Poolie Kev: A Welcome Point in the Hillsides?

Scorer
By Poolie Kev
January 26 2006

Poolie Kev was impressed by Swansea's new ground, but less so by the hospitality (or should that be hostility) of the locals. Still, we got a point and the performance showed promise.

Swansea is a bit of a trek for the average Poolie, in fact with the exception of Bristol City, and maybe Swindon Town, it’s a bit of a trek for every supporter in the division, but it’s a new stadium and therefore had to be done.

Me and me Gilly had stayed in Bristol the night before, doing the main part of the journey in the rush hour traffic of Friday night on the M6. That was bundle of fun I can tell you until we hit the M6 Toll and flew down to the M42 the wrong side of Birmingham. The alternative was three junctions of congestion or £3.50. No contest.

So on a sunny Saturday morning we left for Swansea only pausing to pay £4.90 to cross the Severn Bridge to read the sign saying Croeso Y Cymru. They don’t mean it you know, they hate us!! I note that they don’t charge on the way out either, there must be some reason for that?? Maybe the Westbound carriageway needs more maintenance or something.

Anyway, having located the Liberty Stadium out in a redevelopment area, imagine our consternation in discovering that there was only one pub in the vicinity and that was a Brewers Fayre, more noted for it’s two for one family meals than any form of footy related hospitality. We soon discovered why, in that Swansea fans don’t have any footy related hospitality and when we parked in the supermarket car park 200 yards down from the ground my away shirt was regarded with frank hostility by anyone of a Welsh persuasion between the ages of 2 and 92!!

Anyway, having given up on the queue in the supermarket café which was progressing at the rate of an arthritic snail, we abandoned the meal in favour of some pre-packed sarnies, yum yum, and headed for the ground. Credit where credit is due, it’s an immaculate ground and makes the likes of Colchester and Doncaster look positively archaic by comparison but when will clubs learn that sharing with a rugby club makes your pitch look like Grayfields in December?? Although maybe in this case it’s the football club who are the tenants of the rugby club. That’s the way it looked anyway.

There was, to my headcount, 105 hardy Poolies under the stand, watching, you guessed it, rugby on Swans TV and I have to say there was a fair amount of pre-match flinching going on. There was barely a smile in the house. It seemed no-one expected a result against the pace setters.

Going up into the seats we found to our left that there were about 500 Swansea fans venting their dislike of the English to which our noble troops retorted with chants of En-ger-lund, En-ger-lund, En-ger-lund..which was amusing for a bit. A bit less amusing was Dimi’s David James impression on 20-odd minutes resulting in us going down 1-0 after a fairly promising opening spell. However the lads didn’t give up, despite a refusal of the most blatant penalty ever witnessed on a football pitch against Mickey Nelson by Mr Taffy Snowdonia, I mean Jeff Probert, the referee.

Give the lads their due, having taken these setbacks, including losing Thomas Butler on 20mins, in their stride, they set about battering Swansea with a display of aggressive, passing, speedy, structured football which effectively shut the sizeable home crowd up and resulted, after JP Pitmann smashed a cross shot against the bar and Gav Strachs had a perfect free kick palmed out of the top corner, in that famous last minute equaliser. We deserved the win.

So we turn our attentions on two fellow strugglers, Blackpool at home and the short, for me at least, trip to Rotherham, another ground to which I’ve never been. It has to be said that these are both six pointers and if we don’t get anything we’re almost dead in the water. On the other hand, performances like that at Swansea will see us home in both games. It all depends which Pools turn up.