 Some People Are On the Pitch...Written by urbanpenguin on Monday, 15th Jun 2026 14:40 My seat for QPR at home was three rows from the back of the West Stand. It offered a perfect view across along the Bobby Robson Stand so as the game went into injury time, I could see the crowd politely and excitedly hold itself back from entering the pitch. Some had already stepped over the low wall, others were crowding the aisles ready for the inevitable, but (except for that one person who prematurely evacuated himself then realised, looped his run, and returned to the mass) it held its line. But, like a spring tide about to burst the bank, a flood was coming. On my phone and from my vantage I recorded the moment. Not just the Bobby Robson, but all four sides rushing at once, perfect green rectangle subsumed first by limbs then blue smoke. A few days later, I posted it on Instagram and it went low-level-viral. Random accounts across the world who likely had no idea of Ipswich Town or the meaning shared it, I presume in recognition and pleasure of both the explosion of emotional joy and transgression of the particular ideas of freedom, energy, and order a stadium contains in its architecture.
 An hour after the game, drinking by the harbour, someone I was with said, “I didn’t go on the pitch, I’m not sure what the point is really.” It got me thinking. Why, after stopping filming, did I swiftly descend to ground level, join a throng funnelling past leaking loos, then quickly find myself on the hallowed stretch turf? “What would you do when you get there?” she asked. A good question. I had intended to go to the centre circle, but I was not the only one, so instead meandered within the crowd, sharing a moment of punctuation at the end of a complicated and uneasy season. I looked through the bodies to the stadium beyond, and then started ticking off the places I had spectated from since the late 80s: the family enclosure my dad helped me clamber up steps to when he’d rather have been behind a goal; the front of Churchmans, standing on a milk crate he dutifully carried to each game while I gripped his hand; nearby after it was all-seated; also the North Stand lower; then upper after the Robson rebrand; and then finally the wheelchair section of the same stand I sometimes wheeled my dad onto at the end of his cancer.
 To see familiar architecture in reverse is powerful. I know the views from each of those spaces intimately. As if it was yesterday, I can see Robert Ullathorne’s bumbling backpass coming straight at me, Phil Whelan’s header from a corner inching us towards promotion, and defenders struggle to hold back both Ronaldos. To look back at those memories from the very pitch they happened on is uncanny. To momentarily feel the spatial experience players do each game does, in a small way, help understand that football cliché of the 12th man, and how the proximity, height and intensity of a surrounding crowd may have on the individual.
 I was abroad for work when Town last got promoted. I watched the pitch invasion on my laptop from a former power station in a small German town – bodily distanced, but mentally present, vicariously on the pitch through the live images, but also through rich memories after the Brighton home game in 1992, standing on the pitch with my dad, in a joyous crowd celebrating promotion to the Premiership. I discussed it in a magazine article I was in Germany to write, copy far from that I’d expected to file, but which felt right in that time and place to think about how joy can co-exist with loss. Places such as FPR trigger such emotions for supporters. The ground might have changed since the 80s – new tiers, a big screen, more seats (repainted turnstiles) – but the place is the same as the one all of us were at before, whenever that was. Today's is the same as the one I went to as a kid, as the one my dad went to in the 60s, and as many of our relatives enjoyed all the way back to 1884. Years, years, and years before current players, staff, and owners. Standing in the crowd I looked up at the Gamechanger crew, clad in international-corporate suits and identifiably-US sunglasses. I realised in that moment that the pitch invasion had a function beyond the release of tension and shared celebration. There they all were, in the Directors’ Box looking down on the pitch and across the stadium bowl that they own, but we – the fans – were front and centre.
 They clearly enjoyed the moment and Town’s social media admin had free rein to publish images of the pitch invasion and crowds across the world. In that moment we were useful to the club, its brand, its value, but a crowd should also not forget the value in and of itself. In his recent book on the history of crowds, Multitudes, Dan Hancox writes about how we do not go to games to see the match better as the vantage will always be better on TV, we go there to be a part of a collective experience. Arguably, the game of football has always been one of mediation between those who enjoy the game and those who own it, but in the 2020s this is more acute than it ever has been at Ipswich Town before. The club is at once a successful Premier League powerhouse, an international brand, a rooted community organisation, a sponge into which thousands of people sink their emotion, a rich history of sporting success and failure, an enormous and expensive architectural footprint and a number in an asset spreadsheet of numerous international investors. Modern football is a series of complex dialectics. It is escape, but also 24/7 all consuming. It is the people’s game, but World Cup tickets are more than a mortgage deposit. It is the analogue simplicity of 11 people kicking a pig’s bladder, but also super-technical with VAR, cracked Firesticks and GPS-tracked sports vests. It is an apolitical space where we all simply come together around an historic pastime, but is also deeply embedded in politics small and big, from the expectance of team captains to declare support for basic human rights, right up to government-appointed regulators. At the centre of all this is, and always will be, the supporter.
 Kieran McKenna has moved on. Players spin through the revolving transfer door. Soon, owners and key staff will also sell up and depart, as is their plan. The pitch and stadium (however it eventually looks) will remain and the crowd will forever be present. The crowd, of course, which is made up of not only the 30,000+ people with tickets, but also the ones no longer and not yet able to be present. Sociologist David Harvey wrote that the right to a city is more than our individual access to resources and space, but is a right to change ourselves by changing the city to our collective desires rather than the plans of those few in power. The crowd is not perfect, whether in the stand, on the pitch, or in an Internet forum, though it is powerful – for good and bad. The crowd can attack the homes of refugees and citizens, but it can also stand up to authoritarian rule. The crowd is never inert or apolitical, by its very nature it is a political body, and standing on and claiming a right to the pitch in front of the suited men who bought it is a powerful show of collective ownership and desire. There are different kinds of pitch invasions – solo, mass, violent, protest, joyous – and by the letter of the law they should all be treated the same, so technically all of us on the pitch after QPR should be banned from football for life just as the lone Carrow Road was. But politics is pliable. The May moment was a mass of joy, not protest, so was useful for the club’s brand and no doubt the Gamechangers enjoyed gazing over the scene through tinted lenses. But while we should recognise that power for them and the club, we should also remember the power of it for us as a fanbase and our shared history and future – we do not know how long they will be at Portman Road, but we do know we will be. Of course, we recognise that the Gamechanger group have transformed the club, but in McKenna’s leaving we are reminded how the idea of permanence in football is a romance of the past. Supporters add value, both in the boardroom and on the pitch, whether the 12th man in a game or the 12th column in a finance spreadsheet, but I think it is more valuable to remind those who hold authority that it is temporary, and that power comes from permanence – for me that is what the pitch invasion stood for. To break the code of polite relations, to cross a line of social segregation, to inhabit a part of the land which we supposed to look at but not stand on.
 When I stood on the pitch, having scanned all the spots I was once in, I noticed the banner at the top of the Sir Bobby Robson stand. I presume it was hung by Blue Action, a group I know sometimes annoy other fans, but I think are valuable through the fact they remind the owners that that they can own assets but not a club. Stretched out, it contained a short extract of his Robson’s quote regarding what a club is. Perhaps in 2046 when Gamechanger have finished turning Portman Road into a 50,000-seater stadium bowl and we have a few more stars on the shirt there will be room for the whole quote to wrap around, but until then I think it’s worth reading the entirety: “What is a club in any case? Not the buildings or the directors or the people who are paid to represent it. It’s not the television contracts, get-out clauses, marketing departments or executive boxes. It’s the noise, the passion, the feeling of belonging, the pride in your city. It’s a small boy clambering up stadium steps for the very first time, gripping his father’s hand, gawping at that hallowed stretch of turf beneath him and, without being able to do a thing about it, falling in love.”
 All photographs & text © Will Jennings Please report offensive, libellous or inappropriate posts by using the links provided.
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