Your Villa Stories

Hey we recently launched a new Blog and Jonny Gould kindly did a piece as a guest writer, it was a great look back to his first game as a fan. With over 3100 reads it's been hugely popular and we've been asking for more stories on twitter and we'd like to create this thread to share them. I'll link to JG piece and have a read if you haven't already. We want your memories, be it the first game, a significant other game, a particular special memory, or just Your Story of how you became a Villa fan.      

https://bellsareringing.forumotion.com/t1353-a-trip-down-memory-lane-with-jonny-gould

I'll be adding my own memories at some point and I'm sure the team will as well. I'll also be linking to this thread on Twitter to get as many contributions as we can. UTV

Howard Hodgson gave me his Villa story last week, well here it is. It's a great read:

1. Why Villa?- I come from a family of five generations worth of Aston Villa supporters. It was therefore never an option to support anyone else not that I would have wanted to or had reason to, back in 1977 as Villa were flying under Ron Saunders and had wonderful players like Little, Gray, Gidman, Cropley playing a wonderful brand of football- Oh how I yearn for those days!

2. First Villa Park Match Attended?- Aston Villa 2-0 Everton, Feb 5th 1977.  I do remember it although my Dad maintains I was more interested in writing down the halftime scores!

3. First Villa Hero?- Without question Brian Little. He was our George Best.. Long hair and amazing talent. The ball was glued to his feet. He had everything and not only scored plenty, but created plenty as well. I really did think he could walk on water! Andy Gray was close behind. My Dad took me to meet him at Bodymoor Heath (Old one) and I was so excited but when it came to meeting him I couldn't talk… Completely starstruck!

4. Ultimate Villa Legend?- That's a tough question.. Player wise it's a toss up for me between Brian Little and Paul McGrath, both genius's. However for me the ultimate Villa Legend is Ron Saunders. He took us over in 1974 in the old second division and immediately got us promoted and won the League Cup in the same season! You might think it would be all downhill after such an impressive first season but Ron was just getting started. In 1976/77 we smashed the mighty Liverpool (Best team in Europe at the time) 5-1 at Villa Park and finished 4th in the league with an incredible home record of played 21, won 17, drawn 3 and lost only 1! We also won the League Cup again, this time V Everton, and after 2 replay's! Most will remember the Chris Nicholl piledriver!

Then Saunders achieved what only great managers can.. Having built one great side that played great football, won 2 league cups and was very competitive in the top flight, he was clever enough and brave enough to build another side which went on to even greater glory. That takes a great deal of skill, judgement and guts as many of the players he let go were extremely popular at the time and had been great for the club but Saunders had a goal and if you weren't going to do it his way, you weren't going to survive at Aston Villa. He also lost two of our best players to career finishing injuries in Brian Little and Alex Cropley. Sound familiar? It's very similar to what Alex Ferguson achieved at Manchester United and in his case, many times over. If Ron Saunders had been allowed to stay at the club, who knows how many more great Villa teams he could have built and what state we would be in today?… "If only" can often be associated with Aston Villa!

Anyway he did bring the biggest prizes to the club before he was forced to leave with Villa becoming Champions of England in 1980-81 and European Champions in 1981-82.. He resigned in Feb 1981 with Villa in the quarter finals of the European Cup and his assistant Tony Barton went on to guide the club to the final in Rotterdam and famously becoming only the fourth English club at the time (Only 5 to this day) to lift the famous trophy. The pinnacle for any European football club! Barton was a lovely man and I went to his funeral when he died in 1993 aged just 56. However he'd be the first to admit these trophies were Saunders legacy and his work so for that reason Ron Saunders is definitely the ultimate Villa legend in my eyes followed closely by Sir William McGregor who of course without his work, they may have not been an Aston Villa or a Professional football league!

5. Favourite Villa Memory?- There have been many- Rotterdam, beating Everton 6-2 in 89/90, Tranmere semi final epic, all the wins V Blues, both Inter Milan epics, 1994 and 1996 league cup final victories plus many others. However the one that sticks out and is my most iconic memory is actually associated with a Villa defeat!.. I explain below in a quote from a previous interview:

I have many memories... Good and bad... One that sticks out is actually a defeat in 1981 as we were going for the title.. It was a cold midweek night (although April) and we were playing our main rivals for the title.. Ipswich Town at Villa Park. Bearing in mind we hadn't won the league since 1909/10 this was huge!
It was being dubbed "The Title decider"..

We lost 2-1 despite a late goal by Gary Shaw and as a 8 year old running back up the hill to Aston Hall where we parked the car I said to my Dad with tears running down my cheeks.. "Well that's it isn't it Daddy.. We won't be champions now and probably never will be!" My Dad stopped and turned to me and said.. "Now listen here son... It's not over by a long shot, you follow?" He said it with such belief I did follow!

Ron Saunders that night stood on the Villa Park pitch and said virtually the same thing to the TV interviewer and actually said wearing his black leather jacket "Would you bet against us?" He said it with such conviction you just had to believe him! 
A few weeks later we were Champions of England and a year later Champions of Europe..
My Dad and Ron had been proved right and I realised properly for the first time just what a special club I was supporting… As the saying goes "You don't choose Aston Villa, it chooses you." Well 33 years on, plenty of heartache and living a round trip of 360 miles away I'm still very much in love with my club and am grateful it did decide to choose me! Villa till I die!

I can't be arsed with a long-winded reply but first Villa game was a 1-1 draw with Soton in 1994, I remember screaming at them and a bloke in front turned around laughing and said "you bloody tell 'em kid"

First Villa hero was Tommy Johnson - this was purely because my mate was a better player and always claimed himself as Dwight Yorke - and ultimate hero is Paul McGrath.

Favourite memory? I dunno. The wins against Blues are obviously up there. The cup wins in 94 and 96 too. But one I'll always remember is also a loss. Liverpool 4-3 in the milk cup in 2002 (I think). A night game, under floodlights, kickoff delayed. The atmosphere was electric and the fight the Villa showed even in defeat was brilliant.

Villa_Dan wrote:I can't be arsed with a long-winded reply but first Villa game was a 1-1 draw with Soton in 1994, I remember screaming at them and a bloke in front turned around laughing and said "you bloody tell 'em kid"

First Villa hero was Tommy Johnson - this was purely because my mate was a better player and always claimed himself as Dwight Yorke - and ultimate hero is Paul McGrath.

Favourite memory? I dunno. The wins against Blues are obviously up there. The cup wins in 94 and 96 too. But one I'll always remember is also a loss. Liverpool 4-3 in the milk cup in 2002 (I think). A night game, under floodlights, kickoff delayed. The atmosphere was electric and the fight the Villa showed even in defeat was brilliant.

Cheers Dan. Doesn't matter how long or short people's views are, that's perfect. I totally forgot about that 4-3 game. I was so gutted we lost that, truly gutted. Wasn't on past 11pm or something mad like that? What a night, let's hope we see more of those nights in the future at VP UTV

Hi folks - probably a bit to raw for a blog (okay if you remove 2 Piss, 1 Bastards, 1 bullshit and one shithouse and replace with asterisks!!) and I know it's a bit self indulgent to repeat a post, but as I posted it nearly a year ago, I'm sure peeps won't mind me re-posting it:

One day in May, 1982 – a story of my trip to the European Cup Final

I was a Lucas apprentice, and we used to attend day release at Erdington Technical College. Most of the lads in the class were Villa, and when we got through that troubled semi against Anderlecht (remember the Sun cartoon with Argentinian General Galtieri shouting “run, they’re parachuting Aston Villa Hooligans in” – it was the height of the Falklands war) it was a case of “how are we going to get tickets to the final?”

I think there were supposed to be sanctions against the club after the semi, and only fans that were part of the official Lion’s club were supposed to travel/get allocated tickets.

I had a mate called Simon Burns – everyone called him Robbie, naturally. He used to drink at a pub called The Buccaneer over at Streetly (I think it’s gone now) and he reckoned that tickets were easy to get, was I on for one – of course I was.

Anyway, it turns out that a couple of the pub regulars were over in Germany doing building work, and they’d bought tickets – apparently there didn’t seem to be any control, so they’d block-purchased around 50 odd (of course, we didn’t know at the time but these weren’t in the Villa part of the stadium – more on that later) which made a mockery of the sanctions.

Anyway, we all convened at the Buccaneer around 7pm on the Tuesday evening, and the way it worked out, we were sailing from Dover to Ostend the next morning early doors, so the coach was due to pick us up from the Buccaneer at 10.30pm – can you imagine the state everyone was in by closing time (which 10.30 was in those days!?). I remember an older bloke called Johnny Ray (like the singer I guess) and a couple of others, but it wasn’t my part of town (Castle Bromwich was where I lived at the time) so I didn’t know many faces. I do remember one guy who’d been forbidden by his missus to go to the Final, and he’d concocted some plan that he was going down the off licence (he’d sneaked his passport/some money, but – and this is absolutely true – in order she wasn’t suspicious, he come out in his slippers. So basically this bloke went to Rotterdam in his slippers – never did find out what happened to him when he got home.

I remember the coach journey was brutal – everyone smashed and singing Villa songs, and there was NO toilet on the coach, so not only were we stopping every 30 mins so people could pile off and piss on the M1 hard shoulder, but in between, people had decided to pee in the empty beer cans – a delicate operation if sober – God knows what injuries were inflicted in the state most people were in. The beer cans were then carefully put into bin liners, ready to take off at Dover. Of course, it took about 5 mins before the bin liner was kicked over, so the coach was now awash with piss. The only thing giving us hope was that we’d take all the bags off at Dover. We get to Dover, a bad tempered Customs Officer jumps on board and says “right all of you off with your passports, and I don’t want to see as much as one beer can come off this coach”. Oops, again, can’t remember how that one got resolved, but we must have been bunging the driver a fair bit for him not to go mental.

I was sobering up on the ferry, I do remember there almost been some trouble – there were a few lads from London going across for other reasons, and I remember hearing two Villa boys deciding whether to start on them or not – I’m glad they didn’t though, so the rest of the journey passed pretty uneventfully, if a little tense.

We got to Rotterdam and were dropped off outside the ground, sometime in the middle of the day – it was a sea of Villa – claret and blue everywhere. The pub outside the ground was called The Cup, which pleased the lads from Sutton who drank in The Cup back in brum – a home from home. I remember there being lots of Bayern fans as well, and I could speak a little bit of German so I basically spent my whole time being called over by different groups in the pub to translate. It was a really superb atmosphere in The Cup, the German fans were really generous, insisting on keeping buying the rounds. I swapped my shirt with a Bayern fan (I still have it at home) and spent the rest of the time in Bayern colours (oh dear!).

I remember some of the old Dutch people who lived around the area egging us on to start trouble against the Bayern fans – they knew we had a reputation, partly from all of the “English Disease” prevalent in our football at the time, and more specifically because of the Anderlecht game. I couldn’t believe how much these old people hated the Germans – a legacy of wartime occupation – but they looked genuinely disappointed that we didn’t start fighting with the Bayern fans.

I remember about 25 people steaming into an off licence and whilst it was mayhem in there, a few of us (and I’m not proud of this) draped a union jack over a full crate of wine and just walked out with the whole crate. I remember it was sweet white wine and warm, and we had to force the corks down into the bottle as no-one had a corkscrew. That ruined us really, so much so that the actual game was a bit of a blur, which I regret as I would have liked clear memories of the match, oh,  and I had a weapons-grade headache later on.

I do know that the tickets we had were supposed to be for the Bayern fans, but we weren’t alone – I shudder to think how many black market tickets were purchased, because it was massed ranks of Villa all around, with a few pockets of Bayern fans looking pretty nervous about being swamped in an area they thought would be red and white.

As I said, I don’t remember much about the match, other than when we scored I fell down about 5 rows of seats – it was really steep, and also the overwhelming noise of the Villa fans – in what was an open air stadium.

One strange near-event happened to me as I exited the ground. I could sense someone walking towards me with intent, just out of the corner of my eye. It was a bloke in a Villa shirt and I said “alright mate”. He said in a cockney accent, you lucky bastard, I was just about to fill you in (I still had that Bayern shirt on). He might have been London Villa, but there was a lot of talk of London firms going over for trouble, and they’d bought Villa shirts to blend in – never really did find out whether he was genuine Villa or not, and he wasn’t the type of bloke I could ask – proper scary!

Job done, we headed for home on the coach. I remember somewhere in Holland we stopped for a van of Villa fans – the van had broken down, the driver was happy to stay and get it fixed, but asked if we had any room for the 4 lads with him, as they had work the next day. We piled them onto our coach, but they had to sit/lie on the (dry, thank God) floor. We crossed into Belgium and suddenly we were being waved down by a police Porsche and told to pull in. They got on the coach and started kicking the lads who were in the aisle. A few people jumped up to have it out with them, then realised they were armed with machine pistols – I’ve never seen people sit back down so fast. The police said a coach fitting our description had people on it who had stolen footballs from a display at the previous services. Well it wasn’t any of us thankfully, so they had to let us go as there were no footballs on board. We all reckoned it was bullshit, and a bit of payback from the Belgian police for the Anderlecht troubles.

One great memory I have is that as we passed through London (and some of the lads on the coach had taken out the skylights and were sitting on the roof with their legs dangling through - I said that coach driver must have had a fantastic tip from us!), loads of people were clapping us and giving the thumbs up when they realised who we were and where we’d come back from – I thought that was great – it almost felt like we’d won the European Cup, not the actual team – it was nice to feel a bit of hero worship.

I got dropped off at Erdington around midday – and this is absolutely true – I walked straight into class (day release was a Thursday), and sat a couple of my second year engineering exams that afternoon – with no voice, a massive hangover and still wearing that Bayern Munich top – now that, my friends,, at 18 years old, in Erdington, was kudos!
The only real regret other than being too drunk to remember the game very well, was that when we’d got back to Dover and got taken off the coach whilst Customs searched it, I stupidly left my programme on the seat, and when I got back, some shithouse – either Customs or fellow traveller, had knicked it.

So there you have it – not a remarkable story, but it is a first-hand account of my journey to see the greatest day in Villa’s history – warts and all! If you’ve read this far, thanks, and I hope I haven’t bored you too much

Brilliant DeKuip, a fantastic read mate

Epic DK!

I had to ask my Dad what my first game was. I remember it like it was yesterday but not for footballing reasons - despite us beating Liverpool 3-1.

I recall standing behind the Witton wondering what sights lay beyond that wall. I could already hear the sound and I don't think I blinked for the next half hour. People would stop and ask where I got my Villa jumper and pom pom hat. "Nan knitted it", I'd reply with great pride.

To this day whenever I smell a cigar I'm instantly transported back to that day: the smell of them beneath that stand was, to my young nostrils, overwhelming. As was the sea of claret and blue. I'd never seen so much of it in one place at one time. Seeing kids at school or on my estate wearing the colours always grabbed the eye and quickened the heart but this...this was nirvana! It was like everyone there at that moment were friends and family.

But the best moment was yet to come.

Dad said "You might remember this bit for the rest of your life.". Seems he was right.

Walking up the steps my eyes were filled with green. This luminous grass that seemed overwhelmingly massive. Surely they don't play on this whole thing? It's massive! Much bigger than what I was expecting compared to the pitches at school.

The size. The curve (for drainage, Dad said,  whatever that was about). The lights! I'd seen the famous AV floodlights before driving past Villa Park and had made my own subbuteo version but here they were for real blazing in full glory. My God!

And then I realised that there was a soundtrack to go along with this epic movie.   A constant buzz randomly interrupted with a wall of noise coming from my left. And then the Villa came out onto the pitch. My eyes must have been like saucers,  my ears on the verge of bleeding. I'll never forget that sound. And, as a result, never understand this modern-day namby pamby sterilised version that Sky have encouraged.

I don't remember who scored first or when but when Villa found the net, it was frightening. Everyone went up around me first in expectation then in an explosion of sound!

I felt sure that the Witton was going to collapse before the night was out but I joined in and stamped my feet along with everyone else knowing if the stand did fall down, I'd be in big trouble from mum when I got home for my part in it.

As I say, the match itself  was secondary and I don't think I could tell you a single thing about it. But that night I fell in love with Aston Villa. How could I not?

Thanks Dad.

De Kuip and Trotters, I want to give you both great big man hugs. Brilliant stuff.

 

Some brilliant content here chaps. Exactly what we're after. That first glimpse of the famous old turf and the sheer size and vividness of the green will forever be etched on all our minds and hearts. Love my club, even when I don't like to very much.

Think this is the appropriate place to put this here. Brings a lump to my throat...

This is brilliant too....

http://m.bbc.com/sport/football/31756575

Trotters wrote:This is brilliant too....

http://m.bbc.com/sport/football/31756575

Both very Stirring and powerful!!

"We have a majestic name" magic words from David Bradley, and Trotters your first game recollections gave me goose bumps.