Heading into town after Derby County had been promoted on Saturday gave me 1996 vibes, bringing back memories of the last time the Rams clinched promotion on home soil.
There were a few differences, of course: then, it was promotion into the Premier League and they’d achieved their goal at the Baseball Ground, Pride Park still being built at the time.
But inside the Standing Order that night, the buzz was the same: the high room echoing to the sound of the singing and the happy sound of happy fans, one city united in triumph.
It’s incredible to think that it was almost 28 years to the day since I was in there on April 28, 1996, with things reaching a crescendo when Darryl Powell and Dean Sturridge came in and stood at the bar leading the songs.
I was a reporter at the Derby Evening Telegraph and had spent the week leading up to the game talking to fans about how they were preparing for the big occasion.
A campaign called Roar ‘Til You’re Raw had been set up to encourage everybody to wear black and white for the match and I was assigned the task to write about it.
I remember the excitement, the trepidation and the nervousness that everybody I spoke to in the city over those six days felt about the big match. Afterwards, writing a piece about the game from a fan’s perspective, the emotions were relief, excitement and utter, utter joy.
The match was on a Sunday afternoon, so it’s incredible to think that the city wouldn’t read my piece or the match report until they bought the paper the next morning, accompanied by the now-iconic photos of team captain Robin van der Laan after scoring his goal and the crowds on the Baseball Ground pitch.
Now, mobile phones and social media have made things very different: within seconds of the pitch invasion at the end of the Carlisle game, the footage was all over the internet along with photos and video taken from every conceivable angle.
There were videos of the players receiving the trophy, endless repeats of the goals, the smoke, the crowds, the cheering and the scenes from bars all over the county.
On Saturday I took a 10-second film of fans singing in the Standing Order and put it on our company Twitter/X page: at the time of writing, it’s been viewed 12,400 times. Other content, of the players celebrating and selfie after selfie, have spread like wildfire too.
The media may certainly have changed, but the magic of Derby and its football club is still the same: it’s about the stories, shared experiences and love.
It’s a potent cocktail and it’s why Derby County digital content is catnip for fans and, back in 1996, why the Rams coverage, faithfully provided by Gerald Mortimer, was pivotal to the sales of the Derby Telegraph on Mondays. I would also imagine that, even in this digital age, the sales of the paper this Monday were off the scale.
We find this a lot with our clients: there is nothing like holding a piece of paper with a story printed on it to make coverage feel more real. More importantly, it’s a memento – you can’t put a video in a scrapbook.
What I find most interesting about the story driving the promotion celebrations is that it isn’t really about getting out of League One at all. After all, the club have simply got back into a division they had previously been desperate to get out of – and had nearly done so on two occasions.
Instead, the promotion has been cast as the happy-ever-after ending to a story that is nearly two years in the making – the tale of how the club has come back from the brink of oblivion and reclaimed its rightful place in the world.
It’s no coincidence that this is the kind of story you find in folklore, where a saviour (in this case David Clowes) restores the fortunes of a fallen kingdom with the help of a band of heroes who overcome setbacks and challenges to win the day.
And you could easily tell the tale of how the club fell from the heights, came back from the dead and rose from the ashes. It’s Icarus, Lazarus and the legend of the phoenix rolled into one, only they’re wearing shorts and playing 5-3-2.
This sounds overblown, but because it has the elements of an age-old story, albeit in a new setting and with new characters, it’s easy for people to buy into.
It is this very same use of recognisable stories that makes PR work. A good PR practitioner knows that to get coverage they have to present their client’s marketing messages in a neatly wrapped tale that ticks the kind of narrative boxes the consumers of their target titles expect from news.
They need some form of challenge and a resolution, and it needs to be relevant to people’s lives. It also needs to move them emotionally – they need to care.
And it’s this sense of caring – the love – that completes the Derby County story. What was notable about the social media coverage was the love the fans have for the club and for each other.
It wasn’t just the photos of the adoring fans lifting their heroes on their shoulders, but the parents’ pictures of them sharing the moment with their children and, most touchingly, the very many messages paying tribute to dads, mums, friends, granddads and grandmas who have passed away.
How lovely that at the point of ecstasy, their thoughts turned to the people who weren’t there to share the joy, proving that the experience of supporting your local football club is better shared with those you love, in whatever form that love takes.
I don’t think I was aware of how powerful this was 28 years ago, but I knew I wanted to share the moment with other people after the match, and so I returned to the same place I sang the night away in 1996 – moving the story on, this time with my family by my
