Neil Warnock's quote in the Guardian: "The winners today were the two sets of fans," said the Leeds manager. "They were amazing from the touchline, the noise they made." My question is this: Can anyone think of any ground in the 4 Enlish Leagues where one set of fans chants at one end and the fans of the same team at the other end answer back, with them going back and forth for minutes at a time?
"We're the North Bank, we're the North Bank, we're the North Bank 'ighbury!" "WE'RE THE CLOCK END, WE'RE THE CLOCK END HIGHBURY" And so on. That's the one that springs to mind. But nowadays, the closest you get is probably the tedious left side/right side thing Brighton have going on at their new stadium. Sadly, I don't think the sound travels well enough at Elland Road for it to work for us. Best we could do is an old-fashioned 'Champions of Europe' chant with the left side and right side of the Kop singing the two halves, instead of the frantic speeded-up two-minute version we have these days.
In full voice you can hear the other end of the stadium pretty well, North and South could get something going, play tennis with chants. What's this thing you speak of at Brighton?
The LA Galaxy Riot Squad do a fantastic job of chanting "EL-A" on one side and reponding with "GALAXY" on the other end. I don't go to games often, but try to watch a few minutes of a game on tv and you can hear it clearly. Maybe not as well as when you are there and may not get the end to end effect. Turn your computer monitor sideways and check this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vtC2PRvkkI Capacity only 28,000 but they sell out almost every game.
This is Brighton's: [video=youtube;M8Mt8FOmDTM]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8Mt8FOmDTM[/video] Would be class if we could get as many people as LA Galaxy singing "We're the North East Elland Road", followed by "We're the Gelderd Elland Road". Sadly, no-one in the Kop joins in with the second bit after the North East corner sing their line.
The left and rights sides of the Kop used to do this every game throughout the 80s, and used to go round the stadium asking the next stand to sing. Still do sometimes. But it is much more difficult now with the tannoy systems. The only chance you get for any songs is during the game, whereas throughout the 80s and 90s while the systems were so bad, it provided pre-mact hand half-time songs to be created and developed. This is one of the reasons why we have such a lack of atmosphere. When I read your post at first JLA, I thought you were suggesting a song sung by one team's fans and then responded by the other team's fans. Now that would be interesting groupthink banter!
