Happy Birthday Fulham

Tonight, Fulham FC will celebrate 130 years of being in this, our beautiful game. I've got a soft spot for the West Londoners, for a variety of reasons. They seem to me to be the meaning of the phrase 'family club'. I haven't always felt that way, however. Before my visit to Craven Cottage 18 months ago, Fulham were just another club, always fairly uncontroversial, and so I had no particular reason to dislike them, with 'innocent until proven guilty' my motto on liking or loathing football teams. So what has all changed? Why do I feel deep down, that if Birmingham City slipped out of existence, I would quite happily step out onto Putney Bridge, and take in the wonderful surroundings of Craven Cottage?

Let me take you back to May 2008. Fulham v Birmingham City. As far as relegation six-pointers go, they don't come much bigger than this. The winner will be within touching distance of Premier League survival. The loser will almost certainly be relegated. As the train full of Bluenoses pulls into Marylebone Station, goosebumps run from my head to my toes. I maintain, in all seriousness, and without any hint of sarcasm, there is no better sound in the world than the iconic anthem of 'Keep Right On' being belted out at a train station, much to the bemusement of tourists. Forget the sound of a baby laughing, or a beautifully played concerto, this is audio heaven, and I try to fight back the tears of emotion and pride. After the usual away-day tomfoolery, we all remember we are in fact here to watch a game, and so we make probably the most pleasant journey to a football match anywhere in the world. The walk up the banks of the Thames, through a beautifully picturesque park, coupled with the colours of an early May day, is a fantastic sight, and one wonders why we get so worked up about football, when there are sights like this to behold.

Craven Cottage is the only ground that I have sat in where there has been a neutral area. Admittedly, no one in the ground was 'neutral' on that day, but the very idea of having both home and away fans sat in the same area of the ground was wonderful, if potentially a little naiive. I cannot for one moment imagine this happening at St Andrews, especially for a match of this magnitude. The Fulham fans were wonderful. They admired our incessant chanting, laughed at our hate-filled songs about Aston Villa, and were thankfully magnanimous in victory. Even the worst Birmingham performance I have witnessed couldn't prevent me from admiring these fantastic supporters, and as I choked back the tears of disappointment and anger (you should learn by now I cry often at football) I realised that Fulham fans were not goading or jeering the opposition, but quietly making their way out. I'd like to think every club in the country could behave like that, but I am not that stupid.

I've always been dazzled by teams in white. Real Madrid, England, Fulham. Don Revie and I share this same sentiment, it would appear, when he changed the Leeds United kit from all-yellow to all-white. I guess this has something to do with purity, but also, it's a useful tool to see which players have been really getting stuck in- those with brilliant white shirts at the end of the game clearly haven't.

I was hugely disappointed when I saw that our match against Fulham was scheduled for February 20th. That beautiful walk to the game will be nothing more than a slog through the mud on a cold, wet February day. But there will be other opportunites to sample the Cottage, I'm sure. Happy Birthday Fulham.