Kettering Town's Rockingham Road

Kettering Town's Rockingham Road was the visiting place for City in the 1st Round of the 2008/9 FA Cup, but the day, trip and generally everything about it turned out to be extremely disappointing. Not to mention the racist fans that sit in Kettering's main stand. Please note that due to a camera malfunction there are no pictures in this report.

If there was ever a ground that I was looking forward to going to and being completely disappointed, it was Rockingham Road. I had been looking forward to this day for quite some time as Kettering had always looked like a ground I would have loved to have visited.

Getting to Kettering wasn't much of a problem as it was near enough right next to the motorway and not that far from grounds that City had previously visited in the League, Northampton and Rushden, but getting there was when all the problems began. However, when you put the address of the ground (the address you get off of their official website) and set it into your sat-nav, it takes you to a road that is about a mile away from the ground. Fortunately there are signs pointing to the ground and three roundabouts later, you get to the game.

After struggling to find anything to do other than a Rileys-wannable that's almost falling apart, although it is right outside the ground so I can't complain about that, I eventually got into the ground and was greeted by broken seats and some of the steepest steps you're ever likely to find.

The view from the seated away end wasn't too bad in all fairness. You would have been able to see the other end relatively easily if it hadn't been for stewards stood directly in our view. The view from this stand was unusual through given that Kettering's main stand only takes up roughly half of the pitch.

The other away stand was behind the near goal, a very small terrace with seemingly only one step, not too dissimilar to Lincoln United in that sense. The stand opposite the stand we were in was a small, pitch length terrace and the final stand was a fairly large terrace.

As for the atmosphere, other than a bunch of about 10 chants in the opposite stand, Kettering fans were completely silent in terms of singing, but a lot of their fans were far from pleasant. Infact, I didn't meet a single nice person in Kettering all day. There were fans shouting racist abuse to several members of our bench and the thing that sums up the ketting fans is that not only did they not object to this abuse, they did object when the person got chucked out.

Overall, I must say I was rather disappointed with this and there are very few plus points about Rockingham Road. With Kettering fans being far from friendly, I wouldn't recommend this for families either, especially with some of the comments that have come from their message boards in the days following the game.

At the time I was living in Nottingham and Kettering's reward for beating the Imps in the replay was to draw Notts County. I travelled down with a few Notts friends to watch the game and much of what I had experienced in the other game was still in evidence, with the exception of the racist abuse towards Notts players/management.