This is a piece I wrote for the old Moulin Rouge fanzine but Rouger (the magazine editor) and I didn't connect for some reason and it missed the deadline. Since it's the five year anniversary of 'that' match, I thought I'd celebrate the anniversary by putting it on here. It's says more about following the Millers from afar than it does about the game itself but I hope it gives some pleasure nonetheless.
FROM THE OTHER END OF THE TELESCOPE (RUFC V LEYTON ORIENT - MAY 25 2014)
There were a number of excellent articles in the last edition of Moulin Rouge about ‘that day’ at Wembley – eye-witness accounts and quirky anecdotal stuff at their best – and, although it’s now several months later, I’m afraid I’m going to be guilty of adding to them; I hope, though, from a different perspective. At the risk of beating the “it’s different for expatriate fans” drum too hard and too often, I want to give you my take on the events of May 25th 2014 from several thousand miles away.
How many of you, for example, as part of your preparation for the great day, chose to sleep in the spare room the night before the game? Not many I suspect (unless, as a male of the species, you came home bladdered, exercised poor judgment by trying to give the missus one she wouldn’t forget and promptly found yourself relegated to the farthest reaches of the house.)
My home on the US West Coast is, inconveniently, eight time zones behind the UK – which means that when the whistle blows for Saturday afternoon football to start in dear old Albion, us Californians are usually still lying in our pits, snoring and farting and barely registering the world. It made a lot more sense, therefore, on this play-offs final day at least, to make the 6.30am transition from old-sleeping-geezer to alert-and-ready-fan as painlessly as possible and with the minimum disruption to the rest of the family. Spending the night in a lumpy bed next to an unused Nordic Track exercise machine was a small price to pay.
So, as you were excitedly taking to your seats in the arena, having paid your extravagant parking charges and walked up Wembley Way, I was drowsily pulling on my dressing gown and firing up the lap-top to get things moving. I invariably listen to matches in my lucky, blue toweling dressing gown which I, perhaps mistakenly, believe brings the club success. I’ve been wearing it for a good few years now and we’ve generally done alright so I continue to work on the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” principle.
With the exception of my oldest son, who occasionally surfaces from endlessly watching the New York Yankees to ask how we’re doing, none of my family has the slightest interest in the Millers – not a shred… I sometimes wish I was from one of those tribes where granddad, dad, dad’s brothers, all the kids and even mum take an interest in the goings on at RUFC but sadly it was never to be – and, in any case, there is something slightly noble and self- denying (and, some might argue, a little ‘precious’) about carrying the torch regardless of the apathy around me. I sit in splendid isolation in the back bedroom….in my lucky blue dressing gown…. with my lap-top on my knees….the sun coming up and beginning its swing towards the Pacific. The match commentary plays out to the background noise of lawn sprinklers and Mexican gardeners mowing the grass and trimming palm trees. It’s a solitary passion following the Millers from this side of the world – but there’s no denying it’s a passion.
I fiddle with the various options to get a live video stream working on the computer. It’s always tricky to know which of the little “x”s I need to click out to get a full screen but eventually I have a picture and sound and we’re off to the races. Well, off to the stuttering races since the picture keeps freezing and rushing forward. I have the feeling that I’m watching an editor at work pulling bits out of the footage and then running on quickly to the next scene. It does eventually settle down but I’m initially struggling and have to resort to Millers Player to get a sense of what is going on.
I won’t spend time talking about the game itself since anybody reading this will have relived it a thousand times already and won’t need reminding of what happened. I cheered and I screamed and I sank to the depths. I waited with baited breath and then I cheered and screamed some more – all on my own. Members of the family put their heads round the door as they got up – to see why their normally controlled relative was behaving so oddly. My wife even brought me a sympathy cup of tea at half time when she registered that my resolve was fading with a 0-2 score line.
Two abiding emotions still stay with me from that day.
I felt the strongest connection with other Rotherham United fans even with five and a half thousand miles separating us. More than 20,000 of you took the plunge in London and the ripples spread all over the world. There I was right out on the perimeter feeling the impact. There were others out on the rim – further up the coast in Seattle, all across Canada, out in Thailand and in Australia and New Zealand – all connected by this common and all-embracing passion. We may have felt like we were looking through the wrong end of a telescope but in our heads we were there and part of the event.
And what an event….When Collin stretched and saved that final penalty, it felt like a switch had been thrown. Suddenly we were a Championship club again (for the third time for me) with all the honour and prestige that went with it. Until that moment it hadn’t seemed that it would ever be a reality and there was even a feeling of intense guilt that Orient should have been in this position – not us. That passed and the sense of amazement returned. We would be playing clubs every week that had a Premiership pedigree and aspirations to return to the top-flight. We would be living in a completely different world – in fact, living the dream
I got up, pulled the lucky blue dressing gown tightly around me and went to dress and shave knowing that for me the world was a better place. Nobody else for probably hundreds of miles around me gave a rats but my team had won and was entering a new era.
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Originally Posted by Brin
