To the uninitiated, it must be a baffling state of affairs. We’re not talking about the Old Firm, after all, with its centuries of sectarian baggage. These are supposedly southern softies: the seaside, candy floss, kiss-me-quick hats, scenic walks on the South Downs, Howard’s Way, gin and tonics on the catamaran, and New Forest ponies. But on Sunday 21 March, the festering bitterness will reach boiling point in Portsmouth when Southampton pitch up for the first league meeting at Fratton Park since 1987–88, Pompey’s last top-flight campaign. Until this season, it was the club’s solitary spell in the big time since 1959.
You can take your piffling thirty years of hurt, it’s now forty-one since Pompey last finished above Saints and time, far from being a healer, has created a festering sore. As Steve Woodhead observes, ‘When I think of that club, I see a bunch of people who enjoy the status that should be ours and take it for granted.’
While once-proud Pompey, First Division champions in 1949 and 1950, slowly sank down the divisions – fans clinging to sepia-tinged photos of Dickinson, Harris, Reid, and Scoular – finally reaching the basement at the fag end of the 1970s, Saints were disappearing in the opposite direction, nudging their way into Division One for the first time in 1966. A decade later, under Lawrie McMenemy, they lifted the FA Cup as a Second Division outfit (though any Pompey fan will gleefully point out that their Wembley hero, Bobby Stokes, was a son of Portsmouth).
Promotion to Division One swiftly followed, as did the sensational signing of Kevin Keegan, whose bubble perm was the last thing anyone in a hastily-convened media scrum expected to see when McMenemy called a surprise press conference in July 1980. ‘I want you to meet somebody who will play a big part in Southampton’s future,’ he told the astonished gathering. He was right.
The signing of Keegan – the deal had secretly been done months earlier – showed the depth of McMenemy’s ambition. His twelve-year tenure revolutionised the Saints, and he remains fiercely proud of his record against Pompey. ‘We played them five times and won every one – four league games and an FA Cup match,’ he recalls. ‘Unless you reside in, or have attended games in, this area, it’s difficult for people to understand that the rivalry’s just as great down here as in Scotland or the north east, Manchester, Liverpool, and London. Unfortunately, whether Pompey want to admit it or not, Southampton have been in a higher division more often. We were promoted in 1978–79, have been there ever since, and had a very good run in the days when there were a lot of big clubs in contention for honours. That period was a purple patch in the club’s history, and I think it really hurt them down the road.
‘Always in my team talk before a derby game I said: “You’ve got to remember that tomorrow morning, the two groups of supporters work together in the docks, factories, and offices. You want your fans to be waiting outside for the doors to open, their heads held high, not hanging low.”’
The FA Cup game to which McMenemy refers, a fourth-round tie at Fratton Park in January 1984, was perhaps Portsmouth’s blackest day off the pitch. The first meeting since a last-gasp Mick Channon goal had condemned Pompey to Division Three eight years earlier and sparked running battles in the surrounding streets, it was, in the words of Pompey goalkeeping stalwart Alan Knight, ‘a real blood-and-thunder affair’. In front of 36,000, the game was won by the visitors with a goal from Steve Moran in stoppage-time added for a head wound to Saints full-back Mark Dennis courtesy of a coin thrown from the terraces. Dennis, a gifted player with a firecracker temperament of his own that had earmarked him as one of the 1980s bad boys, said at the time he could fully understand the sentiment.
Nick Illingsworth recalls a recent chat with Dennis. ‘What he remembered most was getting back to the dressing room and seeing Lawrie McMenemy covered in spit. He said that day was the most hate-filled atmosphere he’d ever come across.’
Moran, a Saints fan raised in nearby Warsash, hasn’t forgotten it either. ‘When we drove up to Fratton, it was like passing through a war zone. There was a chilling atmosphere, some real menace in the air. We were all pretty anxious about getting home, especially after Steve Williams was threatened in the players’ lounge, but they waited and slipped us out under cover of darkness. I can’t tell you what a relief it was to get out of the place.’ Moran was later thumped in a disco by a (soon to be ex-) Pompey apprentice.
‘It was extraordinary,’ says McMenemy. ‘I remember picking up £5.50 in change and 2lbs of bananas, because we had Danny Wallace playing.’ Others recall a deluge of flying chocolate bars, given out as a promotion before the game, raining down on the away support. Eighteen fans were hospitalised in what the Portsmouth News dubbed the ‘Battle of Fratton’, with fifty-nine arrests and damages totalling £8,000.
Trouble flared again in January 1988 at The Dell, before, during, and after a 2–0 success for Pompey, their sole victory in the fixture since 1963. Of the 116 arrests, 113 were Pompey fans, many members of the club’s notorious hooligan gang, the 6.57 Crew.
The first thing Portsmouth chairman Milan Mandaric reached for when promotion was sealed last season was not a bottle of champers, but a banner which read: ‘Step aside Saints, Pompey are in the Premiership’. But so far, things have not quite gone according to plan. In their first season in the Premiership, Portsmouth have discovered a very different Southampton Football Club.
With prudent husbandry, Saints have stealthily slipped their feet under the top flight table. Compared to the revolving door that doubled as the Portsmouth manager’s office until Harry Redknapp’s settling influence, the Saints job has been less a hot seat, more a tepid one. Between 1955 and 1991, the club had just three managers. Glenn Hoddle originally joined the club after leaving the England post, and European football – albeit briefly – returned to Hampshire for the first time since Lawrie McMenemy’s heyday on the back of last season’s FA Cup final appearance.
Steady progress is, says Nick Illingsworth, ‘the only way to move forward long term. Some sides have spent millions and seen it wasted. We kept a tight grip on the purse strings and are reaping the rewards. Reaching the cup final was a natural progression. That and European qualification are reasonable targets for a team of Saints’ standing.
‘In the mid-1990s, there was a feeling among Pompey fans that getting back to the top was a matter of when, not if, and when they got there they would automatically be a top-four club. Their attitude was, “All you lot do is survive. When we get there we’ll be a much bigger and better side. We won’t just survive, we’ll challenge for Europe.” But in the past ten years, football has changed beyond recognition. It’s now virtually impossible for anyone to break into the top five, but we’re just outside that bracket, with a new ground, and sixth place is a reasonable target each year. Until Pompey came to St Mary’s, I don’t think their fans had much idea of the amount of work that’s gone into Saints. Maybe their eyes opened a little bit.’
On 2 December 2003, Pompey arrived at St Mary’s for a Carling Cup clash, the clubs’ first meeting since a 1996 FA Cup third-round tie in which Saints’ Matt Le Tissier ran the show in a 3–0 win. The evening was supposed to begin with a minute’s silence for Ted Bates, Southampton player, manager, chairman, and president over a sixty-six-year period who had died just days before, but the ‘silence’ had to be aborted after twenty-five seconds of catcalls from the visiting fans. Trouble that night was minimal, but the fact that all police leave in Hampshire was cancelled, with 300 officers present – it’s usually fifteen – tells its own story.
As Pompey fans were bussed in like POWs from the nearby park-and-ride, the air was thick with tension. ‘It was my first derby,’ says Portsmouth fan Claire Gurney. ‘I travelled down on the train, but got a lift home. Having made the walk from the station, I really didn’t fancy doing it again – as much because of my worry about how our fans would react after losing.’
The league meeting on 21 December was little better. PC Gary Morgan of Hampshire Police’s Football Intelligence Unit reported the ‘nastiest scenes I’ve witnessed in ten years of policing Pompey games’. Small wonder then that even the reserve league fixture prior to these two encounters was made