Stand by, Billingham Synthonia!

[amberaleman]

Ambersalamander will be in attendance at your Northern League fixture tomorrow evening against Whitley Bay.

She's going up to Teesside for work at short notice. But the pill is considerably sweetened by the chance to visit one of her favourite clubs (by name, at least).

We await a full tinpot report.

[Sultan of Cannock- SRFC]

Bloody Hell! That's one helluva way to go on a pushbike!

[ambersalamander]

If I hear or read one more inane joke about me cycling to football games I will withhold my tinpot report (which, having just returned, I am too tired to give now)

It's not you, Sultan dearest - it's just that I get the exact same joke from several different people EVERY SINGLE TIME I travel more than a few miles from my home. Given that this occurs at least twice weekly at the moment and distances are considerable (Windermere, Cheltenham, Truro, Neath, Carlisle, Billingham and this weekend Weston-super-Mare all within a month), this is rather a lot to put up with

Anyway, this is the back-story to my forthcoming tinpot report: Where I work, we carry out regular peer-reviews of mental health services nationwide. Generally, they are conducted by staff working in other mental health units, but occasionally one of us in the office has to step in if we can't get someone else. I am usually the one to draw the short straw.

On Tuesday, I received a message at about 3pm from one of our reviewers saying she had to pull out of the Wednesday/Thursday reviews of two wards in Billingham. She would have had to travel even further (from Weston-super-Mare of all places; I'll flush her out and give her a pasting on Saturday) but that's hardly the point, as she'd signed up for it months ago. I'd already had to postpone these particular reviews twice, and it would have ruined the whole process for the wards if it had happened a third time. This is why I had to step in at the last minute; the only available train was the 18:00 from King's Cross, which meant I couldn't go home and get a change of clothes and my phone charger first, dammit. But I was VERY pleasantly surprised when I googled Billingham Synthonia's fixtures on the off chance that they would a) have a midweek game, b) be at home and c) be one of the few non-league clubs to play home games on a Wednesday (I wouldn't arrive until 9:30 on the Tuesday). As luck would have it, they fulfilled all three criteria. Good old Synners.

I was put in an outrageously posh hotel. Google "Wynyard Hall" to have a butcher's. It used to belong to Sir John Hall. He sold it a few years back and they turned it into a hotel, but he's actually moved back in to be looked after as he's very ill. Kevin Keegan and Alan Shearer used to live around the corner; Duncan Bannatyne still does. That sort of place. This, you understand, is out of town and in stark contrast to the town of Billingham itself, which is - not to put too fine a point on it - a s**thole Before the match the following day, I spent two hours walking around the town trying to find its heart and soul: it has none, unless it is out in the factories. This is quite possible as Billingham consists of nothing but industry, small general stores and housing with the odd take-away chippy thrown in. That is it. I was hungry and thirsty, but in those 2 hours I didn't see a single restaurant or pub, unless you count the two pubs and a restaurant that were unequivocally closed. Permanently.

I did eventually find one pub, but it was cold and unfriendly of atmosphere and had NO REAL ALE.

It's all relatively new: the factory town was simply built on top of the village and hamlets that were there before; no trace of these remains. Even looking at a map, you can tell by the road layout that it is all planned. Most roads are unimaginatively named after towns and counties of England, and most houses are of the boxy red-brick 1980s council variety.

Looking for the town centre, I followed signs until I arrived in one of those partially enclosed 1970s shopping precincts with dull high-street chain stores arranged unimaginatively around a central square, bored youths with skateboards and litter detritus being blown around in little circles. It wasn't a big square; I walked through it in a few seconds and out the other side, where there was a sign saying "Thank you for visiting Billingham Town Centre" followed by another "Town Centre" signpost pointing back the way I had come. Seriously, was that it? Yes, it was. Not a single place for a hungry Sutton fan to eat. Football food it would be, then.

And there was the backdrop against which my tinpot adventure would take place.

[amberaleman]

Is part II still to come?

[ambersalamander]

Here it is. I was knackered last night! Part 2: the first half.

After a long, fruitless yomp around this rather dispiriting town, I finally found the ground. It wasn't where the map said it would be; furthermore, the more I walked towards the floodlights, the further away they seemed to get. There was a nicely tinpot blackboard at the gate with the fixture written in coloured chalk. I paid my admission and was immediately offered a Golden Goal ticket and a programme. I purchased both, and was delighted to see that the golden goal ticket was actually machine-sewn up to avoid cheating. Spectacular tinpoticity - full marks there. I had no.2, which I immediately dismissed as too ambitious. A quick pint of off-colour Bombardier at the bar and a read of the programme were just what the doctor ordered. The barmaid asked me for ID. I didn't have any. She said she couldn't serve me without it. I said it was nice to be asked as I'm nearly 30. She then gave me the tinpot ID - what's your date of birth and your starsign? If I was going to go for 1982, I'd hardly be picky about the day and month! But she did serve me after that, with encouragement from a Billingham fan called Damian. I did try to engage him in conversation about my groundhopping adventure, but none of them seemed remotely interested or surprised. The best I got was "We hate Middlesbrough." Oh well. There was a backwards clock in the bar, with 3 on the left and 9 on the right. This was tinpot, too.

The programme was a good read, informing me that Brian Clough had once played for Synthonia and that a player had recently celebrated his 100th goal, but in keeping with the general tinpoticity, he said in his interview that he hadn't realised it until someone pointed it out after the game. The programme also proclaimed, with obvious pride, that Billingham Synthonia is the only football club to be named after an agricultural fertiliser.

After a visit to the ladies' - they had the best bog roll I've ever come across at a football ground - I went out for some eats. The lady in the teabar was friendly and rather sweet, and when I asked her to recommend something for a Very Hungry Person, she produced a lovely steak pie with a massive heap of the best chips I've ever had at football. Good northern food, and £2.40 the lot. It is worth mentioning that they also had Proper Pepper, of the coarse-ground variety, that doesn't blow away. I've only ever seen that at one other ground. I ate my chips to the background music of Up the Junction.

Synthonia's ground is emphatically one-sided: you can't even get behind one of the goals, and everyone sits or stands in a huge, rusting edifice of a stand with benches rather than seats. Unfortunely, the music they'd elected to run (or rather stroll) out to was Vertigo by U2. An announcement was made to congratulate a Billingham player on his 400th appearance, presumably so he wouldn't have to find out later. The programme stated that Synners' 'keeper always wore either grey or orange, but his kit could not be described as anything other than decidedly red.

It transpired that I was standing/sitting on the wrong side of a tinpot segregation gate with the away fans. This was fine as I was supposed to be a neutral, but as I pointed out to Boyfriend (via text), I had to support this tinpot team I'd waited years to see. He replied that he would "have to support the Geordies over the smogmonsters." He went to uni in Newcastle and has spent some time in Whitli Bee, as the locals call it.

Both teams seemed utterly determined not to score during the first half. It was one of those games where the players' calls easily drown out any noise made by the fans, of which there was almost none. One eager young boy sporadically yelled things like "YOU DON'T HAVE TO HOOF IT ALL THE TIME!" but he was, for the most part, alone. I idly watched a couple of bats flitting around the ground. A Whitley Bay fan just behind me spent the entire half releasing luxuriously trumpeting farts and affecting not to notice.

"It's MONSOONING it down," said his friend. "Nice to be here." "Nice to be here and not at...Bishop Auckland," agreed another. Looking at the almost gale-force wind and rain, I shuddered to think what Bishop Auckland must be like.

Still no football had occurred. When the referee blew for half-time, there had been no stoppage time at all.

[ambersalamander]

I has Part 3!

The second half proved far more lively than the first as Synthonia seemed to change their collective mind about preserving the virgin scoreline. The real action started in the 49th minute when their no.9 hit the crossbar with a belter of a shot that clearly spooked the Whitley Bay ‘keeper – I don’t think he was expecting any actual attempts on goal. This was followed by a couple of corners, the requisite goalmouth scramble, and a lot of hoofing.

“HOOOOOF!” shouted the Whitley Bay fan, as a Billingham player smacked the ball up the field for the umpteenth time. Inevitably, it landed at the feet of an opposition player, prompting a Synners fan to yell “WHAT ARE YOU DOING? YOU’RE PLAYING IN GREEN!”
At 56 minutes, Whitley Bay were awarded a free-kick for what was, to me, an obvious dive. Billingham fans showed their displeasure in the traditional tinpot way. One was particularly vociferous: the ubiquitous small shouty dog, belonging to the usual tinpot “one man.” This chap clocked me on the terraces and seemed to be thinking “Hello, who’s that? That’s not a Billingham fan. I know all those” and spent the rest of the half staring at me and barking. He wasn’t too difficult to stare down.

Two minutes later, Billingham scored a brilliant goal from outside the box. Hooray! 1-0 to the smogmonsters. But their fans still weren’t pleased. “You don’t have to play the long ball all the time!” screeched a junior member of their support. Er, yes they do, I thought. I hadn’t seen any evidence that they were capable of playing any other way. It just wouldn’t be tinpot without the hoofery.

The less obvious downside to such a style of play is, of course, the number of balls lost. And I don’t mean through misplaced studs-up challenges. Once, when a match ball went missing in action, the replacement was delivered directly to a Whitley Bay player, who turned and attempted (probably) to kick it back to the correct spot on the pitch. What he actually did was hoof it straight out of the ground. Oops.

67 minutes gone, and Whitley Bay finally decided to have a real attempt on goal. A tinpot scramble resulted in the ball crossing the line, but it was ruled offside.

Five minutes later, the referee showed himself to be just as tinpot as everyone and everything else: Billingham’s no.2 left the pitch for treatment, and the ref forgot to let him back on. Ignoring the frenzied shouts of “Ref! REF! REF!” from their fans, he also inadvertently taught them a lesson about Crying Wolf. A comical defensive error then led to Synthonia’s second goal as their no.6 cut through the Whitley Bay defence like butter. Butter that has been left out of the fridge for, oh, a day or so. In July.

This was shortly followed by a Billingham sub, an appalling miss from their no.10 that sailed straight over the crossbar to shouts of “Give ‘im a blue shirt!” and a Whitley Bay sub in quick succession. Whitley Bay looked absolutely cream-crackered. Their hearts clearly weren’t in it any more: an 80th minute free-kick was skied straight over the bar, to the obvious delight of the home fans. Yet another substitution was followed by another goalmouth scramble at the away team’s goal: it was hoyed off the line, but I think it crossed it. If it had, it would have been an own-goal and 3-0. This was cancelled out by the resultant corner, headed in for a real goal. 3-0 to Synners.

This time, the ref added on 2 minutes for stoppages. With seconds remaining of these two minutes, the Billingham keeper slipped on the wet pitch and fell heavily onto his arse with no apparent provocation during a Whitley Bay attack. Thus, Whitley Bay got their very tinpot consolation goal, and on my way to the exit I was greeted by the sight of a Billingham fan going postal, screaming and yelling his head off. “Are you all right?” I heard someone say. “No I bloody ain’t!” he roared. “Not after that! We had a clean sheet. Flippin’ awful.” You can see where he was coming from: completely dominating the second half and notching up a 3-1 win against the second-placed team in the league is an absolutely terrible result.

I needed a taxi back to my hotel, but my phone battery had died, so I went into the clubhouse to seek assistance. There was nobody behind the bar, but I soon spotted the not-particularly-bright barmaid chatting on the other side of the room with the tea-bar lady. “What was the score?” they asked. “3-1,” I told them. The not-very-bright barmaid had a surprisingly long think about this and, turning to Tea Bar Lady as if I no longer existed, concluded that “it must be to us, ‘cos it were 2-0 before.” Maintaining the illusion that I’d become invisible, she returned to her post and served three people who’d arrived several minutes after I had with a remarkably complex drinks order. When I finally got her attention and explained my situation, she sent me outside to speak to Damian, who was having a cigarette.

Damian very kindly let me use his phone to call a cab. I was then treated to a lecture on the town of Billingham. “So what do you think of it then?” he asked eagerly. As the honest answer was “not a lot,” I tried to mumble my way through a diplomatic answer along the lines of “there isn’t much to it that I’ve seen.” His chest visibly swelled with territorial pride as he pointed to a condemned building across the road and asked “Well! What do you think that is?”
“Er…closed?”
“THAT,” he went on, “is the arig…arger…Aggercuturalal Offices!”
“But it’s due to be knocked down, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes,” Damian conceded, “but it WAS the Aggercutral Offices. Did you know Sir Stanley Matthews once played on this pitch?”
This educational conversation also served to inform me (unreliably) that Synthonia had hosted the first ever floodlit football match, that the pigment in paints is manufactured in the town (“There’s summat else you got to thank Billingham for!”) that the road on which the ground is located was the first road in Billingham, and that Billingham was one of the first ever railway stations, on the Stockton-Darlington line ("That's summat else..." etc). This lesson concluded with his telling me that he used to work in Elephant & Castle, and when I sympathised, he leaned closer and added, “Well, it’s full of gingers, isn’t it?”
Puzzled, I asked what he meant: I hadn’t noticed an above-normal proportion of redheads in that area. He beamed again.
“It’s a nanagram, see?” he said, with misplaced pride. “You know – COLOURED PEOPLE.”

Oh dear.

[DazaB_WCFC]

Superb read Sal!

I really want to see "Synners" But with that report it might be at an an away game!!!

[loy PRA]

Oct 7, 2011 12:16:36 GMT ambersalamander said:

This was fine as I was supposed to be a neutral, but as I pointed out to Boyfriend (via text), I had to support this tinpot team I'd waited years to see. He replied that he would "have to support the Geordies over the smogmonsters." He went to uni in Newcastle and has spent some time in Whitli Bee, as the locals call it.

People from Whitley Bay aren't Geordies.

[ambersalamander]

I'll tell him, but I suspect he was just being facetious!