Away Days 24/25: New York Stadium, NYS, Pretty Mean When It Wants To Be: Rotherham

 

A Tuesday night away day to Rotherham gave me the chance to do two things, firstly use lyrics from a Ramones song written (and also recorded) by Lemmy from Motörhead as a blog title and to gain an all important ground tick. 

Setting off from Cambridge at around three o’clock there was a strange confidence in the air, especially following a long awaited win against Mansfield! The journey up was uneventful and included a stop at Leicester Forrest East which must be my most visited service station, not that I’m keeping count. After consuming a well known fried chicken brand meal we started the second leg of the journey and arrived in Rotherham around an hour prior to kick off. 

Annoyingly it’s not possible to get a better photo 

After a very thorough security pat down, remember this point for later, we entered the ground and grabbed a pint.

Carlsberg was the cheapest pint at £5! Kronenbourg was £5.85 but that muck is even worse than Carlsberg! Guinness was an eye watering £6.60 a can! I got a 12 pack in Tesco for £13, club card price of course. 

We then made our way up a very, very steep staircase to the safe standing area!

This was my first experience of safe standing and I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I had it in my mind that safe standing was more fancy than a railing in front of the seats, but that’s exactly what it is. But standing at football is always better than sitting down. Hopefully when The Abbey is redeveloped The Habbin becomes safe standing, I’m not old enough to sit down at football yet. 

Before the teams emerged a bizarre pre match ‘show’ took place.

I did wonder if it was the cat and mouse parachute game I remember from infant school, but sadly it wasn’t. 

To add to the entertainment a mascot did some half arsed flag waving:

With the crowd warmed up and ready to go, the game kicked off. 

The first half was almost as effective at putting people to sleep as Propofol, but at least we weren’t losing.

One thing I did find strange was the goal alerts on the screen, I’ve never seen this anywhere else! 

During halftime a bright spark decided to let off a smoke bomb in the concourse, which made walking to have my halftime wee feel like an event on the Crystal Maze. How did the smoke bomb make it past the thorough security?

 

The second  half started perfectly with great footwork from Ryan Loft (yes really) followed by a brilliant finish into the top corner, 1-0 Us! Back to back goals for Loft who has now hopefully found his scoring touch! 

Of course it didn’t last. Just a few minutes later the game was level. Stevens hesitated and let a header in off of the post. I wonder if he assumed it was going to hit the post and bounce out. Around ten minutes later Rotherham took the lead and it was game over. The U’s didn’t really threaten again, though the introduction of Ballard did look promising. 

There it was, another defeat for the U’s. Results elsewhere couldn’t really have been worse and the survival chances grow increasingly slim. 

Cambridge game: 548

36/92

See you at The Abbey for Wycombe. 

Thanks for reading.