...on August 21st 1993, I saw my first ever Albion game.
Up until that point I counted myself as a Man U fan, with Eric Cantona as my favourite player, (I was 9 years old at this stage) but I'd only ever seen them on TV. We didn't live in Sussex at the time but came down here to visit family and I got the chance to go to the Goldstone and see live football for the first time. The game itself was a 1-1 draw with Hartlepool but obviously something struck a chord with me and it started off a run of going to see games whenever we came to visit. For the first 10 or so games I saw across those mid 90s seasons, I never saw us lose, so that contributed to my enjoyment and slowly but surely I began to be less of a Man U fan and more of an Albion fan.
We moved down to Sussex permanently in 2000 and I started going to Withdean, eventually becoming an STH (although I had to give that up after a few years for work reasons) and really becoming a 'full time' fan - Albion tattoo, replica shirts and mugs etc....and obviously that has carried on into the Amex years.
The club has changed so much in the last two decades, and I've seen promotions, relegations, wins, losses, joy, despair and more than our fair share of dramas both on and off the pitch, and although I would never really have imagined at that first game that the club I was watching would go on to be such a big part of my life all these years later, far less would I have imagined that we'd be playing somewhere like the Amex and have been lucky enough to see some truly top class players in the stripes.
For all those ups and downs though, I'd sooner be an Albion fan than a Man U fan any day of the week
Up until that point I counted myself as a Man U fan, with Eric Cantona as my favourite player, (I was 9 years old at this stage) but I'd only ever seen them on TV. We didn't live in Sussex at the time but came down here to visit family and I got the chance to go to the Goldstone and see live football for the first time. The game itself was a 1-1 draw with Hartlepool but obviously something struck a chord with me and it started off a run of going to see games whenever we came to visit. For the first 10 or so games I saw across those mid 90s seasons, I never saw us lose, so that contributed to my enjoyment and slowly but surely I began to be less of a Man U fan and more of an Albion fan.
We moved down to Sussex permanently in 2000 and I started going to Withdean, eventually becoming an STH (although I had to give that up after a few years for work reasons) and really becoming a 'full time' fan - Albion tattoo, replica shirts and mugs etc....and obviously that has carried on into the Amex years.
The club has changed so much in the last two decades, and I've seen promotions, relegations, wins, losses, joy, despair and more than our fair share of dramas both on and off the pitch, and although I would never really have imagined at that first game that the club I was watching would go on to be such a big part of my life all these years later, far less would I have imagined that we'd be playing somewhere like the Amex and have been lucky enough to see some truly top class players in the stripes.
For all those ups and downs though, I'd sooner be an Albion fan than a Man U fan any day of the week
