Sport
The fan - Jason Cowley gets stranded with a pack of Wolves
Published 02 June 2003
Stranded in Abergavenny with a pack of Wolves and the odd Pig
Football supporters - especially those who follow their team away from home - know more than most about the inadequacies of our transport infrastructure. Gridlock on the motorways, interminable roadworks, random delays, cancellations and signal failures on the railways - the average fan experiences all this and more during his weekly travels across the country. It is a small wonder, then, that anyone bothers to leave home at all when even the most straightforward match-day journey can become a tortuous affair. But then, being a fan is about passion and emotion, not calculation. It's an irrational act, located in childhood obsession.
At the end of the bank holiday weekend, travelling home from the annual Hay-on-Wye literary festival, I found myself caught up in the transport trauma that is so much part of what it means to be a fan today. My plan was to take a train from Abergavenny to Newport, from where I could pick up a fast link to London. I arrived at the station to discover, bafflingly, that the platform was full of football fans - some dressed in the gold of Wolverhampton Wanderers and others in the red and white stripes of Sheffield United. They were on their way to Cardiff's Millennium Stadium for the First Division play-off final. The prize? A place in the Premiership for one of these venerable underachievers. So why was everyone so deflated?
I found out soon enough when the Newport train failed to arrive on time; in fact, it failed to arrive at all. Not that any of us were made aware that there had been trouble farther down the line at Hereford - the computer screen, detailing arrivals and departures, was enjoying its own bank holiday break, and the stationmaster had about as much idea as I did as to what was going on.
As it turned out, fans from Wolverhampton had travelled to Shrewsbury, from where they were working their way on local services, via Hereford, to Cardiff. But no one had thought to provide additional services or, indeed, trains of more than two carriages in length. Rather, the service had been reduced for the bank holiday, which meant, the stationmaster eventually informed me, that the service running between Hereford and Newport had been halted because of overcrowding and safety concerns.
Many of the fans at Abergavenny had been stranded on the platform for more than two hours. "The last train that came through from Hereford was so full up no one could get on it," said one man who was travelling to the game with his aged parents, his brother, his wife and two children. Their faces were frozen in collective misery. They did not know who to blame or what to do. They felt powerless.
There is a crisis of legitimacy in our political culture. More and more people - ordinary, decent people such as the Wolves fans to whom I spoke - are opting out of the democratic process in a spirit of boredom and disaffection. They no longer believe that the main parties can improve their daily lives and so prefer not to vote. When they march in their millions in protest against war in Iraq, their elected representatives ignore them and go ahead and bomb and kill in their name all the same.
I eventually escaped from Abergavenny, but only through picking up a lethargic stopping service that took me, tortuously, via Bristol to London Waterloo. As for the football fans I left behind, they were being advised, in the argot, to find "alternative means of transport".
Postscript: once back in London, I found out that because of "engineering works", there were no trains operating on the West Anglia and Great Northern line between Liverpool Street and Stansted Airport. My line. I was, naturally, delighted, on this occasion, to seek alternative means of transport.
Oh, and Wolves were promoted to the Premiership, which may have been some consolation to the golden-shirted family that I last saw wandering off into Abergavenny in search of a taxi. I'd like to think they made it to Cardiff. But you can never be too sure.
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