An Avid Lensman

By SarumStroller

Football Match??

Mayhem in Salisbury's Fisherton Street (the main one that goes west to the railway station and Bath etc).

Enough jubilant mayhem to make one remove most of your clothes (true, it was 30 C) and jump around like springs on Speed and to have the road closed entirely for a good twenty minutes.

And all this not 50 yards from the heavily boarded up 'Mill' pub, guarded by high-vis security, one of the venues that the Skrupels had almost met their fateful end and from which Salisbury stills suffers from, like a continuing, nagging, never-ending cloying hangover.

Police were spot on. They only turned up quietly in numbers when needed, simply parked one car across one end of the road and another at the other. It would have been more than pointless to do any more than let the youthful energy diffuse naturally and only then try to keep the revellers off the road as the build up of traffic started to flow afterwards. 

It was great to see. All good natured exuberance, with rather a lack of Swedish fans around for provocation, there was not one angry shout or action. There were quite a lot of foreign tourists around (not Swedes!) and I am rather proud the way our fans were passionate but far from being hooligans - and all in quite a small tourist town that Salisbury is.

So little faith in the final result, I personally had intentionally let the match slip itself so far from my mind, I had previously photographed inside  a church and then enjoyed a cream tea. 

Surely, the Impossible had become Mission Accomplished beyond almost all our expectations!

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