Milan Mandaric has taken Pompey to a crossroads – and while the club head in one direction, Harry Redknapp chooses another after this straggly defeat. David Stubbs reports
The first time I saw Portsmouth play was in the first game I ever attended – September 1971 at Hull City’s Boothferry Park, a post-holiday birthday treat en route back home from a drizzly week at the Golden Sands Chalet Park in Withernsea. Hull City won 3-1, I vividly recall, except that they didn’t – a check on Soccerbase has confirmed that my lifelong belief to that effect is erroneous. In fact, it was Pompey who won by the same score. Still, what has stuck is the allure of what was doubtless a dismal occasion for the regulars. The combined stench of drifting cigarette smoke and fried onions acts like one of Proust’s cakes on me even now. I remember the bloke two rows down shouting “You Portsmouth pigs!” – the height of terrace invective to me. Mostly it was the floodlights that im- pressed me: tall, imposing and HG Wellsian, they were like giant cyber-sentries from another world.