Branch Chairman - Chris Robinson

Chris lives in Northampton, and was elected to the role of Chairman at the 2007 AGM - having previously been Secretary.

You can contact Chris via email: chairman@itfc-blues.com

My First Game...

Following the election of Chris to the WABITS Committee, he was asked to tell us about his first Town game. Following a successful attempt by his Broadband company to lose the original version, here, in full, is the second attempt:

Picture the scene. It’s 1967, and a 6 year old me, who just 9 months earlier had been too busy playing with toy cars and making dens to watch the World Cup, settled down to watch Sunday afternoon TV. And there, in glorious (well, rather grainy actually) black and white, was ‘Match of the Week’. Having shown no previous interest in football, it needed something special to grab my attention. Well, on Saturday 25th March, 1967, something special had happened , and it was about to be shown in my front room. Ipswich Town were playing Portsmouth at Portman Road. Manager Bill McGarry had decided, as the season was drawing to a close, to give youth a chance. And so he gave a debut to a young lad from South Africa named Colin Viljoen. There I sat, mesmerised, as the elegant Viljoen scored a hat-trick on his debut and Ipswich ran out comfortable winners. It was only years later that I realised just how fortunate I had been. Back in those days, Anglia TV also covered some of the home games of Norwich, Colchester, Cambridge, Northampton, Luton and even Hull City. However, I am convinced that even at that tender age I had far more sense than to have succumbed to the devil and started to follow Norwich City. Besides, my favourite colour was blue – or dark grey as it was on my TV!

And so I gradually became an Ipswich Town fan. I yearned for snippets of information and action on television, as I was too young to be anything more than an armchair fan at that stage. No-one else in my family followed football, although my older brother started to support Ipswich at about the same time as me. I relied on Gerry Harrison (was it him in those days?) for my weekly football fix.

My first live football action wasn’t a particularly glamorous affair. My uncle took me and my brother to watch the Reserves play Tottenham Hotspurs’ second string at Portman Road. I can’t remember much about it, except that we stood near to the dugouts and I was constantly berating the Spurs players for not being as good as Georgie Best! I suspect we lost as I can’t remember the score – I had a football fan’s selective memory even in those early days.

My first ‘proper’ match came some time later. It was on Tuesday 18th April 1972, and I went with my best friend from school and his dad. Ipswich were playing Manchester City at Portman Road. Now, here I have a bit of a confession to make. At the time, both my mate and I had a favourite player – and he played for City! It was the legendary Franny Lee. Let me try to explain. At the time he was an England international (Ipswich didn’t have any), and we both played for a Sunday team who played in the famous City away kit – the one with the Black and Red stripes. We both modelled our game on Franny, although he was a bit better than we were. I needed to explain this as the next part of my confession is even more shocking. We arrived excitedly at Portman Road wearing our Ipswich Town scarves, but stopped off at one of the stalls outside the North Stand and bought two rosettes each – one for Ipswich, and one for City! The master plan was to get the great man’s autograph at the end of the game, and in our innocence we felt that such neutral attire might help. Anyway, the whole experience was memorable from beginning to end. There really is something magical about evening games under floodlights. It blew me away. There was a crowd of 24,464 that night as Town beat City 2-1, the Town goals coming from Colin Harper and Trevor Whymark. Mike Summerbee scored for City. I remember that my first football song (‘We’ve got Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy Robertson On the Wing, On the Wing’) made quite an impression on me that night. At the end of the match we went onto the pitch (you could in those days) in search of the autograph, and with our mission accomplished (what did I do with that programme?) we returned home happy that Ipswich had won – and a bit relieved that our hero hadn’t been maimed by Derek ‘Chopper’ Jefferson. I will admit that I continued to follow Franny Lee’s career, but Ipswich were my team and, having served its purpose, the City rosette soon found its rightful place – in the bin.

Before too long I was able to go to matches with my brother, and then by myself. Luckily, games were relatively affordable in those days, and all that separated me from my home in Woodbridge and the temple that was Portman Road, was a short and convenient train journey. There were scary moments after some matches at Ipswich station – but I didn’t tell my mum about those, and they certainly weren’t going to put me off going.

There were many highlights in those early years. I remember the European nights as if they were yesterday. Then there was the record crowd of 38,010 against Dirty Leeds, the FA Cup Final at Wembley in 1978 (the greatest day of my life – apart from my wedding of course!), kissing Clive Woods’ feet (that’s a long story) and the boys of ’81 – a team as yet unsurpassed in British football in my ever-so-slightly biased opinion. The fact that I was living and working in Norwich in 1981 made it all the sweeter – happy days!

So thank you Colin Viljoen, wherever you are, for it was you who brought me and Ipswich Town together. Yes, there have been moments of heartache along the way. There has also been the burden of expenditure that I would rather not think about too much, and the hours spent following my team when I should have been mowing the lawn or putting up shelves. But all of that is more than compensated for by those moments of pure joy and pleasure that football can bring, and the sense of pride and comradeship that only true football fans can begin to comprehend. It gets hold of you. It’s in the blood. It’s a sort of life sentence. I’m just grateful that my life sentence has been with Ipswich Town – the other possibilities from those black and white days on ‘Match of the Week’ just don’t bear thinking about!