Fireworks: Aston Villa 6 Everton 2 1989

Dek Hogan remembers how an eight goal thriller chased the grumpiness away...

It's Sunday November 5th 1989 and I am in a really grumpy mood.

Thanks to Elton Welsby and his cohorts at ITV, we have a match on. Everyone else has played on Saturday at 3 o'clock, but as we are lucky enough to get chosen by the telly bosses, we get to play on a Sunday instead. No roast beef and Yorkie pudding for me then. Oh dear me no. Lunch will have to be a pint of gassy Mickey Mouse in a plastic glass and a lukewarm pie. Lovely.

(For younger readers, Sky hasn't bought the heart and soul of football yet, but pulls in the viewers with WWF Wrestling, Kay Burley reading the news and Keith Chegwin hosting a truly awful yet addictive talent show. I will buy my first satellite dish a few months after this to watch Villa playing in the away leg at Middlesbrough of the Zenith Data Systems Cup Northern Final and we will have a houseful of dishless Villa fans for that game.)

I suppose one advantage of the telly people mucking about with my weekend is that I've set the video to record the match, so that if I miss anything vital, I can see it when I get home. I've put a four-hour tape in (Scotch E-240) and set the player to “Long Play” so that even in the unlikely event of a six hour delay (well you never know), I'll still capture the game. On the down side I've convinced myself that taping the game is a jinx (it actually proves to be just that on many an occasion) but I still feel obliged to record it just in case the game turns out to be an eight goal thriller, however unlikely that may be.

So, annoying as it is to have to travel across the city on unreliable Sunday public transport and to have to miss the one proper slap up feed of the week, (my Saturday pre-match meal around this era usually consists of a couple of Bird's Eye beefburgers and a sachet of Batchelor's Savoury Rice), this isn't the cause of my grumpiness.

I am pissed off because on my arrival at Villa Park I am unable to make my way to my usual Holte End spot.

The Hillsborough disaster has happened in the previous April and it is at this game that new ground regulations have their first direct impact on me. Although it can be split in half for neutral games such as FA Cup Semis, the Holte End has been, up until now, one vast terrace for Villa games. I believe that before the new regulations came in, the capacity of that one stand was around 23,000.

It has always been my practice to enter via the season ticket turnstiles where the Holte meets the Trinity Road, emerging into the ground directly under the spot where the ABCD scoreboard used to sit, then make my way happily across the entire terrace to my spot near the back of “the right side”.

Hang on though! I can't!

All the gates are locked. Fuming, I head up to the concourse to find that that too has been cut in half and despite lengthy arguments with the steward manning the gate in the middle, there is no getting through. Now I could maybe understand this course of action if they are expecting anything like a decent gate.

They're not.

Football is still very much in the doldrums in 1989, with attendances still down and gates for televised games even more so. The magic of Pavarotti and Gazza's tears that will start to rehabilitate football's image is all still to come. What makes no sense to me is that even with Villa Park's capacity reduced by the stricter regs, it could still hold the crowd we will attract for this match twice over and still not be bulging at the seams. (The actual gate will turn out to be 17,637.)

More to the point, the fences are still up at the front of the stand, so what they actually done is pen us in even more.

Call that safety, cos I don't.

Ironic that Villa should be putting up the Berlin Wall across my beloved Holte End just as the Iron Curtain is being torn down across Europe.

I'll have to watch the game from “the left side”, separated from my usual cohorts. Sure there'll be a bit more singing than on my side and the view is just as good. Indeed, I'd picked my old spot on the right side because it afforded a good view if you weren't too tall. In the intervening years I've sprouted to 6'1”, so “getting a good view” is much less of an issue.

Nose firmly out of joint, on to the actual game. I'm expecting a decent contest.

Everton are still expected to be title contenders while Graham Taylor has blended together a hard working bunch of players who on their day can give anyone a game. Some are still to be convinced about the unusual talents of beanpole forward Ian Ormondroyd but, as it turns out, he'll certainly win a few hearts and minds in this game.

Sid Cowans proves to be a key figure running the game from midfield and sets Villa on the road to victory, running on to Chrissy Chrissy Price's slick pass and driving in off the far post for one nil.

A cracking cross from Ormondroyd is met by a volley from one David Platt and though Neville Southall does well to stop it going in, he is powerless to stop Ian Olney from pouncing on the rebound for 2-0.

Norman Whiteside is chucking his weight about, picking up a yellow card in the process, and it is his scything down of the industrious Ormonrdoyd that brings about the free kick with which Sid finds David Platt's head and we have a 3-0 half-time lead.

Everton rejig for the second half with two substitutions but to no avail. A deft piece of play from Platty gives him his second and Olney soon bags a brace himself after Ormondroyd picks him out following a jinky run down the left.

By now, my grumpiness has left me, happily singing “Keown, Keown what's the score?” and “we want six”. We get six thanks to a Kent Nielsen header and even a late Tony Cottee consolation and a Paul McGrath own goal from a Peter Beagrie shot can't dampen the mood.

The game and the performance has transformed us into title contenders, it turns out that I actually quite like it on the left side and I will soon move there for the rest of the Holte End Terrace's life.

And there's still Bonfire Night to come. I jump onto a Number 11 bus and go off in search of a sparkler and a baked potato.