SkyDaz Banter: Pre-Everton

Everton are a football club similar to us. We both play in blue, have great support despite not having won anything for many years and have a rival across the city who claim to be a ‘Big Club’. Whilst their local derby is allegedly played in a harmonious atmosphere with rival fans sitting next to each other, ours is somewhat more hostile. The scenes at last season’s encounters were embarrassing for the city and hopefully are consigned to history. This season’s game at St Andrews certainly passed without incident mainly due to the fact that most people were asleep!

Every city claims to have the most ferocious derby encounter, Glasgow, Manchester, Sheffield, Portsmouth, etc. The Merseyside derby appears to the outsider to be the friendliest. This may be an urban myth.

As part of my travels I once visited Livingston’s ground in Edinburgh to see my Scottish team, Falkirk, play. Obviously I was wearing my Birmingham City shirt and my sheep loving companion was in his Derby County shirt. We looked cool, but felt frozen.

On arrival we had to get past two huge bouncers fresh from the Gorbals in order to get into the Livingston Clubhouse. No problems, a little charm, a bit of friendly banter and we were in.

The place went quiet on our arrival a la The Slaughtered Lamb. The clubhouse was full of people who had the same DNA. We got ourselves some beer and sat down. Eventually a brave local was pushed forward by his crowd to quiz us on our attendance. The calming tones of ‘Duelling Banjoes’ could be heard tinkling in the background.

He had a big sloping forehead; cross-eyes, multi-coloured teeth and spoke like Billy Connelly on helium. After various attempts at crossing the language barrier we eventually managed to identify ourselves. Our new ‘friend’ wondered who our biggest rivals were. I told him ‘the Villa’ and my mate said ‘Nottingham Forest’. This seemed to satisfy his curiosity.

Being polite and making conversation I asked him who Livingston’s rivals were? He looked at me as if I had just asked if I could sleep with his mother. ‘Inverness Caledonian Thistle’ he growled, cleared his throat and spat on the floor. Showing my ignorance of Scottish geography I asked if they were the nearest team to Livingston, Edinburgh.

When he said they were 300 miles away I queried why ICT were classed as rivals. This puzzled him and he raised a finger to denote he would be back before returning to his mob who engulfed him in an American Football huddle. The room went deathly quiet whilst he relayed the question. There was much whispering and pointing and after about ten minutes he returned and proudly announced, '‘we don't know, we just do!'’ Sure enough at half time they roundly booed the ICT score.

Every football fan has second teams, teams to look for and rivals to wish defeat upon. I berated the Manchester City fan at Sky recently for wanting Manchester United to lose in Europe. I pointed out that surely he would want an English team to win rather than a European one. His reply was ‘Did you cheer when Villa won the European Cup?’ A good point, well made!

Article reproduced with kind permission of the BCFC official matchday programme.