Home is Where the Heart is!

Stamford Chidge, host of the Chelsea FanCast tells us how he fell in love with Chelsea FC, Stamford Bridge and its match day inhabitants!
I first visited Stamford Bridge on April 3^rd 1976. It wasn’t even for a Chelsea match. I was ten years old.

I grew up in the footballing desert that is rural Hampshire, and faced with the choice of following local teams Portsmouth (like my Dad) or Southampton (like my mates) – I chose neither. I was without team, preferring instead to follow England, who at the time were so crap they couldn’t even qualify for World Cups.

However, when your old man says he has two tickets for the FA Cup semi-final, you jump at the chance. The fact that it was between Crystal Palace and Southampton barely registered. Neither did the fact that the match was to be played at Stamford Bridge – the home of Chelsea FC, so I was told.

The only other football match and football ground I had visited hitherto was the rickety old shack that was Fratton Park, some four years earlier. It was not an experience I had cherished, not least due to the dire second division football served up by Portsmouth and Leyton Orient that I had been forced to witness. I was hopeful that Stamford Bridge would restore my faith in football grounds. I was not to be disappointed.

I will never forget that walk coming out of the old Fulham Broadway tube and then on towards the ground – thousands of people; the smell of hot dogs, onions and horse shit; colour and vibrancy in the South West London sunshine. Football.

Once inside the ground (via the old Bovril Gate as I recall) Dad and I settled down near the front of the corner between the West Stand and the Shed – near enough to the action for me to be able to see. I remember seeing iconic commentator Brian Moore making his way to the commentary box in the West Stand, and equally iconic Crystal Palace Manager Malcolm Allison sporting his trademark fedora hat. But what I remember most was the sheer scale of the ground – which always seemed so much larger than traditional four stand square stadia – with its open end and running track, especially with the monster new East Stand looming almost menacingly over proceedings.

I was intrigued, and could feel the buzz of what was a great football ground and badgered Dad for most of the game about the team that played in this atmospheric place – Chelsea. Sadly that was the first and last time I would visit Stamford Bridge until I moved to London as a student in the mid-1980’s, living round the corner in Hollywood Road and later in Lots Road. But the seed had been planted. This was the ground and club for me. I would now be a Chelsea fan.

As for the FA Cup semi-final, apparently Southampton won, and they had a couple of decent players – Mick Channon and a certain Peter Osgood. Many years later I reflected on the fact that this was the only time I was ever to watch Peter Osgood ‘The King of Stamford Bridge’ play – albeit in the wrong colours, and not for Chelsea!

In the 1980’s I was a somewhat peripatetic fan – randomly turning up to Stamford Bridge as an extension to the weekend’s alcohol fuelled debauchery. In those days you could just turn up and the imminent threat of violence and the kamikaze surges in the Shed End fuelled the adrenalin that lads in their early twenties thrive on. But to be honest, having missed the bond of going to football usually created by parental guidance and then a cabal of like-minded mates, I never really experienced it like so many of my current Chelsea friends were lucky enough to. But living in the manor, you could not help but get sucked in to the passion and atmosphere generated by Chelsea supporters on a match day. These were the relatively heady days of our return to Division 1, and the noise that Stamford Bridge could generate was frightening.

I vividly recall staggering around North End Road with a hangover on a day I was not at the match and you could easily hear the Chelsea supporters belting out “Chelsea, Chelsea, Chelsea, Chelsea, Chelsea, Chelsea, Chelsea, Chelsea, Chelsea, Chelsea”. Genuinely nerve tingling and yes it did go on for what seemed like an entire half.  Living in Lots Road you could hear every song and chant from the Shed End as if you were there, from the comfort of your own bath.

After getting married and settling back in Hampshire for a short while, I was deprived visits to Stamford Bridge, until we moved back to London. At which point my sister had the good sense to marry a Chelsea supporter – Martin Levy or ‘Dr. Mart’ as I like to call him. And this is where my real Stamford Bridge experience began.

By this time, the only bit of Stamford Bridge recognisable from the one I had fallen in love with in 1976 was the now tired and jaded looking East Stand and the old (preserved) Shed wall. We now even had a ‘Chelsea Village replete with the Bates Motel. But it was ours, and it was Chelsea, and we had a good team with the likes of Ruud Gullit, Gianfranco Zola and Gianluca Vialli to name but three.

If there is one man responsible for giving me the proper football experience that I had been denied as a kid it is Dr Mart. For the first time I started going regularly to the Bridge, and more important with the same lads who would become proper football mates – Dr Mart; Big Phil; The Blues Brothers; ChelTel; Pablo and Ross. All gathering, every other week, to commune at our football Cathedral, Stamford Bridge.

And this of course was how it was always meant to be. Stamford Bridge is a great stadium albeit nothing like the old one I first new. But at the end of the day it’s just a pitch surrounded by stands – or is it? Football for me is about far more than that. It is about the environment, the locality and the entire experience of the match day. Back in the 1970’s and 1980’s most Chelsea supporters would tell you that football was very much about the before and after, in the knowledge that what they would see on the pitch for 90 minutes would inevitably disappoint.

This attitude still exists within the mind-set of many Chelsea supporters, even though the 90 minutes in between has been a far happier experience in the main for the last 20 years. Chelsea supporters have a particular attitude when it comes to supporting their team. They like a good day out in the company of their mates, and the Chelsea supporting collective as a whole. They like trips to far flung football fields from Barnsley to Budapest. They like a road trip, a journey, and usually a lot of booze. The Irish call this the ‘craic’ – we don’t have a similar word in English but we should invent one for Chelsea supporters.

Since my induction in to Dr Mart’s Chelsea fraternity, this attitude has always been pre-eminent, and I am grateful for that. The before and after experience has of course been further enhanced since we started the Chelsea FanCast and now I have so many match day rituals such as visiting luminaries such as Mark Worrall from Gate 17 fame, the Chelsea Supporters Trust and Mr ‘Only A Pound’ himself purveying copies of the cfcuk Fanzine from the stall, to visiting several pubs before and after to catch up with what seems like an ever-growing number of mates all gained sharing and following our passion for supporting Chelsea. It sounds trite but it really is like having an extended family.

Pre-Match with the Chelsea FanCast

And of course the heart of any family is the family home, and for us this is Stamford Bridge and equally important the local pubs and eateries in its immediate vicinity.

This – ‘our home’ – has of course been threatened over the last few years. Initially it appeared that the Club were attempting to re-locate far beyond Stamford Bridge. Rumours of a move to a new soulless stadium along the lines of the corporate Arsenal model were mooted, and even worse a potential move to the dark lands of Wormwood Scrubs. The argument seemed to revolve around keeping the culture and history of a special club, perhaps to the detriment of future financial and footballing success, or accepting that to continue to succeed on the pitch, and compete with the biggest clubs in the world, relocate to a bigger stadium enabling financial stability.

Thankfully (in my opinion) the Chelsea Pitch Owners voted to maintain a stumbling block to any move away from Stamford Bridge. In June this year, the Club announced that they were funding a feasibility study to “assess the feasibility of an expansion of the stadium within the existing historic site boundaries”. Or in plain English see whether it is feasible to re-build a stadium with a 55,000 or so capacity on the existing site. Of course for many this would be the perfect solution – get a bigger stadium so we can compete with the biggest clubs but remain at our historical and cultural home.

But why is this so important to many of us?  I have already explained the fundamental importance and bond created by meeting up with your football mates every fortnight in the same boozers; the walk up to the stadium; the familiarity of the location that for all intent and purpose makes Stamford Bridge our second home.

Environmental Psychologists explain (more intelligently than I can!) why our attachment to Stamford Bridge (the place as opposed to the stadium) is so important. They call it ‘Place Attachment’ – the emotional bond between person and place. “A place becomes meaningful to a person because of the thoughts, feelings, memories and interpretations evoked by it. It is about behaviour and experiences. Places often gain meaning because of personal experiences, life milestones, and occurrences of personal growth. With communities, however, places derive religious, historical, or other cultural meanings. The strength of place attachment is felt by individuals, notably through self-pride and self-esteem. People experience stronger attachments to places that they can identify with or otherwise feel proud to be a part of. The most common emotions associated with people-place bonding are positive, such as happiness and love” (apart from when Barcelona cheat you out of a place in the Champions League Final!).

So there it is in a nutshell. Chelsea supporters have a very emotional, tangible and passionate bond to Stamford Bridge which extends beyond the fact that we watch our beloved Chelsea play 90 minutes of football there every other week.

I would go further than that to say that the bond goes both ways. The inhabitants of the area around Stamford Bridge might not agree, but Stamford Bridge defines us, as we define it. It has been there for 109 years – longer than anyone living in the area has; and Chelsea supporters have been there fortnightly for the same length of time.

It is very difficult to find anything unique in a body as homogenous as football supporters, but I firmly believe that the football ground and its environs are one way of doing so, and let’s face it having a football stadium in one of the richest areas of the greatest City in the world makes us unique. I recall when a great Chelsea supporting mate of mine came over for one of his all too infrequent visits to the Bridge from Los Angeles. We walked up Fulham Road to the game and he stopped and paused for a minute, seemingly trying to take it all in. After a few minutes he let out a sigh and proclaimed his disbelief that anyone could have a football stadium in the middle of London quite like this, and how lucky we are for that to be the case.

Stamford Bridge has been the home of Chelsea FC since 1905. I have been in love with it since 1976. It is OUR home, and home is most definitely where OUR heart is!

And long may that continue.

First published in the Plains of Almeria Season Preview