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neither of us knew appeared and proceeded to punch him a number of times knocking him down. If you remember Muhammad Ali’s destruction of Brian London, it was rather like that. The aggressor disappeared as quickly as he’d appeared and the other lad promptly picked himself up looking red in the face and decidedly taken aback but not badly hurt. Casual violence was the order of the day back then, as parents, older siblings and teachers were prone to dishing out clouts, but that was a particularly casual assault.
Another memory was when I went in the newly opened Boys’ Paddock at the front of the Roker End with a classmate from school and his younger brother. As we were waiting for the game to start some kid behind us flicked a piece of paper and it hit my mate’s brother on the cheek, not very hard though. I was mortified, as was the kid who’d flicked the paper, when the brother started to cry his eyes out. Bubblin’, as us lads called it, was very much frowned upon and was the province of girls so to start crying over such a minor thing seemed very bad form to me.
There are some special sounds that always remind me of Roker Park and the first of these was the click-clack of the turnstiles as we entered the ground. Another clacking noise that was common in those days came from a wooden rattle which devotees whizzed round while they roared the team on. These days you’d probably get arrested and pinned to the ground by a couple of burly stewards if you tried to enter a ground brandishing a rattle. I never had one but wished I had.
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