Walsall Calling (How We Choose Our Clubs - Part II)

In Part I, I took a little stroll down memory lane, back to the days when I became a fan.

With my uncle taking me to some of Villa’s biggest games in the early 80s, I’d seen genuine superstars such as Rossi, Platini and Boniek up close, and more than I’d seen my local team.

Oddly, or maybe because of this, when I chose a team to follow it wasn’t Villa.

Or any of their local Division one rivals either. I went with lowly Walsall, partly out of sense of local club solidarity, but mainly because I could walk to the ground and it was incredibly cheap to get in. Cheap as in one of the blokes who worked the turnstiles knew my Dad well enough that he’d do this little nod that I realised meant step forward and he’d take care of the rest.

And that was enough. I think I’d also – sub-consciously – done the math. I could play on the Saturday morning, then make it to the Walsall game in the afternoon. For all their league titles and European trophies, Villa couldn’t offer me that level of efficiency.

Or autonomy. My Mum was not going to let me go to games at the bigger clubs on my own anyway and there is also the possibility that, on some level, I also worked out that car security was going to be a lot cheaper when I was old enough to drive to matches.

But I doubt I really thought the whole thing through either. When you’re young, you never do. What I might miss won’t have crossed my mind.

You could argue too that Villa’s best days were already behind both of us. I’d missed their glorious triumphs. In fact, they felt like equals in a way that season, but not until later on.

I began going to Walsall near the start of 1983/84, and hit an immediate bump in the road – a 1-8 defeat at Bolton. I only saw it on the Vidi-printer, and read about it in the ‘Pink’ [ask someone older if you’re below 35] of course, but it was soon followed by another humiliation at Oxford United, this time a slightly closer 3-6.  

Staying in the third tier looked a tall order at that stage, but things turned quickly. Walsall began a remarkable run in the League Cup that led – via a win at Arsenal – to the semi-finals where we went into the draw with both Merseyside clubs…and Aston Villa. Another remarkable oddity was that our second-round win (over two legs) in that run was on the 25 October. This season, the same round is completed tonight (26 August)!

Of course, Walsall’s luck being what it was, in the semi-final we ended up facing a Liverpool side that would end up winning a league, League Cup and European Cup treble that season. But we didn’t let them have it all their own way, drawing at Anfield before losing the home leg 0-2.

I perhaps could have been forgiven for thinking that success came easily to whichever club I supported. Talk about peaking early. Half of one season in and that was about as good as it would ever get.

Regrets

So, have I regretted the decision? Not that much, although the splendour of Villa Park and it’s trophy cabinet did give me cause to wonder when I presented there a few years ago.

In the audience that day at Villa Park were representatives from Walsall, and hearing me make a Walsall joke, they approached and we ended up chatting; a conversation that led – via Covid and a particularly bad opening day experience when fans returned to the stadiums – to me doing quite a bit of work there during 2022/23 and hopefully laying some of the foundations for what has become a fantastic match day experience in recent seasons.

I saw it in all its glory on Saturday, when I was lucky enough to be invited for a meal in the hospitality suite ahead of the lunchtime game against Grimsby Town. As I’d also helped the Mariners with some supporter surveys a few years back, it could I suppose – technically – have been the called the Darren Young Derby, but there was a much more important connection between the two clubs.

Alan Buckley, Walsall’s record goalscorer, was guest of honour and awarded a cap for his services to the club. He went on to have a fine managerial career, with two stints at both Walsall and Grimsby, and it was great to see him looking – and speaking – so well ahead of the game. It was also a pleasure to meet him afterwards, and see some of the people (James, Graham, Adam and Manjula to name a few) who continue to make Walsall such a fantastic club to follow.

The Buck was also the Saddlers’ player-manager when I started going to games in 1983.

So I sort of had him to partly thank for it too. I said so and he apologised. So we’re all good.

But it was certainly a sliding doors moment. Maybe if they’d not followed that hammering at Oxford with a run that meant they didn’t lose another league game until Boxing Day. Or if Buckley hadn’t built a team that would go on to royally entertain us fans over the next season or two. Or we’d have got knocked out of the League Cup in the first round (we lost the first leg at Blackpool but overturned it in the second).  

Or even if my uncle had tried a little bit harder, although it’s hard to see what he could have done, then maybe I’d have been at Brighton instead on Saturday berating Ollie Watkin’s decision to down tools, rather than a full English breakfast followed by the entertaining scoreless draw they served up at the Pallet Track Bescot.

Which sort of ties up these two articles.

My uncle would have been eighty this season so I’m pretty sure he might have knocked his long-distance travel on the head by now had he still been alive, but there is a universe somewhere where he is still heading out before dawn, scarf around his neck and the latest replica shirt proudly worn over his ample belly.

I wonder what he’d have made of the game at Brighton at the weekend. In the championship-winning season in 1980/81, he’d gone there the Saturday before Christmas to see the Villa lose by a single Michael Robinson goal at the Goldstone Ground, a fairly damaging although not ultimately fatal blow to their title hopes.

It would have been the ultimate day trip with the coach starting off long before the sun came up, and returning to the Digbeth Coach Station in the early hours; after which he still had to get home.

On Sunday, with kick-off at 2pm, they’d have had an earlier start to reach the Amex, and after a summer of seeing many of their key players leave the club despite lifting the Europa League trophy in May, the fans got to see as bad a forty-five minutes as is possibly possible in today’s game.

Four goals conceded just after the half hour was up, and then a ludicrous red card that killed off any hope of a second half salvage operation. Brighton, mercifully, eased off anyway as their thoughts no doubt turned to their UEFA Conference League second-leg on Thursday.

For Villa, the game was already up and possibly a beer or two on Brighton’s sea front and pier was the scant consolation on offer for their fans before starting the long ride home.

The Europa League, and Istanbul, must have seemed a long time ago. But that’s exactly how being a fan works. For 98% of us, we’re signing up to years of misery with a few tiny pockets of joy. We just don’t know it at the time.  

When we choose our club, we are also choosing to support them through thick and thin, and for some clubs there’s a lot more thin than for others. If we knew at the time how it all worked out in the end, we’d have probably picked Manchester City instead.

But we don’t know. We have to make a leap of faith. It’s a decision not without consequences. I’m still waiting – some forty-odd years later - for that next time that Walsall reach the semi-finals of the league cup.

After defeat by penalty shoot-out against Leyton Orient on Tuesday, it won’t be this year.

The odds suggest it won’t be next year either. They indicate that the wait for success will go on.

But they also said that about Villa in 1981.

And 1982.