NUFC vs Fulham (15 January 2023)

We’ve focused a lot in the run up to games on the players or various messages, but we’ve had a desire for a little while to celebrate the Boss. We’d had thoughts about how and where and what with, but settled on this on it’s own with a text banner to go in the Leazes End. We had considered doing this from L7, but some technical challenges made that more difficult and something we’ll likely come back to for future displays.

We had a few images of the Boss that we were considered but the one we chose was one which displayed the emotions and actions which we felt were right. We also considered whether we wanted to have words attached to this, but decided that the image would fit well with a number of phrases, so we’d print the image onto the fabric, and then work on a set of words to go above or under it separately.

We have used a few companies local, national and international, to print surfers but we decided to get this done by a company in Consett.

Having had the print done, we spent some time in the days approaching the game moving the surfer to a place in the Leazes stand, and worked on where was best for it to sit, where it would start from, where it would end, We opened up the surfer and tried it out in various places in the stand, made sure it was the right way round, and worked out who would be where, then where it would go after the display.

To go with the surfer, we decided to go with a phrase that the Boss uttered, namely, “We’re not here to be popular, we’re here to compete!”. We ordered that to be printed and added poles to it in the days in advance of the display. The two together were the Leazes end display.

Aside from this new display, we had the usual maintenance work, so repaired the Miggy, Eddie, Joelinton and Bruno banners, together with a few large wavers, and some smaller ones, The Friday and Saturday before the match were tied up doing this.

Having set out all of the display, we had to get organised to manage the display, so that bit was done through WhatsApp.

Written by Graham Moor (@monstercop)

Photography by George Frizzell (@toonarmy59)