Blackpool FC Supporters' Liaison Officer's column: A glorious day when the football was as red-hot as the temperature

After all, it’s not as though there’s a lot else happening at the moment.

On Friday night – like many of you, I suspect – I watched the reshowing of the Seasiders’ Championship play-off final victory over Cardiff City.

Thank you to Blackpool FC for making it available on YouTube.

It was some compensation for us not being able to celebrate the team’s success a decade on in quite the way we did five years ago at BST’s anniversary Gala Night.

If you’re not among the 7,500 who watched it, the club is leaving it online for the rest of the week on the Official Blackpool FC YouTube channel.

Sitting through that rerun brought back some very happy memories. I was working on a project in Poland in May 2010 and had to miss both legs of the Forest semi-final as a consequence, but there was no way I was going to forgo the big one.

My wife (as was) sorted the tickets, my Polish opposite number (a big Legia Warsaw fan) drove me to the airport on Friday, wished me “Good luck and see you on Monday” and I sat on the plane hardly daring to hope that we could do this again.

We’d been to the new Wembley in 2007 to see the team put an end to nearly 30 years in the bottom two divisions, and now here was little Blackpool going back to the national stadium to tilt at a return to the top flight – incredible given we’d started the season as relegation fodder.

If you know anything about rock festivals, I likened the Yeovil game to Monterey Pop, the Cardiff match to Woodstock and the West Ham final to Altamont!

So there we were on Saturday May 22, one tangerine nation inhabiting the sunny half of Wembley Stadium, and boy was it hot (106.7 F pitchside during the game).

There are some who claim they never doubted the Seasiders would win. I had high hopes and a belief that if we took the game to Cardiff we could pull it off, but it wasn’t a cast-iron certainty.

Whatever happened, it was going to be a celebration of what this team had achieved in a remarkable run in to the end of the campaign, really since those back-to-back home wins over Middlesbrough and Reading in February.

I was proud just to be there amidst such fantastic supporters.

It was an afternoon that just flew by – though the last 15 minutes did seem to take longer than they should have.

We did take the game to Cardiff, refused to be intimidated by the occasion or the opposition.

I thought we bossed the first half, were sharper and more combative, so much so that Cardiff’s goals both seemed to come almost against the run of play.

That we came back so quickly on both occasions, with a goal of pure brilliance from Charlie Adam and then one of sheer bravery from Fletch, made the game ours to win.

When Brett Ormerod created history by sticking in the third just before half-time, we all knew we were witnessing something special.

My only regret, funny though it seems now, is that all our goals were scored at the other end of the ground. I even had a wager with my wife that we’d score two more in the second half (that 5-1 win over another Welsh team was still fresh in my mind).

It was not to be, of course. Lady luck was with us when Chopra’s shot smacked back off the bar just before the hour mark.

Both Ben Burgess and DJ Campbell had opportunities to send us into further raptures but the second period, though no less exciting than the first, saw no further goals. It didn’t matter.

Nervous excitement mounted to fever pitch as the clock ticked down. You couldn’t hear the final whistle blow for the sheer wall of noise emanating from all around.

As the match commentator said in the live (re-)broadcast: “Blackpool of all people. It’s absolutely outstanding.” And so it was.

Apart from getting married and being there for the birth of my children, that was simply the best moment, when the whistle blew and the exuberant celebrations began.

Not only was it a great game of football, possibly the most entertaining played at Wembley since the 1966 World Cup Final, but our heroes – and they were exactly that – had played the game of their lives (again!) and claimed the biggest prize: the right to play English football’s elite on a weekly basis. Sunny Blackpool, funny Blackpool, back in the big time.

Little did we know as we laughed, cried, applauded in the tangerine horseshoe half of the stadium on that scorching Saturday, quite what would be coming down the line in the next few months and years.

All we knew was the pure joy of the moment, and that tonight was going to be a good night before I had to fly back to Warsaw on Sunday evening.

Of course, self-belief, a desire to play attacking football and an incredible team ethic were key components of that win and they were there again in abundance during our Premier League year in the sun.

I’d like to think that the recently appointed Blackpool manager, under Simon Sadler’s ownership and management team, will prove capable of getting us there or thereabouts again once this distressing pandemic is defeated and we can all make new dreams.

This is my third monthly SLO column since lockdown began. With the fate of the 2019/20 season still not yet determined for League One clubs, who knows if it will be the last one?

It looks as though League One clubs will be given a vote this week or next on whether to resume and complete this season somehow or to conclude it on a calculated points-per-game basis.

Fortunately for the Seasiders there is nothing at stake in terms of promotion or relegation.

The more challenging issue is what form next season will take and how to prepare for it – given that it might be as little as three months away.

In the meantime, please stay considerate of each other, stay safe and look forward to the day when we get our game back.

STEVE ROWLAND (SLO)