Just been reading this on the rivals site. Thought it was a good read.
The Infamous Stoke City
By Oatcake Admin - 02/12/2007 18:52
Take from Issue 429 of The Oatcake fanzine. A look at Stoke City's unsavoury supporters reputation!
Down the years Stoke City supporters have been involved in their fair share of trouble and, it can't be denied, many have acted in such a way as to drag the name of the club through the mud.
The club have been trying for years to do something about the situation and, as well as issuing one of the highest numbers of banning orders in the country, have also instigated the ID Card Scheme to control just who and who can't travel to our away games.
From my very earliest memories of Stoke City there was always an undercurrent of danger and hostility in the air, especially at the Victoria Ground. You could sense that trouble was never very away and even as a young child I know that fighting at football matches was something for which Stoke City supporters were notorious.
I can well recall the endless skirmishes that took place on the road outside the main Boothen Stand entrance, before and after games. I remember the lads who used to wear the white butcher coats and suspecting that they might have a cleaver or something similar hidden in their somewhere.
As a kid though avoiding trouble was never that difficult. You either walked a different way to avoid it, or else you walked straight through it. Nobody was interested in hitting a kid.
The problems started as you grew up and became an older teenager. Not only would opposing supporters be more than willing to treat you as a legitimate target, but so would the police as well!
And that's it really, it's always been there. As far back as I can recall it has always seemed to be a very part of the fabric of the supporter base. The numbers who were ever actively involved may have been no more than a few hundred but the number who secretly, or even openly, admired their exploits was several times greater!
As football hooliganism really started to come to public prominence in the early 1980s (though it had been going on pretty much unchecked through most if the 1970s) I can recall two incidents which made the national press and which both involved Stoke supporters.
One was a game against Manchester United, which turned into a pitched battle in the streets of Stoke, the other was the opening day of the season at Everton when Stoke fans travelled en masse to Goodison Park, fought running battles throughout the day with the home supporters and police, and then let off a smoke grenade on the terraces.
There's no doubting that Stoke City have been major contributors to the tapestry of English football hooliganism and it is a measure of how deeply ingrained it is in the minds of many of our supporters that even after these years of ID Cards and all of the banning orders made we are still considered, as a club, to one of the highest risk probabilities out there.
Trouble at the Britannia Stadium hasn't always been hooligan related as such. The pitch invasion that followed the 7-0 thrashing by Birmingham City was a protest that turned extremely ugly, as some supporters stormed the Waddington Suite to vent their anger at the club's board of directors.
Similarly, the pitch invasion and demonstration that followed the 4-1 hammering by Bristol Rovers more than a year later was a display of anger and frustration at those responsible for reducing the club and the team to such a sorry state of affairs.
Although I would argue passionately that the two pitch invasions mentioned above were entirely justified (though obviously not the storming of the Waddington Suite) as a way of displaying the outrage and concern at the state of our club, it has to be said it often doesn't take too much to light the very short fuse of the Stoke support and have a major incident on your hands.
I can well recall the final away day of the 1990/91 season when we travelled to Reading in large numbers (tough god knows why?) to observe the final nail being hammered into the coffin of the Alan Ball/Graham Paddon season. We had been pretty hopeless all season and we should have been celebrating seeing the back of the season. However, as the final whistle sounded and false rumours that Denis Smith had just resigned at Sunderland and was coming to Stoke, a chant of "Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough" from the Elm Park paddock mob to our right was enough to see several hundred Stokies scaling the fences and heading towards the fleeing Reading fans to show that they did indeed believe they were hard enough!
Now football hooliganism is never funny. It is anti-social, criminal and people can get very seriously hurt or even killed. However, if I can laugh at one thing hooligan related from all my years as a Stoke supporter it is the sight of those previously cocksure Reading fans trampling over each other to try and escape from the approaching Stoke fans they'd invited to come over. That wasn't the first time that Stoke had been involved in just such an incident that season either. Earlier in the campaign we'd had Grimsby fans come onto the pitch in their hundreds to challenge the Stoke support, only to then turn-tail and run for their lives when the Stoke fans themselves broke through the gates and spilled onto the pitch.
Inside the ground there have been other infamous incidents which have drawn national TV and media coverage.
The most memorable (for want of a better word) came at Birmingham in 1992 when the home fans came spilling onto the pitch to celebrate what they thought was an incredible injury time winning goal. By the time they realised that Cranny and Ronnie had managed to keep the ball out and that 6,500 Stoke fans were laughing their heads off at them the Birmingham fans just exploded with rage and attacked the away end.
That truly was one of the most incredible sights ever as hundreds of rivals fans fought each by the away end, with Stoke fans climbing up to fight those home supporters who were trying to make their way into the away end.
Time plays tricks with the memory and written recollections of events such as this can often add a veneer of glamour and even humour to the events. However, this was a day of genuine terror for many fans and it should not be forgotten that a Stoke supporter lost the sight in one of his eyes that day!
Just how serious these days can get was seen in 2000 when thousands of Stoke fans descended on the JJB Stadium to take on Wigan. Tensions were high after a large gang of Wigan fans had made their way into Hanley earlier in the season and attacked a much smaller group of Stoke fans.
The trip to Wigan was all about revenge and it was taken in terrible fashion as Stoke fans stormed out of the stands and across the pitch to take on a stunned and terrified Wigan support.
The fall-out from this though came at the end of the game when Police in full riot gear decided to start whacking anybody they felt like as Stoke fans tried to leave the ground. Several Stoke fans who'd had nothing to do with any trouble that day found themselves caught up in the mayhem and one was so badly injured that he was later able to sue the police for several thousand pounds, for criminal assault!
And it's incidents such as that Wigan game which serve to lay low one of the enduring myths about the lads at Stoke games who were involved in the trouble - the notion that somehow they were defending the ordinary supporters at away games.
It's a noble thought but it's completely bogus. If anything, having a firm like the one Stoke did tended to attract trouble and ordinary fans would often themselves being attacked in the mistaken belief that they were part of the Stoke crew which had arranged to meet the locals that day.
Since the ID Cards came in it's hard to recall any instances where the opposing firms have tried to attack the 'ordinary' Stoke support.
As much as things have changed in recent years you know that the undercurrent of feeling is still there for some people. A mistake that you should never make is to think that the people who get themselves involved in this trouble are not "real fans". The reality is that they care about Stoke City every bit as much as any supporter does. For them though this pride manifests itself in a territorial and pack-mentality way which ill always lead to one destination.
They may not care about the fear they spread through the hearts and minds of ordinary fans and they may brush aside the inconvenient reality of the harm their actions have on the club they follow but down deep in their hearts they care about the club.
And it is this very support which has made the hooligan element so difficult to amputate from Stoke. If they cared nothing about the club they'd have left years ago.
And as one generation of hooligans moves on so another will rise to replace it. Young lads will always congregate and fight for what they believe in. They always have and they always will.
If the hooligan problem at Stoke is ever to be really removed from the picture it will take more than ID Cards to get rid of it. Too many young lads have already grown up listening to stories of the Stoke hooligans of the past. They are already wise to new ways in which to show their 'support' for the club.
Reduced and marginalised though it may be, the hooligan problem at Stoke City will never truly go away!
