Well its coming soon, but surely not as exciting as the first away of the season back in 1978/79 - yes the so called tickatape game.
I was just about to start college and on balmy Wed late afternoon I caught the 193 bus from Gants Hill -Ilford to the Odean Edmonton and walked the mile and bit this time not to dump your head in the shit but to watch the Villa at WHL home of Tottenham/Spurs. (never quite worked out what their fans prefer to be called between the names).
The previous Saturday first game of the season and we had a fairly easy 1-0 win against Wolves. Spurs were 2 -0 up at Forest at the same time but managed to hang on to draw 2 a piece.
If you know anything at all about Spurs you will know that
1. Their fans are even more fickle than ours.
2. The London media always big them up
3. The had a seedy nightclub outside the ground called Foxes after the so called soft porn star Sam Fox.
We were favourites to lose and had no Andy Gray in our line up.
Knowing that WHL at that time was a bit dodgy I paid the extra 20p to get into the enclosure. Should say we had at best 150/200 fans there that night - bit different from 10 days time.
Any it was predicable the smarmy tickatape Welcome from Shelf side and a crowd which was just below 50,000 welcomed the teams onto the pitch. Thankfully that was as good as it got for the spuds. Alan Evans opening the scoring before Walks on Water, Gary Shelton and Happy face John Gregory getting our other 3 goals. Their return was a dodgy penalty scored by Hoddle
What I would give for that again Saturday week.
PS we lost the home game after being 2-0 up.