Favourite Away Day

I have been on many away days in my years following West Ham from going to Dagenham & Redbridge to Man City and obviously over the river to Millwall. But one game that always sticks out in my mind is Nottingham Forest away at the beginning of last season.

I have chosen this game not only because of the great result that we had but because of the whole day and night out. From the moment we were relegated me and my friends started to plan the away days that we would want to go on in the following season. Obviously the usual games came up like Millwall and Leeds but the one away day we wanted to really do was Forest away. So we were absolutely delighted when the fixtures came out and we saw that it was only a few days into the new season.

We decided we wanted to make the most of this away trip so thought this would be the perfect opportunity for our first away weekend of the season. With the great night life and the apparent 4 to 1, girl to boy ratio up in Nottingham we thought it would be rude not to book up a hotel for the night.

THE JOURNEY/NIGHT OUT

With the game being on the Sunday we had the whole of Saturday to get up there. We arrived in Nottingham around 6ish with the beers already in full flow from the train journey. We had a ten minute walk to the hotel and we bought some more beers and chilled in the hotel for a couple of hours while we got ready.

As one of us had already been up to Nottingham a few years before he knew about Hooters so we booked a table for 9pm well in advance.

Well……… Hooters is a different experience in itself and should have a whole story just for those couple of hours in there. Lets just say the women who work there are just WOW.

We hit Nottingham town centre after Hooters and we went to a few different bars and clubs. The drinks were ridiculously cheap and the ratio’s were completely right with the amount of girls that were out that night. Anyway the night came to an end around 3 in the morning and we slowly made our way back to the hotel for the big game day in the morning. Except for two of my mates. They some how ended up in a pub that had an upstairs bar which was open to all of hours of the night. The strangest part about this is that the bar was just full of black people and they were the only white people in there and they had the times of lives. I can say this now we re-visited this pub for Derby away.

GAME DAY

After an all you can eat buffet breakfast we were out of the hotel and on our way to the City ground. It was a short walk from the hotel to the stadium and none of us were in any fit state to drink a bit of alcohol so we stood outside the ground for a bit and soaked up the atmosphere before entering the ground. Like usual we had filled our end of the ground up and despite it being an early kick off the atmosphere was buzzing especially from us. We started the game well and took the lead after 21 minutes through an own goal from Luke Chambers and we just got better as the game went on. We scored another two goals within the next 15 minutes, one from Kevin Nolan and the other by Carlton Cole. We dominated the majority of the game but Forest got a goal back in the 70^th minute thanks to Robbie Findley. Despite that goal we stayed on top and quickly restored our 3 goal advantage when Winston Reid headed in from a Mark Noble corner. The game finished 4-1 and we continued our reasonable start to the season.

WAY HOME

Our train home wasn’t until 5pm that evening so we had a couple of hours to kill before the journey home. So as we left our bags at the hotel reception we went back there and somehow managed to bring in a Mcdonalds each and a load of cans of beer into the foyer. As the song states ‘Same old West Ham taking the p**s’

The journey home was a lot longer than the way up there. After one messy weekend all we wanted to do was get into our beds and go to sleep before work the next day. This weekend will never be forgotten for the rest of my life.

COYI