16 years ago today

[sglosbcfc]

11 hours ago, robinforlife2 said:

In my 40 years on this earth, the Johnson's have given me probably 3 of the 4 best football matches I seen in Bristol City.

1 - Lee Johnson's team beating Man Utd will be hard to topple, especially with my Brother and Dad in attendance and the last game my Dad has seen City play due to ill health.

2 - The injury time winner at Crystal Palace by Noble in the 1st leg of the playoffs, I remember hugging and kissing people I had never met or seen before, and celebrating all the way back to the train station

3 - That strike by Trundle in the 2nd leg against Palace, I try to forget the next goal due to the personal heartache and effects on friends and family caused, but that night at the time was epic.

4 - The comeback against Hartlepool and Christian Roberts blasting in the winner in front of us.

Sadly in the Cotterill promotion season, I didn't see as many games as I would have liked, so I missed the nights at Bradford etc, but for me in watching live games, 3 of the 4 best times I've had supporting City, have come with a Johnson as our manager and for that I'll never feel bad or negatively about their time at our club.

Some of these videos bring back memories of when life was a lot happier for me. Not gonna lie, watching some of them bring a tear to my eyes. 

Gary Johnson gave me my Bristol City back. We'd had some tough, lean years and Johnson literally put the bounce back into the ground. He also made City feel 'big time' again. People were talking about us, crowds were growing and I remember the away support being particularly large and noisy at that time.

[petehinton]

My first season as a season ticket as a 12 year old, talk about luck. 

This entire season sums up how football can make you feel things not many other things can, especially at a young age. So many incredibly talented players, but also just regular guys and completely relatable. Some of this squad went on to have ‘normal’ jobs, and most are still in the game but in no way made obscene money like they would now. 

Remember being so in awe & scared of playing Coventry in the FA Cup as they were above us. Having Middlesbrough come to AG was another mind bender, I couldn’t sleep the whole week through pure excitement and went through the turnstiles as soon as they opened, ran down to the old tunnel at the bottom of the Atyeo and just took it all in whilst these PL ‘stars’ came out one by one. 

As many have mentioned, that final day was perfect. Having GJ, Louis, Noble and Fonts on OSIB, you can all hear how much they light up when speaking about that day. The feeling of the release of energy around the when Nobes scored the first is still something I haven’t had topped. In his words (ish) “just felt like everyone took a massive exhale and decompressed”. Think Louis said to Stan as soon as he walked out on the pitch, he could just tell it felt like our time and we were gonna do it that day. To think the summation in the papers after the opening day, was that if we were really serious about promotion we’d have to ‘beat teams like Scunthorpe more than 1-0’ ….

Think about those days, games, music in the charts etc very often as the football and the club we all had to support at the time just had such a great, happy feeling to it. Will take some beating, but in Nige we have someone trying to get us back to having a team we can all be very proud of.
 

Albeit I do still really miss those god awful, but somehow delicious half cooked cheeseburgers we could get in the ground at AG back in those days…!

Edited May 7, 2023 by petehinton

[Northern Red]

I wasn't there but was following events via SSN and the radio. I'd been at Carlisle a couple of weeks earlier where we won to put us on the brink of promotion, only in typical City fashion to go and lose at Millwall the following week.

Remember going to a party that evening hosted by someone I was working with at the time, and was getting congratulations and handshakes from various people, most of whom supported the big prem teams from this part of the world. They all knew what it meant.