Just had a chance to read this, good article.
Dunno if this is a bit cheeky but............
‘To get this game on after our hell is phenomenal’
Our correspondent helps to get Brunton Park ready for York City’s visit, 49 days after the floods that left Carlisle United homeless
It was raining in Carlisle; thin, spitting rain. Clogged with Saturday evening traffic, Warwick Road was half in darkness, the houses shells, gutted and empty. There were sandbags on the pavements, skip upon skip filled with plaster and trellising and household detritus, the air throbbing with the sound of blowers and dehumidifiers. Even now, 49 days on, it felt like the aftermath of apocalypse.
At Brunton Park, Dave Mitchell hurried a lawnmower across the pitch. The groundsman and his assistants, Matt Henry and Paul “Nobby” Butler, had been there since 6.30am and would stay until 7pm, forking, preparing and fixing, just as they have been from that distressing December day when a city drowned. Work to be done. “This might be the driest it gets between now and Everton,” Mitchell said.
A few minutes earlier, up the tunnel, beneath the club badge and motto — “Be just and fear not” — through a corridor that reeked of paint and sawdust and into the remnants of the directors’ lounge, Keith Curle, the Carlisle manager, reflected on his side’s 1-1 draw with York City. “I’m frustrated, annoyed,” he said, but anger could not linger. Everybody has lost, everybody has won. Around Curle’s seat, there was carnage.
In the Paddock before kick-off, supporters wished each other a happy new year. After Storm Desmond struck, submerging the goalposts and causing £3 million of damage at the stadium, Carlisle played “home” games at Preston North End, Blackburn Rovers and Blackpool. There was novelty in that — and the club provided free transport — but they yearned for a homecoming, at least until the football started. “Why don’t we ever do things easy?” a plaintive voice lamented.
At 2.15pm, Angela and Wilson Watson had unlocked their back gate. Inside the ghost of their home on Warwick Road, the walls are stripped back to brick. There is nothing else. As the waters surged upwards on December 5, climbing above four feet, Angela had come downstairs and ignored her handbag, her husband’s wallet, the medication they both need. She rescued their season tickets.
She first recounted that story the following Tuesday, when Carlisle’s players, rallied by Danny Grainger, their captain, helped with the clear-up — fans returned the gesture at the stadium the next morning — but there was an irony before the York game; she had forgotten the tickets. The inconvenience was minimal — a ten-minute detour back to their rented house — and it prompted laughter, but it was rationed.
Angela had just walked her dog beside the River Petteril. “You wonder if it’ll rise again,” she said. “That’s permanently going to be in my mind now. I’ll always look at water differently.” Trauma is still felt. “It has been very stressful. I have days when I sink to a low ebb and then you think to yourself, ‘Well, it could have been worse.’ And it could. We could have been dead. So you lift yourself up again.”
The Watsons expect their house to have dried by Easter but are unlikely to return until September. “We’ve lost everything that was on the bottom floor,” Angela said. “I salvaged the season tickets — I didn’t need to, because they’re plastic! — and some photographs. You can only go up and down the stairs so many times; my husband is in his 70s and I’m 68. What’s depressing is that things seem to be moving so slowly.”
Football offers relief but, in this instance, Carlisle and its community are indivisible; the News & Star captured the essence on Saturday’s front page — “Our City Stands United”. Last week, the Watsons, who went to Deepdale, Ewood Park and Bloomfield Road, spent more than three hours queueing for tickets for this Sunday’s FA Cup fourth-round tie against Everton. Club staff, working out of Portakabins and with intermittent power, provided hot drinks and umbrellas.
“There’s a saying that when things go wrong Brits pull together and I think that’s right,” Angela said. “I’ve been incredibly moved. People are trying very hard to help. I took my curtains to be cleaned — it was half-price because we’re flood victims. It was the same when we got keys cut for the workmen. The club have been brilliant too. Being back at Brunton Park is emotional.”
Outside the ground, Claire Winder was selling pin badges; the proceeds will benefit both visually-impaired supporters and the flood appeal. She is a fans’ representative on the Carlisle board who, that morning, had been dispatched to buy a shower curtain for the referee’s cubicle.
“There’s a mixture of excitement and sorrow at driving down Warwick Road,” Winder said. “Hopefully, being back here gives people something to focus on and enjoy again. It’s been absolutely horrendous, but I think you can see the determination. A lot has been said about the spirit of Cumbria, but it’s shone through. To get this game on, a month and a half after the floods, is phenomenal.”
The effort has been shared. “This place is like a second home,” Nigel Dickinson, the operations manager, said. “We’ve only got a small staff, but we have a pride in what we do. Everybody wants to muck in.”
“When we came in after the flood, it was surreal,” Phil King, a director, said. “The power of the water had wiped everything out. Then this spirit kicks in.”
Nobody has sweated more than Mitchell and his team. Henry and Butler were at Brunton Park when the River Eden burst, manning a water pump. They brought a police officer to inspect the flood banks beside the ground. She uttered one word: f***. “She repeated it over and over again,” Henry said, “She was in awe of how much water was on the other side.” A few hours later, “it was gushing down Warwick Road in all directions, as if somebody had opened a dam.”
They had eaten their “bait” at the Beehive pub. “There was a 30th birthday party going on,” Butler said. “They were totally unaware of the mayhem outside. We saw them later, getting kicked out. There were dinghies going past.” They pumped and pumped.
“We’d kept the pitch dry for nearly 12 hours,” Butler said. “It was like, ‘We can’t leave now’. Eventually, we jumped on a tractor and got out, up along Warwick Road at 1.30am.”
“I got home and everybody was still up,” Henry said. “It was all over the news. All you could think was, ‘It’s all gone.’ ” Butler added: “It felt like we’d lost everything. That first couple of weeks afterwards, you couldn’t do anything but clean up. It was soul-destroying, getting covered in all that slime and oil and grease and diesel. It was miserable. It just felt so massive.”
The team were playing away to Welling United that Sunday. “My dad’s got a farm just outside Penrith and the field fences were washed away and debris scattered everywhere,” Grainger, the defender, said. “One of my friends sent me videos; in the first, water was coming through the floorboards of his house. In the second, it was above the kitchen units. It was devastating.
“I’ve never been emotionally affected before games, but I was drained at Welling. I could feel myself getting emotional. When we got back on the bus afterwards, we decided we’d get out into the community, help with moving things, do whatever we can. In the past, when I’d seen floods on television, I’d thought, ‘Dry things out, you’ll be fine!’ Until you see it first-hand, you can’t grasp it. And it’s what’s left behind: the sludge, the smell.”
In Sky Bet League Two, there is little separation. Elaine, Butler’s sister, has had a season ticket for decades; Harry, his son, coaches for the club’s Community Sports Trust. So does John Easton, whose home on Vasey Crescent took in three feet of water. “I was cleaning my house and then coming to work and cleaning here,” he said. Dan Hanford, the goalkeeper, was staying in a club property that flooded. So was the house he was about to buy. As was his car.
There are plenty of tales like that. “We’ve been through hell,” Grainger said, but something has been gained too. “We’ve only lost one game,” he said. “We’re still thinking about the play-offs. Everyone has pulled together. It was important to do something. Let’s get ourselves mucky. Lads have pulled on wellies for the first time in their lives, thrown crap out of people’s houses and not questioned it. It’s a special dressing room.”
“The challenge has been keeping the players focused but also making sure they’re not sterilised from the devastation around the club,” Curle said. “It was a genuine gesture when they offered to help. That offer stands; there are still people putting their lives back together.”
Insurance will cover much of Carlisle’s material losses — remarkably, they only had an excess of £250 to pay — but old programmes and records have been silted and Bill Shankly’s managerial contract from 1949 (salary £700), has been damaged and dispatched to a document restorer.
The game against Everton, which will bring in about £150,000 from live television coverage, feels “like a great narrative”, as King put it. “Just the journey we’ve gone on. It’s something great at the end of the rainbow. We’ve been lucky.” He thought about that and chuckled.
Roberto Martínez’s players will shower in a temporary facility outside their changing room, but Mitchell’s new pitch, which was hauled from Lincolnshire in 22 trucks and relaid, will be immaculate. “It’s a brilliant experience if you use it the right way,” this [thankfully] indefatigable man said last Thursday as he, Henry and Butler scraped mud from the edge of the turf and painted the lines.
It was 48 hours before York, another city buffeted by Desmond, and Brunton Park was still a building site. They got there, though, and after the game, pausing near the centre circle, Mitchell declared himself “satisfied” with how the surface had held up. He was not itching to chat. This is football and more graft is always coming. “We’ve done all right,” he said, switching his lawnmower back on and glancing at the sky. It was raining in Carlisle.
