"...Oh, oh I'm Trapped, like a football fan I'm in a cage...."

.....I can't get out, you see I'm trapped, can't you see I'm so confused, I can't get oooooooout....!"

So sang 80's funkster and possible Smurf-wrangler, Colonel Abrams on his dance-floor filler, "Trapped".  And if you've followed the Poppies away much this season you'll appreciate and share the sentiment in the good Colonel's words.

Another tough day at the office yesterday on the road for the Poppies.  Another backs to the wall effort.  Another grisly afternoon's weather.  And yet another segregated game for the travelling reds.  Depressingly, we all know why this is increasingly happening.  Even more depressingly, those among us who are the cause are unlikely to ever read this.  Or read.

Every time a bunch of our Burberry-wearing part-time teenage contingent angrily rattle a fence somewhere, looking for a fight they know they are never going to have, it is noticed.  Each gumped-up piss-head celebrating a last minute winner on the pitch rather than on the terraces is recorded.  These incidents are ruminated over by officials at other clubs or the local plod.  Or both.  The result - segregation for the rest of us.

Invading the pitch is only acceptable (A) when you win the league, or (B) when Ronnie Radford scores from 40 yards in the Cup back in the early 1970's.  We've missed the latter by half a century, and the former seems a painfully distant prospect, so keep off the f*cking pitch you dolts!

But there's the rub - do these fences cause more problems than they prevent?  Are we "rewarding" the tiny percentage of dicks who view a confrontational atmosphere as some kind of validation?

This is non-league.  We've all spent more years than we care to recall mixing with opposition fans, drinking in each others social clubs, and managing to co-exist without fighting each other.  A lot of it comes down to self-policing.  One of yours gets out of hand and someone has a word.  Bad behaviour is coached out of miscreants by those around them.  Tougher these days when some less than savoury 70's attitudes are reappearing and in some disreputable quarters, being positively encouraged.

When you are among fans of another team you soon realise that they are just people like us.  They are just suffering the terrible misfortune of being born elsewhere and wearing a different coloured scarf.  They are not an existential threat to our way of Poppies-supporting life.  They can't help being from a less-blessed place and as a consequence, forced to support a far more moderate football club.  If you want to feel anything for them, perhaps pity is more appropriate than anger?

When you separate the two groups of fans into separate, caged-of areas the atmosphere becomes immediately confrontational.  It's US versus THEM.  Abuse can be pointed in a specific direction at a specific group of people.  You are stood in an unregulated echo-chamber of a single point of view.  The experience becomes the very opposite of what non-league football has always been and should continue to be. 

Colonel Abrahams, rather on-the-nose with the 
imagery for his song "Trapped".
No signs of the Smurfs though.