Playing Up with Pompey Book

Born and bred in Portsmouth, Bob Beech has followed the city's team for all of his life, witnessing some of the events that made the 6.57 Crew one of the most talked about gangs of football hooligans in the country. Not pulling his punches, he takes the reader from the skinhead days of the 1970s through today's sterile environment of the Premiership. Beech never claims that Pompey was the best, although from the pages the reader can get a feel for how a city with a relatively small population became so respected. A quick look around the many hooligan message boards, or indeed any of the books by popular authors such as Cass Pennant, whenever the question of the best hooligan gangs from the past is raised the Portsmouth 6.57 Crew always appears somewhere within the top five. Playing up with Pompey looks at how and why the 6.57 Crew has built such a reputation. In the 1980s it wasn't just enough to be the part, you had to look it, the casual scene took the terrace wars to a new level, where having the right clothes became just as important as having the toughest gang. Pompey was one of the few in the country that had both. It is part of football folklore that the 6.57 Crew took its name from the first 'fast' train to London that left the city on a Saturday morning. Well before most home fans had slept off their Friday night on the town, Pompey's mob were lording it on their manor. With football and the clothes, came the music. Portsmouth, usually a cultural barren desert, was home to various would be bands during the 1980s. One of them, Emptifish, were looking good to make a significant break through the only problem for record producers - their problematic following. As the football culture moved on, a new scene had the national newspapers wringing their hands in horror, as Acid House took hold across the UK. Again, it was the football hooligans that were at the forefront of this commotion, but what millions of pounds and thousands of police man hours couldn't do a little white pill would.Read More