Bobbing Along in the 80s and 90s: Spytty

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Newport County 2 Mansfield 0

In their previous game, Mansfield Town won 8-1 and their manager was awarded a sparkling Aston Martin as a show of gratitude by a gratuitous chairman.

Everyone knew about it. It was in all the papers.

When the Mansfield away support at Rodney Parade was announced as "90", a ready wit in the crowd shouted, "Did you all come in the Bentley!"

It was symptomatic of an evening where the crowd were by equal measures rabid, noisy, easily angered and only partially informed. All the necessary ingredients of a 'good atmosphere."

Early in the game, a ball was smacked into touch with such force that, had it hit someone, it would have qualified as attempted murder. It was met with the words, "Beautiful, beautiful football."

In all fairness, this might have been the same bloke as before. It was shouted with the full conviction of a spectator who readily confuses the concept of 'whole-hearted support' with shouting something totally wrong about football every time they open their mouth. All grounds have one.

The rest of the ground had a more 'realistic' assessment of the County and chipped in with a rendition of "We're by far the greatest team in football the world has ever seen." By far?

This is why Wales will never qualify for the World Cup finals; our supporters often lack the objectivity required to quantify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the team in comparison to their opponents that is necessary to correctly predict the likely outcome of the contest.

In truth, County were far from the worst football team the world has ever seen (Cardiff City with Russel Osman in the team win that one) and deserved the win.

They featured shaven headed, talentless talisman and 'crowd favourite' David Pipe. The crowd constantly bayed for him to get forward and create 'something'.

David Pipe - seriously

He responded by rarely crossing the half-way line and got a telling-off from the ref when he did. His contribution to the game seemingly measured by the fearsomeness of his grimace. He rated highly in this area.

Christian Jolley, wittily referred to as 'Bambi' (by you know who) each time he lost his footing, lost his footing and Newport were awarded a penalty. They scored.

Jolley then scored the decisive second goal. He celebrated his excellent but slightly greedy effort by running to a corner of the ground populated by imaginary fans to share his moment with no-one.

Jolley was one player, along with goalkeeper Lenny Pidgeley, you felt might develop well at a higher level club. But as he came from a higher level club in the first place this feeling may well have been illusory.

Lenny Pidgeley will probably remain confined to non-league by dint of his silly name.

Keeping the crowd entertained during the boring bits was Spytty the Mutty.

The mirror test of self awareness

Spytty has the perfect combination of personality traits required to become a first class club mascot or nuisance on the Corporation buses. These include:

A complete lack of self-awarenes.
Fanaticism (in a bad way).
The inabilty to distinguish between good attention and bad attention.
The propensity to react to a football match in a manner unlike any other person in the ground.
A basic mastery of mime.

Indeed, Spytty's miserable and disconsolate slow walk around the pitch with his head in his hands after a County near miss was so moving I genuinely felt like putting an arm around him to comfort him.

As he sank dramatically to his knees, I wasn't sure if he was reacting to some bad health news he'd had earlier in the week or a corner awarded to Mansfield. It was impossible to tell.

The problem was Spytty's mime session was that the pace was somewhat slower than the game. In fact, he was still shuffling around the pitch shaking his head forlornly because Jolley was flagged offside when everyone else was celebrating County's second goal.

At one point he looked so emotionally hurt, dabbing at imaginary tears with his oversized ears, I thought that perhaps one of the Mansfield players had said something mean to him in an off the ball incident.

It wasn't difficult to imagine Spytty being on suicide watch had County lost the match.

Fortunately, they didn't.

I would sincerely love to see County back in the Football League and the sooner the better. From this showing, everything is definitely 'going in the right direction' and much of the infrastructure is 'in place'.