B-Side Songs — Terrace Edition

Images: Han Balk

Words and supporting images: Tom Reed

Cover image: Tom Reed

I find chorus now

Reflections of myself

Let it all out

Just let it all out

To find, the feeling

DMA’s. Delete.

It all began to make sense.

A sticker that said, simply, “Go Ahead” on the door in the Nick Owen lounge at Luton Town FC.

Some guys in the smoking area at Kenilworth Road from “Day-Venter”.

A blast from the past of childhood memories of weird team names.

Go Ahead Eagles.

Turn left out of the station in Deventer and left again at the Sun Moon Restaurant Lounge, you go through a tunnel where the Eagles crew would wait for the away support from Zwolle and Twente and other Dutch cities we only hear about on TV show Eurogoals.

This was pre-mobile phone, so sometimes 30 would turn up, but other times 300, giving the Deventer guys something to think about.

Through the tunnel and you can see the floodlights of De Adelaarshorst (the Eagle’s Nest), poking over the top of shops and houses. You don’t need a GPS when you’ve got these hulking great structures securing the neighbourhood, like pins in a photo frame.

Deventer is a picture book pretty city but one of contrasts, the rough with the smooth. It needs its football club, the first working class team to become Dutch champions in a sport dominated by those formed at cricket clubs and boarding schools.

This city was skilled with metal, making bed-frames, bikes and the like. That industry is all but gone and the crunching of the Thomassen & Drijver canning factory, a mile away from the ground, has been replaced with the plastic patter of computer keyboards in offices.

Some clubs creep up on you, but not Go Ahead Eagles, it is announced several streets away, with various visual reminders that the neighbourhood is fond of its football team.

Go Ahead stickers on a post box, some knitted red and yellow pennants hanging over a garden gate, flags strutting out of rooves.

There’s an ornate Go Ahead Eagles bench outside a house in the Voorstad with detailed etchings and candelabras and the owners will talk to you about it and let you take photos.

It’s very normal to be proud of Go Ahead Eagles in Deventer.

The proximity to housing is just one of the similarities with Kenilworth Road, a pair of the few remaining higher-level grounds in Europe, where a stray football clearing the stands could legitimately endanger people’s windows.

Ludwig lives nearby too, a Go Ahead and Luton supporter, it was his stickers in the Nick Owen lounge, which he deposited after taking shelter during a bad storm in Bedfordshire.

He’ll sort guys from Deventer with tickets for Kenilworth Road and he knows the Hatters’ fans who have season tickets at De Adelaarshorst. He’ll show you round if you know who Mike Small is.

He can tell you the story about those Deventer floodlights, the giant black electric pylons brought in at short notice after Go Ahead were drawn to play Celtic in the 1965 European Cup Winners’ Cup.

Before that, there was no artificial lighting and matches had to kick-off at 2.30pm on a Sunday so players could actually see the ball.

Jannie, has lived through it all, a legendary supporter in her seventies, who volunteers at the club.

She never appears to stand still on match-day and represents the work ethic of the team that just gets on with it. You’ll see her carrying a bucket here, moving a box there and the players stopping for a chat.

The B-Side of Deventer behind the goal have a chant for her which goes “Jannie maak ze gek!” which translates to “Jannie drive them crazy” as this retired lady with a deceptive turn of pace sprints past with a giant flag during matches.

And Jannie does drive the B-Side crazy, the Go Ahead home end which has, like her, seen many a sight over the years. The biggest open terrace in the Dutch Eredivisie, with its commanding metal crush barriers and red stairs that run like blood.

“Proud 2 be an Eagle, from generation 2 generation” reads some graffiti on the back wall, which just about sums it up; sons and daughters following fathers and mothers in climbing the steps and finding a place on the B-Side.

Behind the stand there’s an old barrier tagged the B-Side News in which fans would go to find out about the latest goings on and away trips to god knows where. Fans would put up posters advertising a “coach to Groningen” and the chance to get whacked over the head by the Z-Side using this DIY precursor to the internet.

In a quirk of fate, tonight’s match is against Vitesse, the team that graced the very first floodlit match at De Adelaarshorst. Go Ahead have not beaten the team from Arnhem at home since 1987 but after going nine unbeaten, expectations are high.

In the Brink square, fans get together with jugs of Grolsch and Dutch ditties and light pyro in between the twinkling of a city getting ready for Christmas.

Back at the stadium, the Go Ahead Ultras known as ADHD, ready their flags and banners in their shipping container HQ, drink and turn up the hardcore trance music ready for the business ahead.

De Adelaarshorst fills up quickly with fans doing the quintessential walk (or cycle) to the ground, bathed in a white shower of the floodlights cranked on to do their thing.

A bird-handler has brought an actual American bald eagle that will sit on your shoulder, taking the avian connotation to new levels.

Families and friends greet each other warmly, in a get together welcomed more than Christmas dinner and get stuck into the serious job of downing pints.

The click-clack of the B-Side turnstiles is continuous, as a snake of entrants passes through to unite trainer soles with concrete stairs.

This is a club that has stripped football back to one of moments, which the stadium itself invites to occur before your eyes.

And that it does, a protest tifo from ADHD against the Sunday 8pm kick-off, firecrackers and the teams taking to the pitch to “coming down the road” from the Tartan Army.

The B-Side throngs with fans and sways like a 15 pint night except there’s nowhere to slump and everyone holds each other up.

Go Ahead start strongly and get a chance in the eighth minute when Evert Linthorst is brought down by the gloriously named Ryan Flamingo of Vitesse. Midfielder Philippe Rommens steps up to curl home a cute 25-yard top-corner free-kick.

The B-Side gets a lovely lager shampoo and Go Ahead start to swagger.

A second comes on 20 minutes as Flamingo falters once more to leave Rommens to lash home into the bottom corner.

“You’re fucking shit” chants the B-Side at the toiling away team, in the exact same tempo and intonation as it’s sung in English.

The Eagles really should have the game put to bed but Mats Deijl strikes the post when clear and lets a half-decent counter-attacking side back in.

Matus Bero notches for Vitesse with a shinner on 49 minutes, which brings about the sort of 2-1 vulnerability that even Jannie and her flag can’t stem.

Then, in this stadium of moments, Vitesse grab a 96th minute equaliser when the ball falls fortunately for the syllable busting Simon van Duivenbooden to rifle home from close range.

The Arnhem support are up on the fence and you can hear the roar in the quiet Sunday streets of Deventer that feels its football club so much.

There’s a gate at De Adelaarshorst which reads the “Home Of Football”, which is quite an audacious claim but, following a match here, you can believe that this is the centre of things, even for 90 minutes in the East of Holland.

Post-match banter goes on in the city centre bars about Rommens and Kingsley Obiekwu and whose round it is, just like they do in Luton about Carlton Morris and Enoch Showumni and who’s fronting the cost of a several jugs of Madri.

That’s what football should be about, toasting players that only we care about, in our little kingdoms that no-one gives a fuck about apart from us, fighting battles that only we’ll remember.

Finding a chorus of how football can be.

And the lights of a fading English terrace culture shine on in Deventer.