It must have been Millwall away, I deduced from the photo | OneFootball

I particularly enjoyed reading two great articles on The Mag this week, reflecting on how football and supporting Newcastle United has changed.

The articles well worth a read if you missed them, natural progression of a football fan and modern football is rubbish.

A few years ago, my old mate in Newcastle sent me a grainy black and white photo that he had found on the internet. “Is that your Ad?” Ad being one of my older brothers.

What made me laugh was the newspaper image from the late seventies.

Crumbling concrete terracing, bodies prostate on the ground, Policemen wading in to the mayhem and wor Ad clearly in the middle of it all and absolutely nonplussed by the situation.

It must have been Millwall away, I deduced from the photo.

It could easily have been one of many crumbling stadia that Newcastle United fans visited regularly. Yep. those were the days.

What became known as the ‘English Disease’ kicked off big style at grounds across the country, with Cold Blow Lane becoming infamous thanks to the Panorama 1970s documentary, F Troop and surgical masks.

The football violence of the Seventies and Eighties was played out to a political backdrop but is it the fact that this mayhem was all conducted by young men? The same age as the lads and lasses that I now spend my working day with and that is what intrigues me.

The football arenas were the backdrop to the tribal violence.

Back in the eighties, me and my mate had a scrapbook where we would collect newspaper cuttings of football violence from the Sunday papers. This intermingled with other political violence that the tabloid press would grandstand.

Strange looking back at how us young teenagers were fascinated with violence.

However, as time has moved on the violence has been elevated as far as youngsters are concerned and amplified to new levels out on the inner city streets.

The football violence of the seventies and eighties has, thanks to technology, been shunted away from the stadiums and now youngsters, priced out of the game, have taken their teenager angst and anger elsewhere.

So back to the original articles, has the gentrification of “the people’s game” made it a worse spectacle? In my opinion, yes. I loved the Jim Smith era and paying into games at home and sometimes away, including the most important thing of sharing the experience with my mates.

That was so many years ago now and I myself have changed from the youngster that I was back then.

Now I struggle to get tickets for games, but more importantly, the daft lad – my teenage son, is also struggling to get to games.

There we have it. My daft lad struggling to get into games, while middle aged guys like me are reminiscing about football in the eighties.

We are living in a new age of football, but as the great Charlie Harper of the UK Subs pointed out, “nineteen eighties a brand new age.”