Stevenage are a good team, Steve Evans teams always try, wether it's good football or not they are no push overs.
I can't help on the question of the highest league attendance, but I would imagine it was probably for a local derby when we were doing well in the Second Division. I remember crowds of ca. 30,000 v Wednesday. If we'd had the same capacity in the Premier League as we had in the old days, I suppose we may well have achieved some attendances similar to those big FA Cup crowds.
Lost 3 to our 1 though, which takes a bit of shine off. Looking forward playing them, we’ve never played them before and could possibly overtake them and still have games in hand.
South Yorkshire Police, as an institution, didn't exist then. It was probably County Borough Of Barnsley Police.
Rarely saw a policeman in the ground. Maybe the odd one wandering around the perimeter and one or two lurking near the corner flags. I wouldn’t know how many were there that day but I don’t remember any trouble. Leading up to the match tickets went on sale at the Wrexham game and 17,000 turned up! Way more than our usual Third Division crowd. Plenty of those were from Manchester and a good crowd of them joined the Ponty Enders behind the goal singing and chanting for the Reds. Our Reds, not theirs! Different times…
Not been to a home league game with a crowd anywhere close to that. FA Cup tie against Everton in 89 wasn't far off though. Not entirely sure how they squeezed nearly 8000 more in against Stoke. Must have been a lot of people pissing in newspapers that day.
I have read there were 40,600 and odd sold but ONLY the 38000 turned up. Me and a couple of mates sat on the hill going up to the Queen's Ground we could see as far as the 18 yd line.
I was in my first year at Holgate when we played Leicester, and we were given the afternoon off to watch the match. I was at that Scunthorpe game too, when we scored twice in the last few minutes to force a replay, which we won 3-2, in front of 21,477, with two goals from the talented Johnny Byrne.
They were the days, weren't they? As you say, there'd be the odd copper strolling round the touchline and not a single steward. No segregation and no real trouble in the grounds. "Football hooliganism" didn't really rear its head until some time in the 70s. In the early days of my supporting the Reds, the only chants I heard were harmless, such as "2,4,6,8, who do we appreciate?" or the relatively risqué "1,2,3,4, who the hell are we for?", followed in each case by the spelling out of our name.
I was sat on top of the corner flag concrete bunker at that end where our following was. I know it sounds odd (being Scunny) but this was the best atmosphere I had ever been in up to then. They seemed like a proper big club to me with a much better ground than Oakwell
We had almost 29,000 in Oakwell when we beat Sheffield Wednesday in the league in September 81. That's the biggest attendance for a league game I've seen.