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December 2006, between Xmas and New Year. Jags in goal. 10 men. Awesome.
Remember that match and our coach getting windows smashed by Arsenal yobs who ran into an Underground station as soon as they had done the damage. It was a long cold trip back home but the win was great.
Jordan Robertson.
That photo reminds me of a question I used to ask myself - who are the people who chose to watch matches from over by the cricket pavilion, and why did they do it? Talk about a lack of atmosphere...
Makes perfect sense. I always went on the Kop, and moved round to the Lane end for the second half if we kicked the 'wrong way'.I just saw this comment so thought I should own up and say, "I was one of the people who chose to watch matches from the cricket pavilion" - and explain why I did it.
First of all, some context: Like many (if not most) others - we didn't enter the ground and go park up in the pavilion for the entire game. It was common back then to swap ends at half-time, to be behind whichever goal United were kicking into. As far as I recall, you couldn't walk around the ground on the John Street side (if you could then you'd have had to walk through thousands of fans and that wouldn't have been easy). However, the Cherry Street side was wide open and easy to get from the kop to Bramall lane and back again.
The pavilion of course, marked the half-way point between the two ends. So fans would wander around that Cherry Street side of the ground and commonly stop at the half-way point in order to gain a vantage point on the match. In some ways, the reason why it was popular to do that might not be a million miles away from why some folks visit Greenwich Village in London and straddle the international time line. From the cricket pavilion you were equidistant from both ends. You had a view of the ground that you never saw from any other part of the ground. All three sides were in view. And what a vista it was. However, few folks stayed there for the entire match. We might hang around for 5 or 10 minutes, or until a break in play, but usually we'd be heading for one end or the other.
I can recall an exception to this for myself. I arrived late for a night match (when I say "late" I mean "really late" - I think we were into the 2nd half). The prospect of jostling my way through the crowd to try and find a spot where I could see something wasn't great. So I headed over to the cricket pavilion. I think there was only about 30 minutes of the game remaining, so I stayed there. I suspect a few folk maybe chose to stand there for easy egress from the game as well. Be first back to the pub afterwards, y'know, that kind of thing.
Memories of the cricket pavilion are fairly vague for me as I never went to watch cricket there. But I do remember it being a grand old structure and it smelled of wood - a bit like the smell you get in a church. I'm no sentimentalist though and I think the club had to decide, "are we a football club/football business or something else?". And it was the right decision to make Bramall lane the home of football. However, it's a pity they couldn't have dismantled the old cricket pavilion and re-erected it somewhere else in Sheffield as I'm sure it has a special place in the hearts and memories of many.
It was, as you say, too far from the pitch to really enjoy the game and of course there was no atmosphere in there - but little did we know back then that this would be the blue print for West Ham's new stadium!
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