Darren is a director at The Fan  Experience Company.

He has a background in working on customer service excellence projects in the UK and Europe, and an MBA that included studying in the United States.

A UEFA Mentor and fan experience and engagement consultant, Darren works with associations, league and clubs across Europe to improve the match-day experience and increase attendance through engagement with fans. He assessed games at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.

You know what they say….you wait for ages for an advertising board incident at a football match, then two come along at once.

Well, that’s sort a cannibalising what they say a little bit, but you get the gist.

Bizarrely, over the last full weekend of August, celebrating supporters caused a perimeter board to fall and fans spill onto the pitch in two games less than twenty-four hours apart.

In the Swansea versus Cardiff derby, a player was injured and a day previously, eagle-eyed West Ham United players pulled a ball boy free after he was momentarily stuck under a board as fans surged forward when Tomas Soucek scored the away team’s opening goal.

It took me back forty years, to Valentine’s Day 1984, when my beloved club (Walsall) had their second biggest day in the sun with a run all the way to the semi-finals of the League Cup (it was the Milk Cup at the time, the start of a sponsoring initiative that would eventually morph into the Carabao Cup).

Champagne Charlies 

It was a very different cup in those days, for fans and players. None of this single game and straight-to-penalties lark. The first two rounds were played over two-legs, Walsall beating Blackpool and then Barnsley on aggregate. A win over Shrewsbury Town took us to Highbury to face Arsenal, but it was Walsall celebrating afterwards, not the Gunner’s striker ‘Champagne Charlie’ Nicholas, in a repeat of the club’s most famous moment (a 2-0 FA Cup win in 1933 against an Arsenal side that was on the way to three consecutive league titles and contained three-quarters of the then-mighty England team).

A win at Rotherham in the quarter-final secured a place in the last-four along with Liverpool, Everton and Aston Villa. With our luck as it was – and still is – we avoided the struggling Blues, the local derby with Villa and instead the virtually unbeatable Reds were plucked from the hat. Liverpool were the dominant force in England and in Europe at the time; about to win a fourth European Cup (Champions League for anyone born this century but where ONLY the league winners were invited) in just eight years and soon to beat Benfica 5-1 on aggregate on the way to the final in Rome.

I can still recall almost every moment of the first-leg. Ticketless, we purchased some for the home end in an Anfield that had plenty of empty seats on the night. Imagine that now, even with a capacity that has grown to over sixty thousand seats. There was no squad rotation either then. The home team had Grobbelaar, Rush, Hansen, Lawrenson, Dalglish, Souness et al at their disposal, although the latter two were injured and missed the first leg. But somehow, Walsall somehow equalised – twice - to keep the tie level going into the second leg at Fellows Park.

As a young fan it was incredible, and as it was also my first season of attending live games on a regular basis I had no comprehension that it was so unique. If I’d known, for example, that it probably wouldn’t happen again in my lifetime, I might have enjoyed it even more. As it happened, I thought it would be a more regular occurrence. I can almost hear the fans of Wolves and West Brom chuckling as I typed that bit.

90 Minutes from Europe

By coincidence, at the start of that season, Walsall FC had been used in an ad campaign by British Airways that proclaimed ‘They are only 90 minutes away from a place Europe’ – suggesting that even little old Walsall could get to the rest of the continent by hopping on a plane at a regional airport. They were – and still are - the only West Midlands club not to compete in a European competition although if UEFA introduce any more of those, you never know. The last laugh was almost on the airline, as they were now 90 minutes from Wembley, although not from Europe as they’d have needed to beat Everton in the final too to reach the Cup-Winners-Cup. It was wrongly assumed by some that as Everton went on to win the FA Cup that season, Walsall would have qualified for the then-UEFA Cup even if they had lost the final, but that’s not the case.

And in any case, ideas of a trip to Tirana or Trabzonspor were a moot point. Despite creating the better chances and missing a couple of sitters, Walsall were eventually beaten 2-0 and the dream was over.

But what’s this got to do with fans, you ask? Well, I’m getting there but allow me to indulge in a little nostalgia given this sort of thing happens to Walsall at a similar frequency to asteroids wiping out the dinosaurs.

Cup runs are relatively rare for lower league teams, no matter what Newport County tell you, but Walsall have reached the third round this season for the first time in a decade and will play Leicester City before the end of this month, although in the practice draw a day before the real one, they were paired with Arsenal. Which closes the lid of the practice makes perfect debate once and for all.

But back to 1983/4. When Liverpool’s second and decisive goal went in, the wall behind the goal at the Laundry End collapsed as fans surged forward. It was a very unique (at the time) incident, given even higher profile by being a major cup semi-final and televised later that evening (it was not shown live on TV in those days).

The similarities were there with last weekend although this was much more serious. Some fans were injured, and Graeme Souness helped by carrying some of them to safety. Luckily, the injuries were fairly minor, and a potential tragedy was avoided. But it also foreshadowed darker times as wall collapses and perimeter fences had a part to play in the catastrophes at Heysel and Hillsborough later in the decade.

At the time, the subtle -  but nevertheless enlightening - warning signs were missed and football moved on. As it often tends to do.

Worrying Signs 

So maybe it’s time to use these incidents at Swansea and Selhurst Park as reminders that things can go wrong. It was a player and a ball boy this time who were hurt, and not seriously, but let’s not dismiss it as a freak accident too easily.  It only takes a fan to fall the wrong way, to land on a child or hit their head and we could easily be looking at a much bigger issue or even a tragedy that was easily avoidable if action had been taken.

We don’t want to squeeze any more joy out of goal celebrations – crikey, VAR has done enough of that already – in stadiums, but it’s a timely reminder that sometimes things can get out of hand. Fans are unlikely to change their behaviours of their own volition, but additional safety checks, visual reminders such as posters etc and even inspections of the sturdiness of the perimeter boards might be a useful way to avert future problems. Health and safety gets a bad rep, but it’s there for a reason.

As this article proves, these kind of incidents are as rare as Walsall cup runs but they can – and occasionally – do take place.

Let’s not look back at some stage in the future and say, ‘if only we’d paid more attention to what happened in August 2024.’

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