Barham's tash
Well-known member
I think to my youthful mind the skin head contingent in doc martins and cut off stonewash jeans seemed dramatically incongruous hence i've always thought of them as rent a mob. But very fair and just point about the need to do something dramatic to get the attention.Little bit wide of the mark, it was at that point as far as we knew effectively our last throw of the dice, the final game at the Goldstone, or so we thought.
Our protest had to have maximum impact, and getting the game abandoned to coincide with the half time segment on Grandstand was the intention.
We had been told by the then groundsman, the late Brian Harwood, that they had no spare goalposts, so once at least one cross bar had been snapped, the. It was game on, or should that actually be game off?
The people who were briefed about starting the protest, including the aforementioned and much missed Hanksie were aware what was needed to be done, so to say Rent a Mob is not correct, clearly others who may not have been Goldstone regulars joined in, but it was all part of the plan.
And history tells us it worked, no Goldstone in 96/97? I doubt either Jimmy Case or Steve Gritt would have kept us in the Football League, playing in front of small ‘home’ crowds at either Portsmouth or Gillingham.
Its the age old question, would we be where we are now if we’d dropped out of the EFL?
It's all so surreal this far down the line at how engrained all of those experiences were to us who went through them and how nothing these days for us as a club seems to compare - thankfully of course.
