by Frank Keating,
Thursday June 1, 2000
from the on-line Guardian. Read the original article.
That soaring red-bricked neo-Victorian glory which identified Birmingham's Villa Park the world over lay in an exhausted heap yesterday morning, nothing more than an anonymous pile of builders' rubble.
At Southampton the endearing Dell braces itself for similar oblivion. So, after all the ifs and buts and hints of reprieve, do Wembley's twin towers - and after last night's penultimate show, they will stand sentinel to only one two more football matches (the Charity Shield, then England v Germany in October) before being wiped off the face of the earth. Which comes next? Highbury? Goodison Park? Craven Cottage? The bulldozing ghouls of progress
tread on old friends as well as dreams.
Stadiums are coming down and going up all over England. New stadiums - swish, sleek, characterless and crazily exorbitant cathedrals to steel and concrete and corporate hospitality - are coming out of our ears. I suppose they are necessary. I am certain they are not allowing much time for goodbyes.
Not that "gleaming" new means plain sailing. Already since the autumn 17 international matches have been played below that steepling cliff face which is Cardiff's new stadium - but interest repayments apparently remain cripplingly scary.
I could have wept when I saw the television pictures showing the demolition of Villa Park's Trinity Road stand. To all intents that proud red-brick fortress was the architectural signature not only of Aston Villa but, somehow, of urban English football itself and its rise and rise from the roots of the Industrial Revolution.
In fact, it was only 76 years old. But Trinity Road and I go back a long time. I daresay I would not have been crouching in this corner on top of this column if it had not been for Trinity Road. A half-century ago on a January Saturday, my father took me up on the train from Gloucester. A tram from the Bull Ring deposited us, agape, in the excited toing-and-froing pre-match mayhem below the overwhelmingly mountainous and roseate edifice.
No other football ground in the whole world boasted such a grand facade, nor a more theatrically welcoming one - with its breathtaking and classical central stairway, its pavilion turrets and Dutch gables and mosaic embellishments. Pastoral county cricket at Cheltenham did not count. It was the first immense and concentrated sporting throng I had been swept up, up and away in - and I was hook-line-and-sinkered for life.
Villa beat Fulham 3-0. It was a good Villa team and from deep recesses I recall such names as Harry Parkes, Johnny Dixon, Con Martin, Amos Moss and Larry Canning (who became a BBC sports reporter). I should by rights, after such a ravishing introduction, have become a Villa supporter for life.
But my Dad said he had known in London before the war the stalwart Fulham full-back Joe Bacuzzi - and that we would wait for me to get his autograph after the game. And so we did - and so, just because of that big man's smiling handshake and flamboyant signature, was my lifelong allegiance to Fulham FC there and then pronounced and sealed. (How we have been unequivocally lumbered with our team would make a good book sometime).
Anyway, no more Villa Park's Trinity Road defining edifice. This week's pile of rubble surprised even those closest. One fan, Ian Robathan, had launched a belated preservation campaign. He remains resentful at the club keeping plans in the dark - "and angry that we didn't do more to save this final link with Villa's great Victorian heritage".
Another sorrowful Villa fan is the football grounds' history addict, the author Simon Inglis. The latest classic from Inglis is Sightlines (Yellow Jersey, £18), a glorious stadium odyssey in which he tramps his obsession round the world - and where, by chance, he finds the senior supervisor building the swish new national stadium in the Lebanon to be none other than Tony Dorsett - son of Dickie Dorsett ("the Brownhills Bomber"), who was Villa's inside-left when they played that auspicious game against Fulham 50 Januaries ago... Exits and entrances, what comes down goes up and what goes around comes around.
From Paul Johnson
Unfortunately Dickie Dorsett didn't play in the January 1951 game. He played 4 times against Fulham; with two of these games at left-back and one at left-half.
For reference the 13 January 1951 team was:
Jones(K)
Lynn
Parkes
Canning
Martin(JC)
Moss(Amos)
Dixon(J)
Thompson(T)
Walsh
Goffin
Smith(LG)
with the 3 goals being scored by:
- Johnny "FA Cup" Dixon
- Stan "the wham" Lynn from a penalty
- and a Fulham own goal.
