This is a strawberry hat. It reminded me of a baseball player called Daryll Strawberry and you can find out more about him here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darryl_Strawberry
Ummm...looking for a Pompey link here I did wonder if there were any Pompey players who had names of fruits...but that search was fruitless...
So I moved from 'strawberry' to 'baseball' to...the Baseball Ground and Derby County to find the link I was looking for! Yes, I know it's tenuous and Derby don't play in red, but what the heck! Needs must!
I went to Pride Park a couple of seasons ago on the opening day of the Premier League season to see Derby and Pompey draw 2-2, one of very few points Derby accumulated that season.
Pride Park is an impressive modern ground and the Derby fans turn up in numbers to every home game to support their team - crowds of over 30,000 are commonplace even in The Championship.
But I have fonder memories of The Baseball Ground. Not for footballing reasons per se but because of the atmosphere the crowd generated on the night I visited it to see Pompey play.
I travelled up to Derby with a friend from college in his old pale blue VW Beatle for an evening fixture back in 1987 (the 4th March of be exact). It was a long old trip. We parked on some waste ground somewhere near the ground, along with many of the travelling fans.
Pompey were top of the Second Division and Derby County were in second place. The game, played in front of 21,085 fans Derby's biggest of the season to that point, ended 0-0 but it was that atmosphere that's stuck with me to this day.
I'm not sure why to be honest but for me it ranks right up there with some of those 'special moments' you never forget as a Pompey fan e.g. AC Milan in the Uefa Cup (a 2-2 draw), the three epic games against Spurs in the League Cup (0-0, 0-0 and 1-0 - Noel Blake! Get in there!) and Stockport County (1-0) in front of a small but very loud Fratton crowd constantly chanting throughout the game.
Maybe it was the Baseball Ground's construction and shape, it was quite 'box like' I seem to recall so it held in the crowd's sound really well, there was little 'leakage'.
Maybe it was because it was an evening game under the floodlights, always special.
Maybe it was just being at an away game with a large Pompey following.
Who knows. The key thing is that the Baseball Ground remains one of my favourite away grounds to this day.
Sadly of course it's no more, closing in 2003. You can find out more about the ground from these two links:
http://www.derbyphotos.co.uk/special/the_bbg.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball_Ground
Here are some pictures from the matchday programme for that game:
BlueThruAndThru
