Millwall FC - Another Look Part 2: Big Match Den

Words: Tom Reed

Images: Sam Wainwright

With the right wind down Cold Blow Lane, The New Den is the best ground in London, no doubt about it.

We’re talking football grounds, not the super stadia of Tottenham and Arsenal.

The difference between watching your favourite band at an intimate gig versus a whacking great arena. Great rivals West Ham know that distinction all too well.

There’s an immediacy to Millwall, even at midday it feels like five to three.

A big match-day at the Den multiplies things by 20,000, a sell-out with Sunderland bringing 3,000 of their own.

©Sam Wainwright/ Terrace Edition. Millwall FC.

Both teams eye promotion to the Premier League and there’s an eagerness in the air as the burger van Chef de cuisine keenly chisels around fried onions at a time that isn’t much past breakfast.

How do you break down a stigma surrounding a 138 year-old football club? You just get on with helping your community, maybe people catch on.

Kelly and the team are at the New Den way before kick-off, getting things ready for the collection for the Lions Food Hub. Millwall fans bring along their hopes and a can of soup to help someone who needs it or a box of Weetabix or whatever. Small gestures at the big game.

Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not.

Millwall has never been about changing expectations but there’s a big “refugees welcome” graffito on the tunnel leading you to the ground as well a cutely sprayed Lion on the wall. Eddie Dempsey of the RMT is Millwall and you’ll find a mix of persuasions in the New Den crowd, although a nicely cut jacket goes down better than too much politicking.

A lion badge pinned in just the right spot on a cap.

It’s obviously easier to cast aspersions at Millwall fans rather than actually going down there and trying to understand the social nuance of what makes a football club. More simple to chuck clichés at a group of people you can never pin down rather than try and find common ground.

The Sunderland hordes don’t seem to have got the memo on the new Den being intimidating. The Mackems are a spaceship of a club, on another planet and truly believing they are on a rocket ship to the top flight.

“Come on baby, do the Tony Mowbray” they chant down the slipway which siphons them from the home fans after the train station on the hill, possibly the only supporters in the country that can make a chant to the tune of ‘The Locomotion’ by Kylie Minogue into something that pops.

Giddy the lot of them and, bloody well oiled. You would be too if you had a team that played at Roker Park, even for a day. One good natured Mackem stops to try and open an individual bottle of pink Prosecco he’s bought but he struggles to get the top off. “F*cking Prosecco, he laughs wryly, first bottle I’ve seen.”

Goldie knows how to wear a bucket hat, up since five am for the long trip from the North East, armed with not much more than his Fritidsklader cagoule and that well perched titfer.

Again, there’s little sense of trepidation of venturing to Millwall, the Sunderland fans seem to be savouring it.

“Proper this” exclaims a Mackem with a less than straight gait, maybe he’d been on the Prosecco or a 1990 Dom Perignon, as the atmosphere bubbles up.

There’s a Millwall chap called Mark Baxter who’s a very accomplished writer for films and his friend tells us about his match-day programme collection that his mrs is always threatening to throw away but relented when she realised the boxes they are in are actually propping up their collapsing garden shed.

The Sunderland team bus arrives to jeers, which are all pure theatre from the days of The Star Music Hall in Bermondsey where the crowd used to roar at whatever comic wasn’t playing the room and then sing along to Arthur Lloyd's 'There Are Many Worse Off Than You’.

It seems like the designers of the New Den didn’t think about the propensity for football fans to mill around before a game and the outside of the ground is chocker as kick-off approaches.

The queue for the club shop is fat and people spill out into the street from the Millwall Cafe like a Ford Madox Brown and there’s an ice cream van outside the industrial units which has no-one in it, missing out on a million ninety-nine sales.

Through the crowd zig-zags a beautiful black cocker spaniel wearing a coat of Hearing Dogs for Deaf People, the charity that Millwall FC work alongside. It’s a moment of calm that cuts through the hubbub and the dog works diligently looking after his friendly human as she goes to take her place in the stands.

The atmosphere within is seductively raucous, not least because the prosecco is kicking in at the away end and both sets of fans attempt to match each other audibly.

This is no toe-to-toe brawl but a game of relentless ebb and flow with Gary Rowett’s Millwall happy to let Sunderland have possession in the knowledge of some serious counter-attacking.

Wall’s Billy Mitchell wants the ball, he wants it a lot and looks to send diagonals for Tom Bradshaw to sneak between lines.

Sunderland have a lad called Amad on loan from Manchester United and his nonchalant, street football skill on the break means that Millwall will never be secure.

The home side have a goal disallowed and various penalty shouts waved away as the Cold Blow Lane end gestures in open outcry like the trading pit of the old London stock exchange.

The match finishes 1-1 and makes Millwall boss Rowett take a breath when saying it felt “like an old-fashioned game”.

The New Den was built in 1993 and fortunately for football fans, was delivered with four individual stands, all now showing their age, with moss growing on the blue metalwork which just out in the Italian style.

When the three of them join together to chant “Milllll” the track shakes at that South Bermondsey station on the hill.