Cumbria to Cardiff: Part 1
by Patrick Smyth When your home is in Newcastle, but your employment is in Manchester, your weekend commuting would tend to include enough tar-mac for any one man to see in a lifetime. But when you have a passion for ice hockey, and namely for the Belfast Giants, travelling can take on a new wealth of painful meaning.
In 2004 I made the move from Belfast to the wilds of West Cumbria. This would be my home for nearly 3 years. On the edge of the Lake District, cut by the tempest of the Irish Sea, Whitehaven can, at times, be an interesting place to live. But it had one problem. No ice rink. Thus no ice hockey and certainly no Elite League. In fact at that time the closest Elite League team, as the crow flies, was Belfast (Newcastle at that time were still in the BNL). But as I didn’t own a boat I had to regularly drive to one.
So a semi-regular 3 to 4 hour journey (depending on the traffic at Dumfries), to the HSS in Stranraer, saw me leaving work early on a Friday and flying up the A595 toward Carlisle. The 1910 Friday evening HSS to Belfast became a regular sight, but I never tired of it. My parents believed my constant trips home were a mixture of home sickness and the love of my mums home cooked Sunday lunch. The truth was my jaunts back were only ever taken if the Giants were playing in the Odyssey on a Saturday night. In those 3 years of driving back and forth, my little fiesta (the first of three) got to know the 163 mile road both to and from the Scottish ferry port so well I could probably have a kip on my Sunday night drive home, and so many times I wanted to.
Another problem with Whitehaven’s location were the mountains of the Lake District. These divided my abode from the main vein of my hockey trips. The M6 motorway. It would be an hour’s journey to even reach that stretch of road that would lead me to Manchester, Coventry or Cardiff as well as being the long leg of the trips to Sheffield, Hull or Nottingham. But the long drives were worth it just to see my team in teal take to the ice.
When you’re “an away fan” you don’t have a home rink because when you want to see your team at home you have to travel over the Irish Sea to see them. So you find yourself more “at home” in other teams rinks, you get to know the fans of other teams, you know the right and wrong places to park your car, the right and wrong places to stand at the game, which rinks have the best chips (Hull), which has the most reasonably priced beer (erm.. Hull again) and, on the rare occasion you stay over, you get to know the cheap hockey hotels (Etap at Sheffield Arena being a ‘regular haunt’).
But it is on a rare occasion that you stay over, because as a Giants fan when you travel to these places it’s normally a Sunday. Use of annual leave can be a precious thing in many lines of work, not least when your home of employment is miles from where you actually want to be, so an early Sunday departure to, say, Sheffield for example would lead you to your final destination in broad daylight along the motorways of England. You spend a few happy hours in a cold rink shouting for your team then make that same trip home, but this time in pitch black darkness knowing that despite your late return, it’s an early morning on Monday. And as you enter that Monday morning meeting, yawning and wiping the sleep from your eyes, you’ll be met by the usual questions, “Where was it yesterday then Patrick? Sheffield again? Did you win?”.
Are these road trips any different to any other teams? To any other fans going to an away game? Well no. But the benefit these fans hold, and I envy, is their ability to see their own team in their own rink as regularly or not as they please without the need for a flight or a boat. To be among the thousands of like minded supporters, not in the minority of the away block. A place I’ve been among as few as 2 or 4 travelling fans, faced by an army of thousands on the opposition.
It’s a passion, one that makes the journeys all the more satisfying when you win, but to reassess why you do it when you lose. As I mentioned in the beginning, I travel weekly from Newcastle to Manchester and back, but this is regularly interspersed with trips to the random rinks of the UK that would house a Belfast Giants game. And this weekend past I packed my bag and headed to the airport, as I was able to take one of those rarest of opportunities. A home game.
Next Up – “Hockey Night on Queens Island”, “The Regulars” and the long mid-week road to Cardiff.
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