The best education for me was St James’ Park – All I want is for my son to experience the same | OneFootball

I recently wrote about young lads and going to football, in that article I happened to mention stone washed jeans and trainers, though I didn’t mention music.

Back in the nineties we were in an unprecedented “shocking” age of drug taking youngsters and Madchester, according to the tabloid press at the time.

If the press was to be believed, the drug-addled youth were out of control and even the government took steps to ban music with certain beats per minute.

It was as if two decades previously Punk Rock had never happened and the establishment had blinked and missed what was going on.

It was also the Kevin Keegan managerial era and that sense of optimism and a bring it on mentality abounded.

All my mates, the daft lads from the Gosforth area, were necking disco biscuits, sniffing poppers and riling the police with their antics up in the Milburn stand.

Ex-punks but now clubbers and still hardcore Newcastle United fans, frequenting away games. Especially London – here they could crash at mine and have an evening or nighttime of havoc and misdemeanors and at the same time rubbing shoulders with future art world celebrities.

All of my mates gave up their season tickets when the crew up in the Milburn stand were forcibly disbanded by the dispersal of season ticket holders, which many suspect/believe/know was done on police advice.

The same lads rarely visit St James’ Park now.

There is the occasion when me and my own daft lad meet with my mates and their kids and manage to get to a game, but the chances of it happening now are slim and getting slimmer, as football drifts away from its lifeblood, which is the working class.

My son is now a teenager and he should be going to games home and away with good salt of the earth folk nearer his age. The last person he needs to be with is a middle-aged bloke like me recalling times past and drinking with other cantankerous middle-aged men.

Kids need to get into the football.

I would be more than happy having a few beers on Gosforth High Street watching the football with my old mental mates, their bizarre stories in abundance. On condition that my lad was at the game with like-minded young guns having that shared social experience.

An experience that I was fortunate enough to have with my best mate and older brothers, learning and growing at the same time.

I work with kids in my day job and do my best and try to educate them.

The best education for me though was the moment I entered the East Stand Paddock in 1974 and could smell the damp turf, intermingled with the smell of the brewery drifting across Gallowgate.

Then of course to hear the nonsense banter of the crowd. That was an education that is immeasurable.