Oxford is a funny city when you think about it.  Nowhere is quite the same and I don’t think we can count Cambridge, given its lack of serious industry and any footballing folklore.  Magdalen Bridge has always seemed to act as a dividing line between two worlds, both of which I have inhabited.

I have lived here from when I was a one-year-old, but very much in the University, growing up in Tom Quad in Christ Church (a door on the left with an angel above it), then going to read Medicine at Merton and finally being a doctor at the JR and living in Headington Quarry.  

Apart from the example of the late Mickey Lewis coaching the University Men’s team and perhaps Dr Ceri Evans (a Rhodes Scholar), and the sponsorship of Oxford City by Oxford University recently, I am not aware of much in the way of crossovers between these two factions of Oxford.

However, with the new stadium and the question of what ticket prices will be like, I found myself wondering what we should want.  It is well documented that football had a big change in the character of its crowds after the 1980s and the Taylor Report. Most of this was for the better, in terms of safety, family values, decrease in racism and better-quality stadia. 

Football is, at its heart, a working person’s sport through its early adoption in the North and Midlands after its birth in English public schools in the mid-1800s.  The cost of tickets usually has allowed this to continue, but with the advent of expensive stadia and a rise in commercialisation of tickets sales to the highest bidder, there is a strong risk Oxford might go the same way as Manchester United recently has, moving fans who have had season tickets for decades away from their usual seats to allow corporate clients their prime views. 

I now work as a GP in North Dorset in the town of Gillingham. My viewpoint is that if I had grown up going to matches filled with people from the same background as my privileged upbringing, I would not have experienced anything of normal life, living in a bubble and with no thrills or risk. 

I had the benefit of attending the Dragon School in North Oxford and then winning an Exhibition to Eton.  I was from a family of academics who would never have been to football before.  My mother had once been to an Arsenal match in the 1960s and my father, who had grown up in Liverpool, had never been to a match in his whole life. He had gone to school and university in Oxford but probably never had heard of the club.  

I had been to the Town Hall to see the Milk Cup brought back, sitting on top of my mother’s shoulders, just wandering out of our back gate at Christ Church one evening.  I had watched it on TV but I knew next to nothing about the club, except for the strangely inviting arch we drove past.  (We had friends from the cathedral who lived in Horwood Close next door).  

Happily, Eton was obsessed with football, perhaps unsurprising for previous winners of the FA Cup.  Prince William arrived in my house the year after I left, a shame as I might have got him into Oxford rather than Villa.

Going to football had seemed terrifying to my mother. A friend from the Dragon had been with to the FA Cup final in 1989 with his father, the Lord Lieutenant of Oxfordshire, and reported to my petrified mother about fans urinating on Wembley Way.

In my boarding house was a fervent Italian football fan from Milan.  He had been to the San Siro a number of times and made football sound exotic and watching Football Italia on Channel 4 only added to this.  So I thought I would test his coolness and suggested my father take him and me to an Oxford United game.  We turned up at the Manor for a random game.  I barely knew who the opposition were.  After a minute, Oxford were 1-0 down due to terrible goalie error; I turned to the Italian who was shaking his head.  Clearly this was a very low level of football.  Then something strange happened, and the game turned itself on its head. A particular player on the wing was incredible and the opposition’s midfield player-manager had no answers. We also appeared to be standing on the left side of something called ‘The London Road’ and the atmosphere was very, very tasty.  

After this 5-3 win over Swindon (1992), I was completely hooked.

I had my GCSE English Language the next summer and wrote an essay on attending my first match which got me the required ‘A’. I was boarding and every Tuesday morning a letter arrived from home with Monday’s Oxford Mail sports section. Away games in London were very easy on a Saturday from Eton, hopping on trains to Brentford, Leyton Orient, Watford, Charlton, Millwall and Crystal Palace.  All were losses, I think.  My House Master would sign me back in that evening with my voice usually hoarse or gone completely. 

On completing my UCAS form the next summer, I prominently placed my loyalty to Oxford United at the start of my personal statement, as I did on my CV 8 years later when applying as a Junior Doctor for training posts at the John Radcliffe.  Both perhaps worked, and I got a place to read medicine at Merton for 3 years (leaving for a London medical school to get some time out of the city) and then a 3-year placement at the Oxford Hospitals and then Abingdon as a GP trainee doctor. 

In my time at Oxford, I could sometimes rustle up 10 people to come to matches and would write very short reports for the Oxford Student, where a friend from the Dragon was the Sports Editor. I have never felt happier than when we played Ipswich at home and Matt Elliott turned one of their strikers on the edge of our box, their player sinking to the ground and Elliott glanced down at him, and then calmly walked the ball out of defence, before a raking pass to the wing. The university students were impressed. 

Everyone I took loved coming to Oxford matches. I took university friends, school friends, girlfriends, parents, my brother.  My poor brother (not a football fan) was a Junior doctor in Cardiff when Oxford came to play on a hot summer’s afternoon.  We parked near the ground, and I gave him an Oxford shirt to wear to match my own.  Oxford won 3-1 away and as we walked through police lines back to our car, we were warned “this way is for locals only”.  My brother pointed out he was a doctor in the city, so we were let through with a “good luck” muttered in our direction.  Just as we were reaching the cul-de-sac with our car, three huge Cardiff fans were approaching us.  Our turning off the main road looked perhaps like we were inviting a fight (though really – I was 15 and tiny) . One ran up and tapped my brother on the arm “take the shirt off boyo or I’ll lay you flat”.  My similarly short brother (due to having had a hole in his heart as a baby, stunting his growth) decided to try and act hard, after all he had a younger brother to look after. “No, you leave it” he replied. I thought better to bargain. “Just take the shirt off Mark” I begged, so he did. But the huge man wanted the (expensive) shirt. “Please, that cost me a fortune and we live just up the road”. “Oh, ok pal” and he handed it back and shook my hand.  

Perhaps my brother didn’t enjoy matches in fact. He never came again.

But my father relished it all.  He would wear his dog collar and sometimes cassock and was often the man who security decided to search. (This incident made it into his obituary in the Telegraph).  I think he enjoyed telling pompous Bishops he had spent Saturday afternoon calling the referee a wanker. 

I think it was only when I became a security guard at Chelsea for a season when I was a clinical medical student in London, to realise how lucky I was to have the Manor.  I was posted to the Directors’ Box and had to ask to see Ken Bates’ ticket each game.  The atmosphere was incredibly dull and looking out of the glass windows, it felt like I was watching TV.  The fans looked a mixture of terrifying and people I had been at school with.  The only time I was ever threatened by a fan (except the Cardiff ones above) was a Chelsea fan before an Oxford match in Headington.  So later that season, when Oxford came for the FA cup replay, I took my place below the box.  As we went 1-0, I turned screaming to look up at the Directors and felt sure a wife, whose ticket I had previously checked, saw me, and looked slightly confused. 

I took my Dragon mate to the last game at the Manor the year I qualified as a doctor.  Apparently, there were fireworks, but the roof of the London Road blocked them out.  I was excited about the new stadium and had biked out of the centre several times to see it being built (the first-time round) and had been only slightly concerned by the sewage smell. 

As a young doctor, I thought I would use my earnings to buy a season ticket in the South Stand Upper Tier.  The view was excellent but the atmosphere flat. I had more fun as an away fan in Luton that season where I did a 6-month stint in the Luton and Dunstable Hospital. On the ward round the next day, the Consultant (a Hatter) said we were the worst fans they had had all season, which made me proud. (I think we just sang very pointed songs, probably about Joe Kinnear, who was still alive it must be said).

Sadly, my father died in 2008, having retired to Wolvercote and I had a hiatus of attending due to working as a GP back in London, so had less excuse to get to Oxford from 2012 when my mother had a stroke that moved her to nursing home near my brother in Kent.

But then my son pitched up and after some false starts (he watched the Wycombe play-off final and saw my deep angst and perhaps thought “this ain’t for me”) I got him to the next play-off final.  He is hooked now.  I feel bad as his first three games were Bolton, Southampton (friendly) Norwich, Preston. All wins. 

But if this is what it takes! 

All this reminiscing brings me onto a few points: if football had been at the height of its most dangerous times, would I have been allowed to go? Probably not. (But was it ever dangerous at Oxford, I don’t know.  At Cardiff and Millwall, I noticed as away fans the police certainly had to protect us after the match, which I doubt happened to victorious teams leaving the Cuckoo Lane end).

Does Oxford have a good mix of people watching? Does it price people out? I would hope it does not do the latter and the former does seem to be the case. I noticed a tweet from a fan recently saying he sits next to people from all walks of life including lawyers, builders and “a lord of the realm”. (How does he know? Is he in his robes?).

My hope for the new stadium therefore is that tickets prices will have a good range of pricing and keep the people for whom football is a solace from all sorts of hardships, be they mental health, financial or the grim reality of living with austerity and job insecurity.  But it is important for everyone to know about football; my wife and daughter love coming too. They need to feel safe and comfortable. So, when they come, we sit in the South Stand and when just Hector and me, it’s the East Stand. He is Autistic and loves the noise, the singing and the camaraderie. 

We must not let Oxford become a place like the Chelsea I worked in. And perhaps we can throw a few Indonesian students from Oxford into the mix.