NUFC vs Leicester City (10 January 2023)

Cup games are strange, for league games, we know at the start of the season that we’ll be playing and roughly when, subject to fixture changes for a variety of reasons, and we discuss this in some detail over the pre and season.,  For the cup, we have a much shorter time to decide what the display might be, and what the mood music might be.

For Leicester, we had a couple of ideas as to what they might be, and had a lot if discussions about it, and came down on the importance of atmosphere for this game. Given the nature of it, we wanted to get supporters more engaged with the team, we’ve been discussing the idea of encouraging supporters to being their scarves to the match and re-ignite some of the atmospheric matches of the past. However, we also have a lot of display ideas in the pipeline and wanted to use one of these for the game, so we decided to combine one of these ideas with the scarf idea. We would deploy the 90s surfer to the Gallowgate end.

In addition to this, we had a fair amount of work to do to repair the existing flags out on the terraces which don’t see all of the care that they deserve, so three things to do in the week before the game were push the idea of scarves on social media and networks, plan, prepare and trial the banner, together with a bit of time in preparing and repairing existing stock.

First thing, we developed a ‘#BringYourScarf and shared this out widely on social media, engaged with the club and local media outlets, We were delighted with the response from all quarters, including various posts from the club.

Next we had to get in and test the 90s surfer for size and confirm that it was in good shape. We pulled it out onto the Gallowgate end, and look for position and fit. We did this in the final days before the game.

At the same time, a lot of the team were in repairing flags, clearing up, taking damaged items out of stock and making sure that the ground was adequately supplied by flags.

In our WhatsApp group, we had a lot of discussion about what was needed on the day, including talking to Rob, the club DJ, how many people needed to be on top and bottom of the surfer, whether it was static or it would move. We agreed that, and had the right number of people. One thing that we forgot to do was to remove the smaller flags from seats which would be under the flight path of the surfer.

On the day, it was wonderful to see all of the flags and scarves in action and it brought tears to many eyes seeing all of the scarves being held and waved for the game – it was truly wonderful – and seeing Alan Shearer waving his was also wonderful.

Once the surfer was finished its journey, 10 of us picked it up and took it to the storage area.

On to Fulham and Southampton.

Written by Graham Moor (@monstercop)

Photography by George Frizzell (@toonarmy59)