. Well, the Christians didn’t like that one bit and had soon dismantled the side stand at the Abbey Stadium and thrown it in his direction piece by piece while he stood on the field motioning with two outstretched hands for them to “bring it.” Back in the day – conkers at dawn That Monday a member of Cambridgeshire Constabulary arrived at the country estate of LFW’s designated Responsible Adult (unsalaried) Colin Speller clutching a folder of print outs from the message boards describing the incident in detail. He sat himself down at the kitchen table in the servants’ quarters, laid the threads out in front of him and hit Colin with the big question first ball of the morning session: “So sir, what’s this internet all about?” Sadly I missed all of this because I was at that awkward stage between the death of the idiot father who used to take me to QPR and an age deemed suitable to make the journey from North Lincolnshire to Loftus Road and other associated away games alone. I was busy knocking around with the few friends I did make in Scunthorpe – stop sniggering, most of the people I knew there now punch out feral children in between repeats of Jeremy Kyle for a living so it’s best I didn’t get too attached to any of them – following a mixture of Scunny United and Grimsby ‘Mighty Mariners’ Town around the place at the time. So The Abbey Stadium was a new ground for me, Lord Speller’s second team Dartford were in town, and there’s only so many QPR season videos you can watch in one sitting so it seemed like a reasonable way to spend time. It’s still quite Norfolky round those parts: flat, lots of wind farms, pedestrian paced rail services, pints of beer served with lumps of chalk in – that sort of thing. The fat men with limps are lesser spotted, replaced instead with sinewy, chinless student types who look like a cousin of Man Utd’s David De Gea ostracised from the family for being a sexual deviant of some sort. After finding four pubs closed for the bank holiday (my man with the Fosters would have been outraged) we ended up in The Free Press which is a quaint little place that shares a single radiator with a house three doors away for its heat and could therefore comfortably double up as a storage facility for ageing meat. The inane chatter of the chinless people would occasionally reach a crescendo when Stephen Fry Tweeted something terribly witty and important only to die down into a barely concealed contempt when we asked the barmaid to hunt around in the back for a bottle of Becks. She said they had some, but nobody had ever ordered it in the history of the pub which, according to a map above the fireplace, opened in 1888. We ordered a chicken pie each which – attention Wetherspoons regulars – came with actual pieces of chicken in it and a gravy that tasted like Mary Mother of Christ’s breast milk. Welsh Wing Wizard Karl Connolly. Or something. We fancied a walk to the Abbey Stadium, which was only around the corner, so Colin stuck us on a park and ride bus that dumped us off at the A14 near Newmarket necessitating a 17 mile hike back into town. When we did finally find the ground we took it on in completely the wrong direction and ended up being pursued slowly around a set of allotments by an omni-present red Honda Civic like stars in some weird French noir comedy. Cambridge United are used to disappointment. They’re an ex-Football League team which means people who have never seen a Conference game in their lives but are nevertheless charged with writing 50 words for a national newspaper by way of a season preview are likely to pick them as a promotion favourite simply because they’ve heard of them before – you may recall the same lazy bastards would do exactly the same thing with Sheffield Wednesday during our League One days before scampering off back to the press box at Anfield to write another 3,000 words on whoever the Andy Carroll equivalent was back then. Anyway, Cambridge United never do get promoted and although they started the season with two wins and two draws they fell behind here just after half time to part time Dartford who had three defeats to their name already prior to kick off. The home fans immediately took on the downtrodden air of a battered wife welcoming a husband back for his thirty fifth chance only to get a slap for not heating his baked beans enough the following breakfast time. Dartford are a strange team that nomadically shared grounds in neighbouring towns for a considerable time like some sort of unfaithful cuckoo until the council, literally out of the goodness of its heart, built a magnificent new stadium for them for free and gave it to them as a gift. A sign next to the home dugout asks: “Why can’t all councils be like Dartford?” A meteoric rise up the non-league ladder has ensued, but The Darts seemed as surprised as anybody to take the lead here. Cambridge have a brand new stand set some three quarters of a mile away behind the goal. Perversely, they use it for the away fans who arrived for this one with an overly enthusiastic drummer. ‘Bastard,’ I think, ‘less than 48 hours ago I was throwing a chilli burger up into a bathtub, do I look like I need drumming? Do I?’ It’s a reasonably tidy ground for the level Cambridge are at, so of course they’re planning to bulldoze the whole thing and move out to a soulless shithole next to a distribution centre, a supermarket and – no doubt – a Frankie and chuffing Bennies in the middle of Butt Fuck Nowhere in the next few years. Why? Why are you doing this football? Dragging clubs like Cambridge and York City out of their cities to grounds that look more appropriate for selling factory reject shoes and charging people £45 to watch QPR and Norwich engage in a farcical nonsense. Stop this behaviour. I didn’t tell Colin but I was glad when Cambridge equalised from a hotly disputed penalty five minutes from time because it provided a moment of drum-less peace while the home side suddenly got its dander up and sent four apparently goal bound shots just wide or into the hands of Millwall trainee goalkeeper Marcus Bettonelli inside 45 seconds. “There’s only one Tagliatelle” sang the travelling faithful, and the bloody drum started again just in time for Nathan Collier – weighing six stone soaking wet and looking like he won his place in the team in a tombola draw – to lob the Cambridge keeper completely by accident and win the game for the visitors against the run of play with the last kick. We turned left out of the away end on the way out, avoiding the allotments but coming face to face with a startled cow. Local mediators were quickly on scene to smooth relations. A shame really that our taste of The Norfolk Way is over so soon this season. On the pitch >>> QPR performance 4/10 >>> Referee performance 5/10 >>> Match 5/10 Off the pitch >>> QPR support 6/10 >>> Home support 7/10 >>> Overall atmosphere 6/10 >>>> Stadium 8/10 >>>> Police and stewards 8/10 In the pub >>> Pubs 8/10 >>> Atmosphere 8/10 >>> Food 8/10 >>>> Cost 7/10 On the train >>> Journey 7/10 >>> Cost 8/10 Total 95/140Tweet @loftforwords Pictures – Action Images, Neil Dejyothin Photo: Action Images Please report offensive, libellous or inappropriate posts by using the links provided.
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