ernieflag

Sheffield Wednesday v Oldham Athletic – League One

Hillsborough, Sheffield

Tuesday 28 September, 19:45 K.O.

Sheffield Wednesday are a team with which have played quite a big part in my football life. My late grandfather was a huge Wednesdayite and it was he who really got me into football. His stories of riding his pushbike to Wembley to see Wednesday in the cup final showed me that my trips to watch Oldham and England are show little commitment by comparison. Of course, games against Wednesday also stand out when I look back at supporting Latics. The Championship winning game in 1991 is, and I fear always will be, the highlight of my football supporting life. I can still picture the winning penalty now almost twenty years on. Earlier on that season, I witnessed one of the best games I can remember, a 2-2 draw at Hillsborough when we blew a two goal lead by conceding a couple of penalties.

Following our drop down the divisions since those halcyon days, we wouldn’t have expected to have faced Wednesday other than the odd cup match but in many ways, there fall has been even more dramatic. A big club with good support and a superb stadium wasn’t able to prevent them joining us in League One in 2003. Following their promotion back to the Championship a couple of years later I expected to see them competing to get a place back with the big boys, but five years later, they are back in the third tier.

Despite how often we have played each other, I haven’t made that many trips to Hillsborough due to the regularity with which the fixtures computer seems to give us a Tuesday night trip. It appears that I haven’t missed a great deal as the history books show that it is 86 years since we left there with three points. As I’m seriously restricted on how many games I can make this season, though, I was determined to make the journey over the Pennines. I thought I had this sorted – a train to Sheffield after work and then a lift back after the game. Unfortunately, due to illness, I lost my lift back. Luckily, Latics fans are a good bunch and so I put a message on OWTB and within ten minutes had an offer of a lift. Thanks Paul!

So, come ten to five I was out of the office, giving myself time to grab some food and drink en route to the station. A proper football meal, as always, Burger King washed down with a tin.

I thought there might be a few Latics fans on the train but in fact I didn’t see any. Bizarrely, on the train that I thought would b full of commuters, it seemed to be student dominated. With the unis full of freshers, perhaps this was the first opportunity they’d had to get their washing back home. That said, the two girls opposite me (one with bright pink hair) looked like they needed a wash more than they needed their washing doing!

I can’t remember ever travelling over to Sheffield on the train and it would be quite a nice journey if you weren’t crammed in like sardines. Yorkshire hasn’t got much going for it but on a sunny day, the Pennines can look rather impressive. Mind you, one thing it wasn’t was a sunny day.

It always strikes me as sad to see Sheffield city centre these days. I remember when this was a vibrant place but Meadowhall shopping centre put paid to that. Out of town shopping centres have become the norm these days but Meadowhall must have been one of the first ones and when it opened, a ridiculously large number of shops abandoned their city centre locations and moved in. This left Sheffield as little more of a ghost town. Things seem to have improved slightly since then but it still doesn’t have a heart in the way that other big cities have.

What I do love about Sheffield, though, is how much of a proper footballing city it is. It seems as though everyone in Sheffield is either Wednesday or United. Just about anywhere you travel these days you will see people walking about in Man Utd/Chelsea/Barcelona shirts but this is a very rare sight in the steel city. All the shirts are either red and white or blue and white stripes. To make it even better, they really hate each other. What I’ve never got my head round, though is the fact that they have the same nickname for each other. United fans call Wednesday fans ‘pigs’ because apparently Hillsborough was built on a pig cemetery and Wednesday fans call United fans ‘pigs’ because… They think it’s a good insult? I’m sure they have a good reason, but I can’t be bothered looking it up.

Upon arriving in Sheffield, I was impressed with their steel waterfall outside the station

but headed past this to find a pub, working on the theory that I knew pubs were fairly scarce around the ground and one near the station would be sure to have some Latics fans in it. Not only was I clearly the only Oldham fan in there, there was equal clarity that I was the only person who would be heading over to the game at all. More bloody students!

With nothing happening, I decided to head up to the ground on the ‘Supertram’. The tram system is decent enough, but I’m not sure what makes it ‘super’. It doesn’t seem particularly better than the tram service in several UK cities and is nowhere near as good as many trams on the continent. Oh well, I guess it is a hell of a lot comfier than the trams in Blackpool so perhaps that’s how they like to judge themselves. They certainly don’t excel on the conductor front. Upon buying my ticket I asked if the tram went straight through to Leppings Lane. “Oh yes” came the answer. When the train reached Hillsborough and the Wednesday fans I’d been talking to told me that I should get off there, I knew better. When the tram then turned and headed off in a different direction, I was left to walk back to Leppings Lane.

I met up with Terry at the tram stop by the away end and we headed round to the main entrance for a photo with the flag. As we posed outside the entrance, a number of home supporters stopped to watch what we were doing and we spent some time talking to them about Ernie and our travels with the flag. They seemed genuinely interested and wished us luck. They also showed a lot of interest in Latics and how we were playing. As I said before, these are proper football fans.

There was a healthy queue at the away end and it already looked like my prediction of three or four hundred Latics fans would be way short of the mark. As usual, before entering the ground, I had my bag searched but when the steward found just a flag I was waved inside. There was no hint as to what was to follow.

Inevitably, Hillsborough will always be synonymous with the tragedy of 1989 but that should never take away from what a wonderful stadium it is. If you read these reports on a regular basis, you will know that I love old fashioned grounds and Hillsborough is so much better than the modern stadiums. I think it must be because the stadium is essentially (bar the away end) made up of single tier stands, but it just seems huge inside. The capacity is under 40,000 but it seems twice the size of the City of Manchester Stadium.

As soon as I walked into the stand I went to hang the flag up. Now, this flag has been to over 50 different stadiums and never has permission to put it up been refused. There have been a couple of occasions where I have failed to put it up in a prominent position because I’ve got into the ground too late and they’ve all been taken but never have I been told that I couldn’t. When I asked the young steward at the front f I could hang it from the steps that go down to the paddock, I assumed it was a formality when she called over the chief steward. When I was told that I couldn’t display it unless I had a fire certificate I was stunned. Originally I was told that this was “the law” but after correcting him on this, it changed to being “ground regulations”. I am currently awaiting a response from Sheffield Wednesday and so I won’t comment much further on this, but what I can confirm is that this does not appear in their ground regulations that are on their website.

My own opinion is that every club is entitled to implement whatever safety measures they see fit. If, however, these differ from every other club, they really should make people aware of them before they get to the ground. They also shouldn’t introduce measures that serve no purpose. I don’t understand why there was no fire risk attached to the fact that I had taken the flag into the ground, but one materialised if I was to hang it up. This is even more confusing when you consider that I had asked to hang I in an area where there were no fans, therefore nobody could have set fire to it.

There was nothing I could do about the situation (if I’d have known in advance, I would have taken a fire safety certificate but they’d not given me that option) so I accepted the decision.

With Wednesday coming into the game on the back of four consecutive defeats, I feared the worst. We’ve always had a reputation for turning team’s seasons round and this had all the necessary ingredients. Under Paul Dickov, though, we seem to be made of sterner stuff.

It wasn’t the greatest game by any stretch of the imagination but in the end a point was not a bad return from a match that is always going to be difficult no matter how much trouble the Owls seem to be in. In the early stages, I thought the defence looked very edgy but after about twenty minutes they seemed to pull themselves together and Mvoto in particular was outstanding. Unfortunately, attacking wise, our final ball was non-existent. Time and again we broke into the Wednesday half but we never really created a chance. They weren’t much better and I think the stats of just two shots on target in the whole match probably summed it up. Even with our current trend for conceding goals late in each half, it was difficult to see anything other than a goalless draw from fairly early on.

The post match walk back to the car provided a bit of entertainment, watching the police trying to round up a group of lads, then finally herd them into a shop doorway for a group photo. I’m not sure exactly what they’d done other than being a bit loud for the police’s liking as the headed for the city centre.

All in all, a good evening out, it was just a shame that we couldn’t find that little bit of bite up front.