I was born under the cold blow lane

I was born under the cold blow lane

I Was Born Under the Cold Blow Lane is one man’s experience of a lifetime following Millwall home and away. It shows the love, devotion, blind faith, stupidity and money that are required to support a team for over three decades.
It is Millwall as a Sixties-style kitchen-sink drama, full of grim, bleak locations, down-to-earth industrial language and violence, but without the sex. Truly Football for the working class common man – and you do not get more working class than Millwall. After all how many other teams mention beer and jellied eels in their club song?

It includes personal memories from the Old Den days through to today’s modern New Den era and features a guide to the real joys of away travel from London to points North, South, East and West.

Cataloguing the good and bad times, the characters, chants, wit, wisdom and mentality of a Millwall crowd and the strange things encountered on the way. It is an emotional rollercoaster with all the joys and pains that you could wish for from following a Football team.

It covers the modern era, ranging from the lows of life in Division Two, to the joy of winning the Division Two Championship in 2000/1, to the low of losing a Division One Play-Off and the subsequent riot in 2001/2 and the fraught season that followed in 2002/3, through to personal recollections from 2003/4, a season that was to turn into one of the most exciting in the club’s history, culminating in the heights of an FA Cup Final and qualification for Europe for the first time ever.

Barrie Stradling is in his forties and has been following Millwall nationwide for too long to see sense now! Millwall is for life – as they say the first 38 years are the worst.