Sunderland away 1985 How it was when it was as a Newcastle United fan back in the day

It was 8th April 1985, Sunderland v Newcastle United.

Easter Monday and alongside 10,000 other Newcastle United fans, I was eagerly anticipating my trip to Roker Park that morning.

That season had started so brightly.

After winning promotion back to the top flight, Newcastle United won their first three games and on the evening of 1st September 1984, sat on top of the First Division table for a brief moment; losses at Highbury and Old Trafford the following week bringing us back down to earth.

On New Year’s Day, Peter Beardsley plundered a hat-trick as we swept the Mackems aside at St James’ Park, in a game where those three points enabled us to leapfrog Sunderland in the table, getting 1985 off to a fabulous start.

A fortnight before the East Monday fixture at Roker Park, Sunderland had lost the Milk Cup Final at Wembley Stadium, succumbing to a calamitous own goal against Norwich City. To add insult to injury, the Mackems also missed a penalty (for younger readers, Milk was a drink they invented before Carabao).

On Easter morn, the Division One table didn’t read well for either of us, and although the derby was a must win for the team sent packing from Wembley with their tail firmly between their legs, I can still remember going into the game thinking that as long as we didn’t lose, that would probably be good enough. Managed by Jack Charlton, Newcastle United were on 41 points after 34 games (of a 42 match season, 22 clubs in the English top tier back then), Sunderland were eighteenth on 34 points from 33 matches.

Bobble hats were all the rage and the scousers had begun a trend where these iconic hats would be adapted to also display a neutral club. Known as half and half hats, the Everton variety was often paired with Celtic and Liverpool with Rangers, but there weren’t any firm rules.

Before you could buy them officially, some ingenuity was required, or more to the point, if your auntie had a sewing machine, two bobble hats could be merged. I’d somehow managed to acquire a Dundee United hat (I remember being impressed with them when they’d narrowly lost in the UEFA Cup to Man Utd earlier in the season), and so I left for Roker Park that morning looking resplendent in my half and half NUFC-DUFC hat plonked on my head.

As a sixteen-year-old who was fast approaching their ‘O’ levels that summer, I had recently developed a keen interest in the casual subculture and looking back, a morbid fascination with football violence, having already witnessed and been on the periphery of a few skirmishes since cutting my teeth on the away scene with a terrifying trip to Maine Road the previous season.

Rumours circulating pre-match had been of an audacious plot by Newcastle’s finest to ‘take’ the Fulwell End. With segregation introduced at football grounds across the country in the 1970s, this was a ritual that hooligans from some of the most notorious ‘firms’ embarked on during that era. I’d never seen it happen in person.

My ticket was for the Roker End. I recall the short walk from the sea front where some dodgy bus had deposited us being quite uneventful, odd pockets of Sunderland fans milling around and mouthing off, but with a sizeable police presence, no one going further than that.

We took the field wearing our silver away kit with the blue star emblazoned on the front, a young Paul Gascoigne an unused substitute, George ‘Rambo’ Reilly and Tony Cunningham up top in a 4-4-2 formation, with Beardsley tucking in behind.

Shortly after kick off, those pre-match rumours proved to be on the money, the crowd in the Fulwell End parting like the Red Sea as around 300 Newcastle fans made their presence felt.

My recollection of what happened is that gaps on the terracing opened, revealing the crush barriers whose purpose was to aid the safety of the crowd, Sunderland fans scurrying away as the Newcastle fans made their way down the terrace.

As the police restored order, those Newcastle fans who minutes earlier had been brazenly standing in Sunderland’s ‘End’ were escorted along the side of the pitch where the Clock Stand was, joining their compatriots behind the other goal, where lots of back slapping and bonhomie ensued. Mental really.

As for the game itself, it was pretty uneventful, a goalless draw which was good enough from our perspective, might as well have been a defeat from theirs because Ipswich won at Norwich and Luton hammered bottom club Stoke, plunging the Mackems into the bottom three, a position from which they never recovered, suffering the ignominy of a cup final defeat, relegation and their ‘End’ being taken, all in the same season.

With the passage of fully forty years, those were of course very different times following your team. Not a 16 year old any longer, a 56 year old with a respectable job, who doesn’t of course condone football violence.

How it was, when it was.