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Priestfield experience - For the benefit of Bigtomfu



LowKarate

New member
Jan 6, 2004
2,002
Wombling free
In response to this exchange of posts between myself and [MENTION=638]Bigtomfu[/MENTION] a few months ago about our time at Gillingham in 97-99…

Me: We kept going to games then so that we could have a chance of where we are now. Those games at Priestfield were so bad they barely deserve description and the reward is so much sweeter for having seen them

Bigtomfu: "You're wrong there, it's exactly because those games were so bad that they DO need/deserve description"

… and in contrast to the season ahead, for Bigtomfu’s benefit and anyone else interested this is what it felt like watching home games at Gillingham 20 years ago when we were 91st – 92nd in the league, with no home ground and initially only 2k fans.

I know that others have posted their views of the Priestfield years in another thread recently, but this is my attempt to sum up more of the complete experience that I had. I don’t know whether you’ll get a sense of this, but bleak as it was, it was a real journey of discovery and a hell of a lot more fun than most would have thought possible.

In the last year at the Goldstone when the possibility of our club being wiped out was very real, I was asked what would I do if Brighton no longer existed and my view then was that I would ideally follow a newly formed Brighton club in the lowest league and if that didn’t happen then maybe I would pick another friendly team like Charlton. Better than either option would be that The Albion would survive and I would keep watching us.

That oblivion situation never occurred thankfully, but watching us as the 91st club in the league, playing terrible football a long way from home was the biggest test of loyalty and patience.

96/97 finished and we avoided relegation to The Conference. The club was just about alive as we did at least have access to Priestfield to play our games and surely 97/98 would be a season of recovery and a chance to make our way back up the league.

Well it wasn't like that at all. 97/98 was the absolute pits on the pitch. Statistically worse than 96/97 and it showed. We had a collection of cheaply assembled journeymen players, some with higher league experience and others just starting their career and many with little evident skill.

The initial 1-2k of fans who went to the first few games were to a man, woman and child, born optimists. The lack of numbers and the desperate state of playing so far from home affected the players though and so many of them panicked and could not complete even the simplest of passes to each other. It really wasn't much better than county football and if you want to see just how bad we were then I recommend that you get a copy of The Priestfield Tapes.

I had been to Gillingham before, but for the first home game it was totally different. It was a home game and I was now a home fan there, so I really should have known the best route, where to park, drink, stand, etc… but I didn’t know any of this and I had to start gathering this knowledge from my first game.

I could not convince any of my albion mates to make the long journey with me often (they didn’t have the stomach for it and I honestly could not blame them). Driving across the border into Kent, it always seemed (to me) as if the skies were greyer and it rained more. Maybe our desperate state influenced my view of the weather, but Kent never felt like the ‘Garden of England’ to me.

Finding a good place to park would be a challenge (or so I thought from my experiences elsewhere), but with so few fans travelling it was easy to park within two streets of the ground and it remained that way for most of 97/98.

The club shop was comical. As far as I could tell it was a quickly purchased burger van type of set-up, parked outside Priestfield, with very little room for more than a few programmes, a few trinkets left over from the Goldstone shop and when they eventually got some, a few football shirts with huge stick-on felt-like white panels with Sandtex plastered on the front. I still have mine.

Wins and even goals were scarce and after a few months of poor football and with the realisation that the quality was going to be worse than ever before, the 'gallows humour' set in. I think the Wardy Wonderland song stemmed from Priestfield as we dreamed of a better team. Someone may correct me if it started at The Goldstone, but we certainly sang it a lot at Priestfield.

Heroes were rare. Nicky Rust Rust Rust was lauded anytime he got near the ball. Peter Smith (fast / gangly), Jeffrey Thompson Minton and Rod Thomas were averagely skilled and treated like superstars just because they weren’t completely rubbish. Barker and Hart when they arrived made more of a difference up front and slowly over the two years we started to re-build spirit on the pitch and off it. Having an Albion Stalwart in Brian Horton as manager helped a lot as I think many of us had faith that somehow he would make it work and he sort of did.

In 98/99 the football improved and our attendances rose above 4K by the end of the season. Parking became slightly harder and I often ended up 6-7 streets away, nearer The Cricketers pub, which became the regular pre-match haunt. This was, I think, the biggest pub in the area and with the most bar space and a garden, it attracted lots of our fans. Queuing 4-5 deep around the large bar became common and helped build the camaraderie.

Other highlights that stick in the memory, were:

1. Standing to the left of the goal during pre-match warm-up with my girlfriend (now wife) at her first game in 1998 and the players were raining shots at Nicky Rust (I think) in goal and missing the target regularly. One wayward attempt was heading straight towards my girlfriend's face and as she froze, I put my fist out to punch the ball away, but it glanced off and went further back into the stand and hit a child. If you were that child, I am sorry.

2. One of the visiting goalies had a yellow and black hooped jersey which made him look like a giant bee. At the time it was common for goalkeepers to be taunted with the 'Wooooooaaaaaaaahh! you're sh.. aaaaaaahhh!!' chant which for the giant bee’s benefit we changed to buzzing sound along the lines of 'zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZ! you're sh.. aaaaaaahh!!'

3. Away games were fun too with the same faces at both home and away games very often. A trip to Scarborough in Aug 98 was great and the away game at Doncaster in 97/98 where Donny played a non-league keeper who did some work for their Chairman in his one and only game. He was overweight, scared and helped us to a critical 3-1 away win in the year that Donny went down and we stayed up. We didn’t win away from home very often or at home for that matter.

4. Brighton v Doncaster 0-0 draw – dubbed ‘The Heart of Football’ – This was turgid turgid turgid turgid turgid fare. It was just the worst game of football ever by two league teams, neither of which could have complained if they were shot afterwards.

5. Stadium catering staff in response to my order for Bovril, turned around and took a big tin of Marmite off the shelf behind them and spooned that into a plastic cup before pouring hot water onto it and handing it to me. As I looked in stunned silence into the cup I could see a solid mass of Marmite sitting resolutely and undissolved at the bottom with a weak solution of still clear hot water sitting proudly above it. If you think the catering is bad at The Amex, think again.

6. Peter Smith regularly tripping over the ball or sometimes his own legs as he tried to run.

7. Brighton v Colchester 4-4 Boxing Day draw, being 3-0 down at Half Time. Others have commented about this on other threads recently. My memory of it was of a battling performance having pretty much gifted the game in the first half with careless and error-strewn passing. It felt like a cup final win when the whistle blew.

8. Very little steward control, so you could start a game in the home end terrace and then walk around the side into the seats and pick a different spot (for no extra charge). They did clamp down on that a little more as the crowds got bigger.

9. My car clutch gave up on the A229 not far from Gillingham on the way to one game. Thanks to help from a friend and the breakdown service I still made it to the game and then back on the back of a recovery truck.

10. That’s almost certainly enough waffling about Priestfield.

This post is not to say I was there and you weren’t. I actually wish more of you could have been, because with hindsight it was character and patience building which has served me well in the 20 years since.

Just remember that whatever happens this season, it will never be as bad as it was 20 years ago and, football is meant to be fun, so don’t shout at the players if we don’t manage to win the League and Cup double this year.

Enjoy the season ahead!
 


Badger

NOT the Honey Badger
NSC Patreon
May 8, 2007
12,750
Toronto
7. Brighton v Colchester 4-4 Boxing Day draw, being 3-0 down at Half Time. Others have commented about this on other threads recently. My memory of it was of a battling performance having pretty much gifted the game in the first half with careless and error-strewn passing. It felt like a cup final win when the whistle blew.

My one and only trip to Gillingham. I was 14 at the time and I think it cost me 2 quid to get in, 25p per goal! I remember the guy on the PA saying he'd crack open a bottle of champagne if we scored. Early in the second half he kept his word, with the sound of a popping cork over the speakers to much amusement. Was it Paul Emblem who scored a hat-trick?
 


AmexRuislip

Trainee Spy 🕵️‍♂️
Feb 2, 2014
33,727
Ruislip
I didn't go to any Albion games in Gillingham.
But I knew about the horrors of Albion playing there, especially for the fans.
It's part of my clubs history, so it should be talked about IMO, as it really does show how far we have come, and how deserved we are to be playing in the PL this coming Saturday :)
 








Bigtomfu

New member
Jul 25, 2003
4,416
Harrow
In response to this exchange of posts between myself and [MENTION=638]Bigtomfu[/MENTION] a few months ago about our time at Gillingham in 97-99…

Me: We kept going to games then so that we could have a chance of where we are now. Those games at Priestfield were so bad they barely deserve description and the reward is so much sweeter for having seen them

Bigtomfu: "You're wrong there, it's exactly because those games were so bad that they DO need/deserve description"

… and in contrast to the season ahead, for Bigtomfu’s benefit and anyone else interested this is what it felt like watching home games at Gillingham 20 years ago when we were 91st – 92nd in the league, with no home ground and initially only 2k fans.

I know that others have posted their views of the Priestfield years in another thread recently, but this is my attempt to sum up more of the complete experience that I had. I don’t know whether you’ll get a sense of this, but bleak as it was, it was a real journey of discovery and a hell of a lot more fun than most would have thought possible.

In the last year at the Goldstone when the possibility of our club being wiped out was very real, I was asked what would I do if Brighton no longer existed and my view then was that I would ideally follow a newly formed Brighton club in the lowest league and if that didn’t happen then maybe I would pick another friendly team like Charlton. Better than either option would be that The Albion would survive and I would keep watching us.

That oblivion situation never occurred thankfully, but watching us as the 91st club in the league, playing terrible football a long way from home was the biggest test of loyalty and patience.

96/97 finished and we avoided relegation to The Conference. The club was just about alive as we did at least have access to Priestfield to play our games and surely 97/98 would be a season of recovery and a chance to make our way back up the league.

Well it wasn't like that at all. 97/98 was the absolute pits on the pitch. Statistically worse than 96/97 and it showed. We had a collection of cheaply assembled journeymen players, some with higher league experience and others just starting their career and many with little evident skill.

The initial 1-2k of fans who went to the first few games were to a man, woman and child, born optimists. The lack of numbers and the desperate state of playing so far from home affected the players though and so many of them panicked and could not complete even the simplest of passes to each other. It really wasn't much better than county football and if you want to see just how bad we were then I recommend that you get a copy of The Priestfield Tapes.

I had been to Gillingham before, but for the first home game it was totally different. It was a home game and I was now a home fan there, so I really should have known the best route, where to park, drink, stand, etc… but I didn’t know any of this and I had to start gathering this knowledge from my first game.

I could not convince any of my albion mates to make the long journey with me often (they didn’t have the stomach for it and I honestly could not blame them). Driving across the border into Kent, it always seemed (to me) as if the skies were greyer and it rained more. Maybe our desperate state influenced my view of the weather, but Kent never felt like the ‘Garden of England’ to me.

Finding a good place to park would be a challenge (or so I thought from my experiences elsewhere), but with so few fans travelling it was easy to park within two streets of the ground and it remained that way for most of 97/98.

The club shop was comical. As far as I could tell it was a quickly purchased burger van type of set-up, parked outside Priestfield, with very little room for more than a few programmes, a few trinkets left over from the Goldstone shop and when they eventually got some, a few football shirts with huge stick-on felt-like white panels with Sandtex plastered on the front. I still have mine.

Wins and even goals were scarce and after a few months of poor football and with the realisation that the quality was going to be worse than ever before, the 'gallows humour' set in. I think the Wardy Wonderland song stemmed from Priestfield as we dreamed of a better team. Someone may correct me if it started at The Goldstone, but we certainly sang it a lot at Priestfield.

Heroes were rare. Nicky Rust Rust Rust was lauded anytime he got near the ball. Peter Smith (fast / gangly), Jeffrey Thompson Minton and Rod Thomas were averagely skilled and treated like superstars just because they weren’t completely rubbish. Barker and Hart when they arrived made more of a difference up front and slowly over the two years we started to re-build spirit on the pitch and off it. Having an Albion Stalwart in Brian Horton as manager helped a lot as I think many of us had faith that somehow he would make it work and he sort of did.

In 98/99 the football improved and our attendances rose above 4K by the end of the season. Parking became slightly harder and I often ended up 6-7 streets away, nearer The Cricketers pub, which became the regular pre-match haunt. This was, I think, the biggest pub in the area and with the most bar space and a garden, it attracted lots of our fans. Queuing 4-5 deep around the large bar became common and helped build the camaraderie.

Other highlights that stick in the memory, were:

1. Standing to the left of the goal during pre-match warm-up with my girlfriend (now wife) at her first game in 1998 and the players were raining shots at Nicky Rust (I think) in goal and missing the target regularly. One wayward attempt was heading straight towards my girlfriend's face and as she froze, I put my fist out to punch the ball away, but it glanced off and went further back into the stand and hit a child. If you were that child, I am sorry.

2. One of the visiting goalies had a yellow and black hooped jersey which made him look like a giant bee. At the time it was common for goalkeepers to be taunted with the 'Wooooooaaaaaaaahh! you're sh.. aaaaaaahhh!!' chant which for the giant bee’s benefit we changed to buzzing sound along the lines of 'zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZ! you're sh.. aaaaaaahh!!'

3. Away games were fun too with the same faces at both home and away games very often. A trip to Scarborough in Aug 98 was great and the away game at Doncaster in 97/98 where Donny played a non-league keeper who did some work for their Chairman in his one and only game. He was overweight, scared and helped us to a critical 3-1 away win in the year that Donny went down and we stayed up. We didn’t win away from home very often or at home for that matter.

4. Brighton v Doncaster 0-0 draw – dubbed ‘The Heart of Football’ – This was turgid turgid turgid turgid turgid fare. It was just the worst game of football ever by two league teams, neither of which could have complained if they were shot afterwards.

5. Stadium catering staff in response to my order for Bovril, turned around and took a big tin of Marmite off the shelf behind them and spooned that into a plastic cup before pouring hot water onto it and handing it to me. As I looked in stunned silence into the cup I could see a solid mass of Marmite sitting resolutely and undissolved at the bottom with a weak solution of still clear hot water sitting proudly above it. If you think the catering is bad at The Amex, think again.

6. Peter Smith regularly tripping over the ball or sometimes his own legs as he tried to run.

7. Brighton v Colchester 4-4 Boxing Day draw, being 3-0 down at Half Time. Others have commented about this on other threads recently. My memory of it was of a battling performance having pretty much gifted the game in the first half with careless and error-strewn passing. It felt like a cup final win when the whistle blew.

8. Very little steward control, so you could start a game in the home end terrace and then walk around the side into the seats and pick a different spot (for no extra charge). They did clamp down on that a little more as the crowds got bigger.

9. My car clutch gave up on the A229 not far from Gillingham on the way to one game. Thanks to help from a friend and the breakdown service I still made it to the game and then back on the back of a recovery truck.

10. That’s almost certainly enough waffling about Priestfield.

This post is not to say I was there and you weren’t. I actually wish more of you could have been, because with hindsight it was character and patience building which has served me well in the 20 years since.

Just remember that whatever happens this season, it will never be as bad as it was 20 years ago and, football is meant to be fun, so don’t shout at the players if we don’t manage to win the League and Cup double this year.

Enjoy the season ahead!

Fantastic post that recaptures the very ethos of what those two seasons in the wilderness meant. You're right, I should have replied with some more in depth description of what we endured and the minutiae of our journeys and the things we did as individuals to make the time pass less painfully that when combined became the driving force of the campaign for Falmer.

I for one think proudly on our time there and like you I know I am a better person for the experience - and no this is not a I'm more of a fan and more deserving of tomorrow than any JCL or post apocalyptic supporter. We ALL deserve to be in awe of the collective achievement tomorrow and make no mistake every single one of us has contributed and that to my mind is what makes us as a club and always will.
 


Gwylan

Well-known member
Jul 5, 2003
31,324
Uffern
1. Standing to the left of the goal during pre-match warm-up with my girlfriend (now wife) at her first game in 1998 and the players were raining shots at Nicky Rust (I think) in goal and missing the target regularly. One wayward attempt was heading straight towards my girlfriend's face and as she froze, I put my fist out to punch the ball away, but it glanced off and went further back into the stand and hit a child. If you were that child, I am sorry.


I can equal that. A wayward shot came into the crowd and headed towards me; instead of stopping it and throwing it back, I decided to volley it back with my weaker (left) foot. Needless to say, I cocked it completely, it slid off my foot, straight into the face of the bloke next to me. I slinked away - fortunately there was a lot of space at Priestfield. If you're the guy who got it in the boat, sorry.

That's a great description of Priestfield by Low Karate. It doesn't quite describe the full horror of the Doncaster match, it was like watching two pub teams after a particularly heavy night's drinking. There was no mention of the Darlo defeat where we lost 4-0 to a team just a step up from a pub team, but only just.

No mention, either, of some of the dreadful players we watched: Gislason, Mahoney-Johnston, Davies ... the horror, the horror
 


Seasidesage

New member
May 19, 2009
4,467
Brighton, United Kingdom
In response to this exchange of posts between myself and [MENTION=638]Bigtomfu[/MENTION] a few months ago about our time at Gillingham in 97-99…

Me: We kept going to games then so that we could have a chance of where we are now. Those games at Priestfield were so bad they barely deserve description and the reward is so much sweeter for having seen them

Bigtomfu: "You're wrong there, it's exactly because those games were so bad that they DO need/deserve description"

… and in contrast to the season ahead, for Bigtomfu’s benefit and anyone else interested this is what it felt like watching home games at Gillingham 20 years ago when we were 91st – 92nd in the league, with no home ground and initially only 2k fans.

I know that others have posted their views of the Priestfield years in another thread recently, but this is my attempt to sum up more of the complete experience that I had. I don’t know whether you’ll get a sense of this, but bleak as it was, it was a real journey of discovery and a hell of a lot more fun than most would have thought possible.

In the last year at the Goldstone when the possibility of our club being wiped out was very real, I was asked what would I do if Brighton no longer existed and my view then was that I would ideally follow a newly formed Brighton club in the lowest league and if that didn’t happen then maybe I would pick another friendly team like Charlton. Better than either option would be that The Albion would survive and I would keep watching us.

That oblivion situation never occurred thankfully, but watching us as the 91st club in the league, playing terrible football a long way from home was the biggest test of loyalty and patience.

96/97 finished and we avoided relegation to The Conference. The club was just about alive as we did at least have access to Priestfield to play our games and surely 97/98 would be a season of recovery and a chance to make our way back up the league.

Well it wasn't like that at all. 97/98 was the absolute pits on the pitch. Statistically worse than 96/97 and it showed. We had a collection of cheaply assembled journeymen players, some with higher league experience and others just starting their career and many with little evident skill.

The initial 1-2k of fans who went to the first few games were to a man, woman and child, born optimists. The lack of numbers and the desperate state of playing so far from home affected the players though and so many of them panicked and could not complete even the simplest of passes to each other. It really wasn't much better than county football and if you want to see just how bad we were then I recommend that you get a copy of The Priestfield Tapes.

I had been to Gillingham before, but for the first home game it was totally different. It was a home game and I was now a home fan there, so I really should have known the best route, where to park, drink, stand, etc… but I didn’t know any of this and I had to start gathering this knowledge from my first game.

I could not convince any of my albion mates to make the long journey with me often (they didn’t have the stomach for it and I honestly could not blame them). Driving across the border into Kent, it always seemed (to me) as if the skies were greyer and it rained more. Maybe our desperate state influenced my view of the weather, but Kent never felt like the ‘Garden of England’ to me.

Finding a good place to park would be a challenge (or so I thought from my experiences elsewhere), but with so few fans travelling it was easy to park within two streets of the ground and it remained that way for most of 97/98.

The club shop was comical. As far as I could tell it was a quickly purchased burger van type of set-up, parked outside Priestfield, with very little room for more than a few programmes, a few trinkets left over from the Goldstone shop and when they eventually got some, a few football shirts with huge stick-on felt-like white panels with Sandtex plastered on the front. I still have mine.

Wins and even goals were scarce and after a few months of poor football and with the realisation that the quality was going to be worse than ever before, the 'gallows humour' set in. I think the Wardy Wonderland song stemmed from Priestfield as we dreamed of a better team. Someone may correct me if it started at The Goldstone, but we certainly sang it a lot at Priestfield.

Heroes were rare. Nicky Rust Rust Rust was lauded anytime he got near the ball. Peter Smith (fast / gangly), Jeffrey Thompson Minton and Rod Thomas were averagely skilled and treated like superstars just because they weren’t completely rubbish. Barker and Hart when they arrived made more of a difference up front and slowly over the two years we started to re-build spirit on the pitch and off it. Having an Albion Stalwart in Brian Horton as manager helped a lot as I think many of us had faith that somehow he would make it work and he sort of did.

In 98/99 the football improved and our attendances rose above 4K by the end of the season. Parking became slightly harder and I often ended up 6-7 streets away, nearer The Cricketers pub, which became the regular pre-match haunt. This was, I think, the biggest pub in the area and with the most bar space and a garden, it attracted lots of our fans. Queuing 4-5 deep around the large bar became common and helped build the camaraderie.

Other highlights that stick in the memory, were:

1. Standing to the left of the goal during pre-match warm-up with my girlfriend (now wife) at her first game in 1998 and the players were raining shots at Nicky Rust (I think) in goal and missing the target regularly. One wayward attempt was heading straight towards my girlfriend's face and as she froze, I put my fist out to punch the ball away, but it glanced off and went further back into the stand and hit a child. If you were that child, I am sorry.

2. One of the visiting goalies had a yellow and black hooped jersey which made him look like a giant bee. At the time it was common for goalkeepers to be taunted with the 'Wooooooaaaaaaaahh! you're sh.. aaaaaaahhh!!' chant which for the giant bee’s benefit we changed to buzzing sound along the lines of 'zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZ! you're sh.. aaaaaaahh!!'

3. Away games were fun too with the same faces at both home and away games very often. A trip to Scarborough in Aug 98 was great and the away game at Doncaster in 97/98 where Donny played a non-league keeper who did some work for their Chairman in his one and only game. He was overweight, scared and helped us to a critical 3-1 away win in the year that Donny went down and we stayed up. We didn’t win away from home very often or at home for that matter.

4. Brighton v Doncaster 0-0 draw – dubbed ‘The Heart of Football’ – This was turgid turgid turgid turgid turgid fare. It was just the worst game of football ever by two league teams, neither of which could have complained if they were shot afterwards.

5. Stadium catering staff in response to my order for Bovril, turned around and took a big tin of Marmite off the shelf behind them and spooned that into a plastic cup before pouring hot water onto it and handing it to me. As I looked in stunned silence into the cup I could see a solid mass of Marmite sitting resolutely and undissolved at the bottom with a weak solution of still clear hot water sitting proudly above it. If you think the catering is bad at The Amex, think again.

6. Peter Smith regularly tripping over the ball or sometimes his own legs as he tried to run.

7. Brighton v Colchester 4-4 Boxing Day draw, being 3-0 down at Half Time. Others have commented about this on other threads recently. My memory of it was of a battling performance having pretty much gifted the game in the first half with careless and error-strewn passing. It felt like a cup final win when the whistle blew.

8. Very little steward control, so you could start a game in the home end terrace and then walk around the side into the seats and pick a different spot (for no extra charge). They did clamp down on that a little more as the crowds got bigger.

9. My car clutch gave up on the A229 not far from Gillingham on the way to one game. Thanks to help from a friend and the breakdown service I still made it to the game and then back on the back of a recovery truck.

10. That’s almost certainly enough waffling about Priestfield.

This post is not to say I was there and you weren’t. I actually wish more of you could have been, because with hindsight it was character and patience building which has served me well in the 20 years since.

Just remember that whatever happens this season, it will never be as bad as it was 20 years ago and, football is meant to be fun, so don’t shout at the players if we don’t manage to win the League and Cup double this year.

Enjoy the season ahead!

Do you know what? I forgotten just how grim it was. I found myself nodding as I read through that and thinking yeah I remember that. I think I just might cry tomorrow. How far have we come? It's put all my moaning about no striker in context and for that I thank you Sir.
 




1234andcounting

Well-known member
Mar 31, 2008
1,609
Great summary of our exile [MENTION=1636]LowKarate[/MENTION]

A few other personal memories. Some desperately bad players appearing in the stripes - the two who are most "fondly" recalled are Damien Hilton and Michael Mahoney Johnson. If you saw either of those "play" you are probably, like me marvelling that players of the calibre we have now play for the same club.

A couple of the pubs near the ground that became Brighton pubs alternate Saturdays for two years. Can't remember the names of either, but I am sure some will.

There were some good performances and matches. Beating a high flying Brentford on Boxing Day (?) 98 being about the best.

The wonderful doggedly determined Jeff Minton. Although Stuart Storer scored the goal against Donny and Robbie Reinelt got that goal at Hereford, it was Minton's commitment when almost everything around him was falling apart that kept us in the League in 97-98, at least imo.
 


BUTTERBALL

East Stand Brighton Boyz
Jul 31, 2003
10,255
location location
It's been an incredible journey and one most long-standing Albion fans would never change. You have to experience the deepest lows to enjoy the highest of the highs.
 






Ninja Elephant

Doctor Elephant
Feb 16, 2009
18,855
I am part of the lost generation. I attended games regularly throughout the two years there, they were my first seasons as a fan. I enjoyed the bus ride to the games and the occasional stint as a ballboy thanks to Liz! The games were often rubbish and we rarely scored a goal, but it added character if nothing else! Things will never be so bad for our club again, and the few thousand of us who made the journey regularly will always know the worst of times alongside the current best of times.
 




seaford

Active member
Feb 8, 2007
339
I had a season ticket for the 2nd season at Gillingham, persuaded her indoors that I had to get a season ticket to guarantee one at Withdean!!
Thankfully my mate Mark played the same car and drove us up there.
I don't get to many games now, although I do have a ticket for tomorrow, and going to the Amex is a slightly surreal experience after Priestfield and Withdean.
 






wendy's tackle

Member
NSC Patreon
Jul 17, 2004
40
East Dean, Eastbourne
That's a wonderful account of those dark days, which is particularly appropriate as we look forward to our Premier League debut. I lived in South-East London at the time so the trip was pretty convenient, but I could not have been happier when we got back to Brighton. It was very strange being there, neither home nor away, not feeling welcome but still getting comfortable with the surroundings after a while. The standard of football was truly appalling, but like a bad drug we had to just stay with it enjoying the rare moments of promise and those few players who tried to bring some light. There was a sense that our loyalty was properly appreciated by Dick Knight and the club as we all tried to keep the thing going. I'm glad we did, though I could not have imagined the transformation we've since seen. What a journey.
 


I had a season ticket for the 2nd season at Gillingham, persuaded her indoors that I had to get a season ticket to guarantee one at Withdean!!
Thankfully my mate Mark played the same car and drove us up there.
I don't get to many games now, although I do have a ticket for tomorrow, and going to the Amex is a slightly surreal experience after Priestfield and Withdean.

Wow - I wonder how many season tickets we sold each year. Had to be below 1,000. The only time in my adult life I didn't buy a season ticket was in the wilderness years at Gillingham. Went to about 1/3 of the home games - so, so, grim. The only non grim part was the gallows humour of the 1500 fans that attended. Whatever happens tomorrow it pales into insignificance compared to those horrid Gillingham years - I terms of results
 


Skaville

Well-known member
Jun 10, 2004
10,099
Queens Park
I was camping on that grim, wet, windy Wednesday last week. Many tents around us were destroyed, but we hunkered down, grinned and bared it and everything felt a little more rosy when we came through it. Gillingham was exactly like last Wednesday
 






Raphael Meade

Well-known member
Jul 5, 2003
4,125
Shoreham/LA
In response to this exchange of posts between myself and [MENTION=638]Bigtomfu[/MENTION] a few months ago about our time at Gillingham in 97-99…

Me: We kept going to games then so that we could have a chance of where we are now. Those games at Priestfield were so bad they barely deserve description and the reward is so much sweeter for having seen them

Bigtomfu: "You're wrong there, it's exactly because those games were so bad that they DO need/deserve description"

… and in contrast to the season ahead, for Bigtomfu’s benefit and anyone else interested this is what it felt like watching home games at Gillingham 20 years ago when we were 91st – 92nd in the league, with no home ground and initially only 2k fans.

I know that others have posted their views of the Priestfield years in another thread recently, but this is my attempt to sum up more of the complete experience that I had. I don’t know whether you’ll get a sense of this, but bleak as it was, it was a real journey of discovery and a hell of a lot more fun than most would have thought possible.

In the last year at the Goldstone when the possibility of our club being wiped out was very real, I was asked what would I do if Brighton no longer existed and my view then was that I would ideally follow a newly formed Brighton club in the lowest league and if that didn’t happen then maybe I would pick another friendly team like Charlton. Better than either option would be that The Albion would survive and I would keep watching us.

That oblivion situation never occurred thankfully, but watching us as the 91st club in the league, playing terrible football a long way from home was the biggest test of loyalty and patience.

96/97 finished and we avoided relegation to The Conference. The club was just about alive as we did at least have access to Priestfield to play our games and surely 97/98 would be a season of recovery and a chance to make our way back up the league.

Well it wasn't like that at all. 97/98 was the absolute pits on the pitch. Statistically worse than 96/97 and it showed. We had a collection of cheaply assembled journeymen players, some with higher league experience and others just starting their career and many with little evident skill.

The initial 1-2k of fans who went to the first few games were to a man, woman and child, born optimists. The lack of numbers and the desperate state of playing so far from home affected the players though and so many of them panicked and could not complete even the simplest of passes to each other. It really wasn't much better than county football and if you want to see just how bad we were then I recommend that you get a copy of The Priestfield Tapes.

I had been to Gillingham before, but for the first home game it was totally different. It was a home game and I was now a home fan there, so I really should have known the best route, where to park, drink, stand, etc… but I didn’t know any of this and I had to start gathering this knowledge from my first game.

I could not convince any of my albion mates to make the long journey with me often (they didn’t have the stomach for it and I honestly could not blame them). Driving across the border into Kent, it always seemed (to me) as if the skies were greyer and it rained more. Maybe our desperate state influenced my view of the weather, but Kent never felt like the ‘Garden of England’ to me.

Finding a good place to park would be a challenge (or so I thought from my experiences elsewhere), but with so few fans travelling it was easy to park within two streets of the ground and it remained that way for most of 97/98.

The club shop was comical. As far as I could tell it was a quickly purchased burger van type of set-up, parked outside Priestfield, with very little room for more than a few programmes, a few trinkets left over from the Goldstone shop and when they eventually got some, a few football shirts with huge stick-on felt-like white panels with Sandtex plastered on the front. I still have mine.

Wins and even goals were scarce and after a few months of poor football and with the realisation that the quality was going to be worse than ever before, the 'gallows humour' set in. I think the Wardy Wonderland song stemmed from Priestfield as we dreamed of a better team. Someone may correct me if it started at The Goldstone, but we certainly sang it a lot at Priestfield.

Heroes were rare. Nicky Rust Rust Rust was lauded anytime he got near the ball. Peter Smith (fast / gangly), Jeffrey Thompson Minton and Rod Thomas were averagely skilled and treated like superstars just because they weren’t completely rubbish. Barker and Hart when they arrived made more of a difference up front and slowly over the two years we started to re-build spirit on the pitch and off it. Having an Albion Stalwart in Brian Horton as manager helped a lot as I think many of us had faith that somehow he would make it work and he sort of did.

In 98/99 the football improved and our attendances rose above 4K by the end of the season. Parking became slightly harder and I often ended up 6-7 streets away, nearer The Cricketers pub, which became the regular pre-match haunt. This was, I think, the biggest pub in the area and with the most bar space and a garden, it attracted lots of our fans. Queuing 4-5 deep around the large bar became common and helped build the camaraderie.

Other highlights that stick in the memory, were:

1. Standing to the left of the goal during pre-match warm-up with my girlfriend (now wife) at her first game in 1998 and the players were raining shots at Nicky Rust (I think) in goal and missing the target regularly. One wayward attempt was heading straight towards my girlfriend's face and as she froze, I put my fist out to punch the ball away, but it glanced off and went further back into the stand and hit a child. If you were that child, I am sorry.

2. One of the visiting goalies had a yellow and black hooped jersey which made him look like a giant bee. At the time it was common for goalkeepers to be taunted with the 'Wooooooaaaaaaaahh! you're sh.. aaaaaaahhh!!' chant which for the giant bee’s benefit we changed to buzzing sound along the lines of 'zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZ! you're sh.. aaaaaaahh!!'

3. Away games were fun too with the same faces at both home and away games very often. A trip to Scarborough in Aug 98 was great and the away game at Doncaster in 97/98 where Donny played a non-league keeper who did some work for their Chairman in his one and only game. He was overweight, scared and helped us to a critical 3-1 away win in the year that Donny went down and we stayed up. We didn’t win away from home very often or at home for that matter.

4. Brighton v Doncaster 0-0 draw – dubbed ‘The Heart of Football’ – This was turgid turgid turgid turgid turgid fare. It was just the worst game of football ever by two league teams, neither of which could have complained if they were shot afterwards.

5. Stadium catering staff in response to my order for Bovril, turned around and took a big tin of Marmite off the shelf behind them and spooned that into a plastic cup before pouring hot water onto it and handing it to me. As I looked in stunned silence into the cup I could see a solid mass of Marmite sitting resolutely and undissolved at the bottom with a weak solution of still clear hot water sitting proudly above it. If you think the catering is bad at The Amex, think again.

6. Peter Smith regularly tripping over the ball or sometimes his own legs as he tried to run.

7. Brighton v Colchester 4-4 Boxing Day draw, being 3-0 down at Half Time. Others have commented about this on other threads recently. My memory of it was of a battling performance having pretty much gifted the game in the first half with careless and error-strewn passing. It felt like a cup final win when the whistle blew.

8. Very little steward control, so you could start a game in the home end terrace and then walk around the side into the seats and pick a different spot (for no extra charge). They did clamp down on that a little more as the crowds got bigger.

9. My car clutch gave up on the A229 not far from Gillingham on the way to one game. Thanks to help from a friend and the breakdown service I still made it to the game and then back on the back of a recovery truck.

10. That’s almost certainly enough waffling about Priestfield.

This post is not to say I was there and you weren’t. I actually wish more of you could have been, because with hindsight it was character and patience building which has served me well in the 20 years since.

Just remember that whatever happens this season, it will never be as bad as it was 20 years ago and, football is meant to be fun, so don’t shout at the players if we don’t manage to win the League and Cup double this year.

Enjoy the season ahead!

Great post! Brings back a lot of memories. I managed all but 2 home games at the Priestfield during our stay and can solidly agree that it was some awful, awful football. Good camaraderie but I never want to eat dinner at the Shell garage on the A229 again.

It really does seem a lifetime ago.
 



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