Page 6 - 358264 LP231909 A Love Supreme 48pp A5 (Issue 257)

EVA FOREVER SAFC
Many of us, when talking about our football team, shake our heads and make comments like “half me life I’ve spent following this lot, and what have we done?” all the while acknowledging that we’ve seen some great games, had some great experiences, and wouldn’t swap it for the world. Imagine, then, if you’d been doing it for over ninety years, which is exactly what Eva Lazenby has been doing. Eva made the news at the Portsmouth home game when she was celebrated as being a centenarian at the match, having celebrated that momentous birthday a week or so earlier with a family do at the Hilton.
Sunderland girl Eva lived near Roker Park and made her debut at the match aged seven in 1929, yes 1929!
“There was a full-back called Ernie England who’d played for us for about ten years, and
in the olden days they used to open the gates about ten minutes from the end to let folks out, and all the kids would get in for free. I was one
of them, and so was Ernie England’s daughter, and the trainer was somebody called Hogg,
and his daughter was as well. They were great days. I lived very near Roker Park, just across the road. I used to go until I was fourteen or so then I stopped for a bit, and I remember when we won the League in 1936, then the FA Cup in 1937 that I didn’t go to. I was only fifteen and didn’t have any money, so that was that. You couldn’t run into Wembley for the last ten minutes. There were some great players then, like Jimmy Connors and those sort of people. And then the war came. I
was seventeen when the war started, and football was hitty missy then. Teams weren’t the right teams, with guest players and that, and I knew some of the players that came part-time, but they’d play a few games and leave and someone else would come in.”
“I’d been in the RAF during the war, and Horatio Stratton “Raich” Carter was my PE instructor at Number 16 Maintenance Unit in Stafford, and he belonged Sunderland so after that he obviously came back to play for Sunderland but didn’t stay for long. I remember one of the games he did play in before the war when we’d had a very heavy snowfall and all the supporters had gone and cleared the pitch beforehand so they could play. That’s one game I remember him playing before his career took off. I came out of the RAF after the war and used to go regularly then, for years. In those days
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