Something different for the OMTDJs blog but I thought I’d tell you about my day as a football Ultra.
I’ve been a fan of Aston Villa since making friends with real life Brummie (he insists he’s truly from leafy Sutton Coldfield) Simon Stanley around 2006. Here we are having a quiet sensible time last week.
Celtic had never ever played Aston Villa competitively, but this season the occasion came at last, and I made a fairly last minute decision to travel to Birmingham and try to get into the game.
On the train down I got a coffee and decided to search for a ticket by walking along the carriages and asking fellow Celtic fans. They are usually quite easy to identify. Dressed as leprechauns and brandishing Buckfast at 11am. I chanced upon a couple more civilised guys who said there was a website where I could get a ticket for maybe £300. They said “you look like you can afford it, with that haircut”. I’ve since reported this back to my barber Johnny (Azteca), and we don’t know if it was an insult or compliment.
They kindly then gave me a literal cup of wine, which made me think of the weird “cup of wine” lyric from Hooked On A Feeling – I’ve always thought it should be “glass”. And we won hearts and minds by stopping very loud Celtic fans from entering the quiet carriage, whilst only talking fairly loudly ourselves. True gentlemen. At one point one of the chaps did break the rules and take a call from a guy called “Billy”, offering a trip to the Dubai F1 for “four point six”, which I assume meant four thousand six hundred pounds. But it felt like if you had to ask Billy to clarify, you probably couldn’t afford it. These were the high rollers I was mixing with.
During the course of the journey I gradually messaged more and more people, that I had initially wanted to avoid hassling, asking if they could help me get a ticket. Yet on arrival at Birmingham New Street, 4 hours from kick off, I still didn’t have one. In the end my sister Jo McGo/Dee heroically came through, and I made a mad dash through Birmingham city centre to meet a chap at a hotel who apparently had a spare that Gordon Strachan wasn’t using. Ticket secured, I then took the fairly un-Ultra option of a 10k jog along a famous Birmingham canal and back (more canals than Venice..), towards Bournville and Cadbury World. (I’ve visited Cadbury World before and would 10/10 recommend, though I hear they no longer shove chocolate at you every 5 minutes or so.)
Following a shower I was on a train to Aston. It turns out Celtic fans should have approached from a completely different angle, so I had to walk all round the stadium in a kind of horse shoe in order to access the Celtic area. I had fortunately left my leprechaun costume in Glasgow and passed undetected. Gordon Strachan’s ticket had VIP power and I found myself at the match in the back row of the Celtic section sitting along from Joe Ledley, David Turnbull, and Mikey Johnston. I was next to YouTuber Max (@footballmad4296) and, er, the agent of (back up Celtic winger) Yang Hyun-Jun. And in front of, I think, Brendan Rodgers’ brother – see if you can see a resemblance below.
The noise before kick off was absolutely incredible, with the Villa fans hoisting an Ozzy Osbourne Tifo that’s already an instant classic (get your t-shirt here) to go alongside the amazing Ozzy-Adidas-Villa ad from last August. The Celtic players were clearly rattled by the volume. With 4 minutes gone Villa had already scored twice and I wondered if I was going to witness an epic humbling of the hoops. Somehow the team rallied and at half-time it was, improbably, 2-2 thanks to 2 goals from Adam Idah. In the second half John McGinn’s now legendary big bum came to the fore, making Celtic record singing Arne Engels look like a poor wee weakling on a couple of occasions, and with Ollie Watkins terrorising the Celtic defence a final score of 4-2 was more than fair and the right side of embarrassing.
Post match there was a mad queue for the train station so I just walked back towards town. Apparently this involved traversing some of the roughest parts of Birmingham, but I had a can of lager and a bag of crisps, and was oblivious to all danger. I was back on the train to Glasgow the next morning at 7am, like my day as a football Ultra had all been an incredible dream. As far as I know, the chaps from the train are still in a bar somewhere on Broad Street.
Max’s full vlog from the match is here (you can hear me shouting a fair bit 🙂 )