Lord Bracknell
On fire
In my early years as a Newport County supporter, it was a greyhound track that ran round Somerton Park. Sadly, the old ground has gone - buried beneath a housing development. After the Club went bust, they endured a long period of exile, playing home games as a lower-end non-league club at Moreton-in-Marsh in Gloucestershire (further from Newport than Gillingham is from Brighton), before returning to Newport to play at the delightfully named Spytty Park athletics track (does any of this sound familiar?), before moving last season to a proper stadium at Rodney Parade, which they share with Newport Rugby Club and Newport Gwent Dragons.The last time that we played Newport County (though a different entity then) was in 1966 at the start of the FA cup run that finished in the lock-out at Stamford Bridge. There was just about a coach load from Brighton. I can remember Eric Whitington scoring.
The major memory is of the ground - Somerton Park. There was no high terracing - it was all shallow, almost like watching in a park. Behind the goal, the terracing was railway sleepers with cinders to stand on, not concrete. These cinders had probably come from the local steelworks. The ground doubled as a speedway track, and so the corners of the pitch (and the corner flags) were on coconut matting which could be taken up afterwards to expose the curved speedway track underneath (more cinders!). I had never seen that before or since.
Somerton Park has a place in County supporters' hearts that is not very different from how Albion fans think of the Goldstone. It's where I first saw the Albion play - back in the fifties, in the old Third Division (South).