Do you remember your first time?
Do you remember your first time? Please, this a family website. I mean your first Brighton & Hove Albion game, not…that.
With only a few fans allowed in to just three Amex games last season – and I will be forever glad I grabbed two of the last remaining Manchester City tickets – there will be plenty of people for whom the 2-0 win over Watford will have been the first they have attended a Brighton match.
For those very young fans taking their seats for the first time, what an atmosphere as kick off approached, what a performance by the team, what a win. A day to remember.
My first game? For that you have to go back almost half a century, to a cold Tuesday night in March 1974. Albion hosted Port Vale in the old Division Three (not Division Three South, I’m not that old, thank you).
Brian Clough was, improbably, the team’s manager, in between his time at The Leeds United and Nottingham Forest. The Albion were still a season or two off the glory days of Peter Ward and acquiring the nickname and badge that are so much a part of the club’s identity now.
Back then, players were paid a lot less than the tens of thousands a week they get now, so those not putting down roots in Brighton and Hove were found cheap lodgings with local people nearby.
For a while my parents rented our spare room in Poets Corner (before it was fashionable) to players including goalkeeper and Chester City legend Grenville Millington, and midfielder Ronnie Welch.
It was Ronnie who secured us tickets for the West Stand, more suitable for a six year old, my mum believed, than my grandfather’s habitual spot exposed to the elements on the East Terrace, where he had stood since the concrete was still fresh.
And so it was that I witnessed the Albion triumph 2-1, whilst my mum periodically clamped her hands over my ears to spare me the North Stand’s considered but somewhat blunt opinion on the referee’s eyesight.
Within a year the whole family was out in all weathers watching the side grow in success, first under Peter Taylor and then Alan Mullery.
Five years later and I was travelling back to Sussex on a freezing coach from Newcastle, an empty bottle of their eponymous Brown Ale having shattered the window next to me, but not my delight at Albion’s promotion to the top tier of English football.
Within 10 years of my first game, we were at Wembley, oh-so-close to winning the FA Cup. A year or so after that I joined those masters of a humorous and occasionally “colourful” ditty in the newly re-roofed North Stand for a couple of seasons, before then heading north for university.
I had to watch from afar as things at the Goldstone began to go horribly wrong both on and off the pitch. By the time I returned to Brighton full time, the Goldstone was gone.
40 years on from my first full season as an Albion fan I was lucky enough to be able to give something back to the club that has given me so much, by nominating Tony Bloom and Chris Hughton for the Freedom of Brighton and Hove as we celebrated promotion to the Premier League.
The changes from my grandfather’s first game in the Albion’s early days to mine in 1974 on the eve of the club’s first “golden age” and then to current day are vast.
What would he have made of mobile ticketing, a comfortable and modern stadium on the edge of the Downs, multi-million pound transfers, and world class players like Yves Bissouma? He would have loved the pies, I have no doubt.
What would Cloughie have made of the fact that the tiny Division Three club he left top flight Leeds for, on the way to European trophies with Forest, are now starting the season in the top five of the biggest league in the world? Hashtag Teams Like Brighton, eh?
For anyone seeing the Albion for the first time, welcome, enjoy the ride, for there will ups and downs, victories and defeats.
It is great that we are for now at the pinnacle of domestic football, hopefully never again needing to be worried about the club’s actual existence. Who knows what glory days the next Albion decade has in store?
Whether it is Premier League opponents on a gloriously sunny Saturday, European clashes in stadiums thousands of miles away, or Port Vale on a damp weekday evening, it is your club now. And I hope it will be for the rest of your days. Just never forget your first time.
