Pompey v So’ton

[Scott7 5,244]

Never mind Rangers/celtic, Magpies/Makems, Liverpool/Everton this fixture in the English League Cup tonight is, according to Talksport, one of the world’s needle derbies. Apparently Poileas Portsmouth think so too. Riot police, dogs, horses drones and helicopters on standby for an invasion of 2,000 rabid So’ton ultras. So, forget Boca/River. South coast sandcastle   builders are the top firms.

 

Now that Parliament has been deemed to have been unlawfully prorogued, I hope Mr Speaker will set aside the consideration of Brexit so that urgent questions can be dealt with about England’s shame.

 

My question; which of Pompey and Saints are the d.o.bs? One of them must be, surely.

[ian1964 10,457]

7 minutes ago, Scott7 said:

My question; which of Pompey and Saints are the d.o.bs? One of them must be, surely.

Has to be Pompey!  McCrorie plays for them

[Uilleam 5,501]

Skates v Scummers

Here's a Guardian article from 2005, which puports to explain it all

This article is more than 14 years old

 

Scummers v Skates

 

This article is more than 14 years old, not that much will have change in the interim.

 

Neighbourly goodwill is non-existent when it comes to the fans of Southampton and Portsmouth, the south-coast port cities that are just 17 miles apart. The FA Cup tie at St Mary's on Saturday will test a rivalry that took time to develop but has put down deep roots.

Kevin Mitchell

Sun 23 Jan 2005 00.47 GMTFirst published on Sun 23 Jan 2005 00.47 GMT

 

It is a mystery Portsmouth's first goalkeeper would have been hard-pressed to solve: why the Scummers and the Skates can't stand the sight of each other.

If he were alive today, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle no doubt would have been surprised to witness an FA Cup tie at St Mary's on Saturday afternoon between Southampton and Portsmouth invested with blind, irrational hatred on all sides of the ground. And, perhaps, Sherlock Holmes, his famous detective, would have raised an eyebrow, as Pompey fans hurled invective at the Great Defector, Harry Redknapp, now in charge of Saints. And he might have turned to Dr Watson to inquire why so many members of the constabulary were milling about the ground.

Nothing could be further removed from the experience of AC Smith - as the haughty author and doctor preferred to be known while appearing in public in shorts and guarding the goal during Pompey's first season, 1884. They were innocent times whose values lingered for decades.

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Indeed, up until the 1950s, Pompey and the club formed in a church hall by a local vicar were mostly cordial neighbours, despite the retrospective view that resentment sprang from one team dominating the other for long periods. The fact that their clashes have been sporadic - over 84 years just 29 league meetings, with seven wins to Portsmouth, 14 to Southampton and eight draws - further dilutes the illusion that they have been generational enemies.

Putting aside their formative years in the old Southern League, theirs have been occasional engagements, as they pass each other up and down the leagues. Portsmouth, pre-eminent either side of the war with a Cup win and two consecutive league titles, have the history, Southampton the recent dominance. As any Saints fan will tell you, they have finished above Pompey in the league for the past 45 years - although that could change this season. Once, though, it hardly mattered.

Pompey fans lucky enough to get a ticket to the 1939 FA Cup final, which Portsmouth famously won, remember that only 4,000 turned up at The Dell for a league match that day, the rest of Southampton's supporters preferring to cheer Portsmouth on while listening to the final on the radio. Later, the Cup was proudly paraded around The Dell, where Southampton fans applauded Pompey's heroics.

Football fans in those days and well into the 1950s would put aside allegiances to watch nearby clubs when their own team were playing away. There was not the culture of travelling to away games then that gripped the mobile armies of hooligans in the 1970s and thereafter and which encouraged uncompromising tribalism. Nobody is sure why it all went bad on the south coast, although most agree it started in the 1960s, even before the dawn of modern hooliganism.

 

Then Saints won at Fratton Park in 1966 on their way to promotion to the old First Division, there was a pitch invasion by both sets of supporters. In the intervening 39 years, they have met only nine times in the league, as well as twice in the FA Cup and once in the League Cup. And there has invariably been trouble. Most memorable - or infamous - was the fourth-round FA Cup tie in 1984 in which a Pompey fan struck Saints full-back Mark Dennis with a coin in injury time and Southampton went on to score the winning goal. There was more bloodshed afterwards.

So this is very much a modern war, one built on sand but sustained in ignorance. Mass police presence and CCTV will make a recurrence of 1984 difficult for even the most recalcitrant thug on Saturday, but few doubt the air will be filled with menace.

Most interested parties The Observer spoke to over the past week or so agree this is more than a conventional football rivalry. It is a clash of cultures, a melange of misunderstanding and mutual loathing between clubs separated by a short ribbon of motorway but who might as well be inhabiting different planets. It describes modern Britain more accurately than any reality TV show. It is about the idiocy and manufactured romance of football, which too often becomes a vehicle for deeper prejudices.

Take the nicknames the two sets of fans reserve for one another. 'The popular theory in Portsmouth about the Scum thing,' says Nick Illingsworth, a Saints supporter and fanzine editor, 'is that it comes from the Southampton Company of Union Men and that there was a dock strike in Portsmouth which was broken by Southampton dockers.

'This sounds a great story until you realise that up until about the 1980s the commercial port in Portsmouth was very, very small. It was virtually a quayside. Portsmouth is mainly a naval port and you can't just employ a hundred hairy-arsed dockers from Southampton to march into a Royal Navy establishment, for security reasons for a start.'

Another theory goes that Portsmouth look down on Southampton as scum because that is a naval term for merchant seamen, as scum floating on the water. More likely it springs from the general use of the word at the time between football supporters everywhere.

Pat Symes, a local journalist and author, agrees. 'I think it's just a fan thing, really,' he says, 'generated from the terraces.' And Skates? Symes offers gingerly: 'When sailors were miles from home with no women in sight, they used to use skates to, uh.... But it's never caught on in quite the same way as Scummers.' Illingsworth admits to his part in the invention of Skates as a derogatory term for Pompey fans. It was well known that Portsmouth people delighted in calling sailors skates, so a fanzine in which Illingsworth was involved, Ugly Inside , ran a competition to find a rebuttal for Scummers.

'The winner of this competition,' says Illingsworth, 'was the guy who pointed out that, whatever we called them, nothing would get up their noses more than the term Skate.' Graham Hurley, a local author of Pompey-based crime thrillers, sees the phenomenon in wider terms. 'I think the story really begins and is shaped by geography,' he says. 'Pompey is an island, it's the only island city in the country, and that makes it very insular, an inward looking place

 

'It is a tribal place, very martial. And this goes back to the time - which is not a cliché - when it was born on blood and treasure. It grew up around the dockyards, it sucks people in. And those families tended to stay. So you've got this community that grew outward from the dockyards. And that has led to a very particular culture. I've never, ever lived anywhere like it. 'There's a kind of clannishness within Pompey, built on family after family, which has led to this feeling of belligerence and stubbornness. It's quite a secret place, square-shouldered, right-angled and deeply unpretty. It has a kind of gruff charm when you get to know it. It's very functional. And it's uncursed by money.'

HURLEY SUGGESTS SOUTHAMPTON is 'not as well defined as Pompey is'. Illingsworth, who has lived there all his life, offers another perspective. He says it is wholly wrong to regard Southampton as just middle-class and conservative.

'Ironically enough,' says Illingsworth, 'when Southampton was embroiled in a dock strike in the early 1980s, Portsmouth, because they weren't a unionised port, accepted the short-sea traffic between here and France. And it never returned. But nobody here called them scum for that.'

Nevertheless, the impression that Southampton is the more genteel and civilised place persists. 'Southampton,' says Hurley, 'is kind of amorphous. It spreads out - it's not an island, it's not bound by the sea. It's quite a wealthy place, Southampton. Lots of money there. It's surrounded by wealthy areas: west you're looking at the New Forest, north you go to Winchester, east you go to the Hamble River, with all the boatyards. It's very middle-class.'

But, as Colin Farmery, a Pompey supporter and the author of Seventeen Miles From Paradise, Saints v Pompey , points out: 'The city [Southampton] returned the only Labour MP south of London in the Conservative general election landslide of 1983 and its dockworkers have proved to be inherently militant over the years.' What they are all agreed on is that the animosity is genuine, whatever the flimsy reasons for it. And it's no longer easy to define the boundaries between the two.

'Although the cities are 17 miles apart,' says Illingsworth, 'with modern housebuilding, there's not a lot of green land between them now. But they're still chalk and cheese. The people just don't get on.' Hurley observes: 'You will find in Pompey, even now, families who get a nosebleed if they go as far as Fareham. I would suggest that Pompey stops at Cosham and Paulsgrove and all those postwar estates that were built on the foothills of Portsdown Hill.'

'They're very different places,' says Symes, 'which you might find odd. Whereas, say Nottingham and Derby are very much the same, Southampton and Portsmouth are not. Southampton has a rural feel about it and even the accent is slightly different. There are people who have settled there from the New Forest and other parts of Hampshire and they have a distinctive, John Arlott-type burr.

 

'In Portsmouth, they have a lot of people come down from south London. In fact, their real enemies are Millwall and there's still a great deal of animosity when those clubs meet, because they used to come down and work in the dockyards when the docks burgeoned.'

Yet, for all this agonising over why they hate each other and why they are different, it always comes down to the football. The Southampton chairman, Rupert Lowe, did not miss the opportunity to have a dig at Milan Mandaric last week. 'I think he's run out of money,' Lowe told The Observer after taking Nigel Quashie from Pompey for £2.1million. 'The Cup tie is undoubtedly the biggest game of the season for both clubs and, at St Mary's, I make us slight favourites.'

'Four to five thousand will go to St Mary's,' says Symes. 'They've played in the league and the irony is that it's one of only three league games Southampton have won this season, when Redknapp was manager of Portsmouth and the wretched Steve Wrigley was trying to make a breakthrough as the manager of Southampton, and that's not that long ago.'

High-profile players and managers have moved between the clubs - most notably in recent times Mick Channon and Alan Ball - without starting a civil war, but Redknapp's defection is different.

'Gordon Strachan dropped him right in it by saying he couldn't possibly contemplate going to a club down the road,' Symes says. 'I actually think Gordon was using that as an excuse because he knows Portsmouth is a club built on sand.' Hurley says: 'A Pompey fanzine that came out just after Redknapp went produced a front page with a picture of Harry and the headline said, "Thanks Harry". And it was genuine. By the time it came out, of course, people began to wise up to what he'd really been up to, and the double meaning came in, you know, thanks a lot, Harry.'

What would Sherlock Holmes have made of it all?

WHY POMPEY?

The nickname is the city's, not just the club's. Of all the theories the top four are: · A group of Portsmouth-based sailors, who scaled Pompey's Pillar near Alexandria, Egypt, became known as the 'Pompey Boys'. · The French ship 'La Pompée' was captured in 1793 and became the guardship to Portsmouth Harbour. · Portuguese sailors thought the harbour looked like Bombay (Bom Bahia, to them), because of the backdrop of hills.

· Ships entering Portsmouth harbour make an entry in the ship's log 'Pom. P.' as a reference to Portsmouth Point.

WHY SAINTS?

Southampton was founded in 1885 by the men of St Mary's Church, the mother church of Southampton. In the early years the club was known as Southampton St Mary's.

WHY SCUM?

Unknown. One theory is t hat Portsmouth (Royal Navy) looks down on Southampton (commercial port): scum is a naval term for merchant seamen floating on the water.

WHY SKATES?

Royal Navy sailors who were at sea for months on end would often use skate fish to relieve their sexual frustrations (the mouth of the skate is said to be even better than warm liver). According to local myth, Portsmouth women would fend off the advances of sailors with the phrase 'I ain't no skate-bait, mate.'

BY FAR THE GREATEST CITY

Southampton was granted city status in 1964, 770 years later than Portsmouth, which was made a city by virtue of its Royal Charter in 1194.

WHO WILL WIN?

Southampton have by a distance the better record. They've won 14 of the 29 league meetings (eight draws, seven Portsmouth wins), three out of three in the FA Cup and the only League Cup tie between the teams. And Portsmouth are in dreadful form and appear to be selling half the team. But anything can happen in a game like this, and probably will...

 

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2005/jan/23/newsstory.sport8