Mad for it: From Blackpool to Barcelona: Football’s Greatest Rivalries

‘Where were you at Upton Park?’ sing the 2,000-odd visiting West Ham fans, all apparently pointing at me. I blush. Because this is actually my second attempt to see a West Ham vs Millwall game this season. A furious West Ham press officer refused me access to the first.

‘Why do you want to see the game?’

‘I’m doing an article on the rivalry…’

‘There IS no rivalry! There is NO rivalry between West Ham and Millwall! It’s just a game! OK!? It’s JUST a game!’

‘Yes, but…’

‘I said – “IT’S JUST A GAME!”’ (end of conversation).

OK, OK – so it’s just a game. So why am I feeling just a little bit nervous? Well I’ve done me research, see. And most fans, academics, journalists, and media pundits agree – visiting Millwall is like walking naked into a pit full of grizzly bears. With a sign saying ‘grizzly bears are puffs’ around your neck. While on really bad acid.

EIGHT GREAT HATE DATES

1904

West Ham 3 Millwall 0

Ten thousand see the first ever game at Upton Park. Local lad Billy Bridgeman scores West Ham’s first goal at their new home.

Arsenal’s Gooner fanzine babbles about the ‘Dickensian surroundings with water dripping from the dank viaduct’ and claims that leaving the ground is ‘like being on manoeuvres in some enemy infested outpost in Vietnam’.

And here’s Billy, a West Ham fan, recalling his first trip to Millwall: ‘We all got there early, and we was singing and shouting and that, having a great time. Millwall was really quiet. We was well taking the piss. Then all of a sudden this noise started, like moaning, they was all sorta moaning. I thought, what the fuck’s going on here? It was so fucking loud, and they was all doing it, and it went on and on and on…West Ham just shut up.’

John King, in his seminal hoolie novel, The Football Factory, gibbered that Millwall has a history of ‘a hundred years of kicking the fuck out of anybody who strays too far down the Old Kent Road’.

Which shows how much Mr King knows: 100 years? Try 400. In the 17th century panicking Puritan pamphleteers condemned the area as a bolthole for every species of ‘dissolute, loose and insolent’ wide-boy, ruffian, ‘evill dispozed person’ and ‘sturdy beggar’ on the planet. South London, wrote bible-basher Donald Lupton in 1632, is ‘better termed a foul den then a faire garden’ (and the name kind of stuck). In 1837 Charles Dickens set Fagin’s den on Jacob’s Island in Bermondsey: ‘the very repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot and garbage.’ And in 1996 the US State Department ‘red-flagged’ the area as a ‘no-go’ zone for American tourists, claiming that it was as dangerous as Guatemala (which, at the time, was overrun by right-wing death squads).

This, as former Millwall player Eamon Dunphy so eloquently put it, is quite simply ‘the wrong part of London’. And – if the press are to be believed – Millwall FC are the living embodiment of unredeemed sporting evil. ‘The New Den, like the old Den, remains unparalleled, a uniquely poisonous, malevolent, ugly, depressing venue,’ hyperventilated Keith Pike of The Times. ‘To watch Millwall is to journey into a valley of hatred,’ blathered Ken Gorman of the Daily Star as he stared fearfully at ‘a sea of scowling vengeful faces bounded by beer-fuelled loathing for any outsider. To talk of hatred in people’s eyes,’ ranted Ken, his nostrils dilated in animal terror, ‘is not to exaggerate the most evil stench of wretchedness I have ever encountered.’

So that’s why I’m doing my breathing exercises and fingering my energy crystal and trying really hard not to shit myself as I walk from the tube station, past the yuppie-flat building sites (with all the bricks and scaffolding poles conveniently shrink-wrapped and stacked for easy access), down past the railway lines and under the dank, dripping, graffiti-covered Victorian brick arches. Past evil-looking crows that go ‘Caw!’ And the glue-head wobbly scrawled sign that reads ‘west ham will not make the den!’

EIGHT GREAT HATE DATES

1957

Millwall 1 West Ham 3