Football blogger Adam Bate recalls not one, but two miserable trips to south London to watch his beloved Wolves play at Selhurst Park.
Albert Einstein famously defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I doubt he’d have been impressed by my actions of autumn 2002.
The decision to go and watch Wolves play Wimbledon at Selhurst Park that year was, in itself, an odd one. There was a poisonous atmosphere surrounding my club, Wolves, at that particular time. We had squandered promotion and specifically an 11 point lead over our arch-rivals, West Bromwich Albion, the previous season and the fall-out from that debacle was ongoing. A notorious banner had been unveiled at the play-off semi final defeat to Norwich in May simply saying: “You’ve let us down again.” It was a long summer.
It was against this backdrop that my friend Dan and I decided to embark on the coach trip down to south London. Given that petrol prices weren’t what they are now, I suspect car would have been the cheaper mode of transport. The train would certainly have been quicker. We boarded the official supporters coach. A little over four hours later we were there.
Of course, Selhurst wasn’t even Wimbledon’s ground. They leased it from Crystal Palace and so the game itself had that uniquely awful atmosphere that only such fixtures can provide. In front of just 3,223 fans – most of them in the away end – Wolves were beaten 3-2. It was the sixth game of the season and Wolves’ first defeat but the wounds of the previous spring remained raw. When new signing Denis Irwin approached the fans to commiserate he was greeted with nothing but bile. It was an unsavoury end to a depressing day.
'We had to banish the demons'
There was plenty of time to dwell on the result. Five hours in fact, as the coach crawled through Croydon before spluttering its way around the M25. And then a funny thing happened. As the clock ticked and the mood darkened, the black humour of the football fan kicked in. A quirk of the fixture list meant that the very next league game would see Wolves sent straight back to Selhurst Park to face Crystal Palace. We had to go. We had to banish the demons of this horrible day.
When I think of these trips nearly a decade on, I am reminded of Colin Montgomerie’s comment after blowing the US Open at Winged Foot in 2006: “See you next year for another disaster.” We only had to wait a fortnight. Indeed, looking back to the build-up to that second game, there was the distinct air of grim foreboding rarely tasted outside of a Thomas Hardy novel. There I was. There was Dan. There were our coach seats - the same coach seats. And there was that same awful journey into the depths of south London.
I knew we’d made a terrible mistake long before Wayne Routledge – making his full league debut - opened the scoring for Palace after just 56 seconds. A brace from our former forward Dougie Freedman didn’t help the mood but by the time the home side fired home their fourth it would be fair to say I was hysterical. At the final whistle, I could sense in Denis Irwin’s eyes that he knew what was coming this time. And I was pretty sure he, like me, was wondering why he bothered.
They do say the night is darkest just before the dawn and so it proved. Wolves ended a top-flight exile of nearly 20 years that season. As I celebrated promotion at the Millennium Stadium the following May, I afforded myself a quick glance around the stands. And I liked to think that the fans with the biggest smiles on their faces were the ones who’d endured those miserable trips to south London earlier in that campaign.
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More in this series:
Breaking down at the Britannia Stadium