Every fortnight we cover the best and worst football songs from every club in the UK from our book ‘The Sound Of Football: Every Club, Every Song’. You can buy it here

Derby County

Nickname: The Rams

Ground: Pride Park Stadium

Stadium Capacity: 33,502

Song: The Derby Ram (also known as When I Go To Derby)

The world series of baseball is misnamed. It’s the championship of the major-league baseball teams in the United States and Canada only. The rest of the world doesn’t get a look in despite the sport’s popularity in Japan, Latin America and Cuba.

Although baseball’s a minority sport in the UK there was, for a short period of time, a British Baseball League. In the 1890’s a Derbyshire businessman, Sir Francis Ley, wanted healthier and more productive workers and he constructed a baseball pitch at his factory in Derby.

Sir Francis organised a team to enter the British league, a four-team professional circuit, which he would have won but the other teams complained about his lack of sportsmanship – he’d bought American players to bolster his squad. Even in the nineteenth century, money could buy sporting success.

Although the league was short-lived it did leave one legacy. Sir Francis Ley’s baseball ground became the Baseball Ground, the second (of three) stadiums for Derby County.

Derby County’s one of the original twelve founding members of the Football League and one of only ten clubs to have competed in every season. It also holds a number of other records, most of which are unwanted. During the 2007-08 Premier League campaign it equalled the league record of just one win in a season; it had the least home wins and the least away wins; the most defeats; the least number of goals and the worst goal difference.

Perhaps Derby is cursed? When the club moved to the Baseball Ground in 1895 there was a story that a group of gypsies was forced to move their camp to make way for the Baseball Ground. Legend has it that they put a curse on the ground preventing Derby County winning the FA Cup. It wasn’t a very good curse – Derby won the FA Cup in 1946.

Derby has one record that’s unlikely to be matched. It’s the only club to have had three home grounds host full England internationals. Once at Derby’s original ground The Racecourse Ground in 1895, secondly at the Baseball Ground in 1911 and lastly at the current home, Pride Park, in 2001.

The club also had the first ever club mascot – a ram named Rammie. Rammie is a full-time employee of the club and works to maintain the club’s links with fans through charity and community work.

The club has a ram as its symbol to represent it’s link to the First Regiment of Derby Militia. The militia took a ram as its mascot and used the song, The Derby Ram as its regimental song.

“As I was going to Derby,

All on the market day,

I spied the finest ram, sir,

That ever was fed on hay,

And indeed me lads,

It’s true me lads,

I never was known to lie,

If you’d have been to Derby,

You’d have seen the same as I“

(Source: trad)

No one knows the song’s exact origin. It has been around for at least 200 years with reports that in 1796 the first US president, George Washington even sang The Derby Ram to a friend’s children. 

In 1855 the first Regiment of Derbyshire Militia adopted a ram as its regimental mascot, a tradition which continues to this day through the Mercian Regiment of the British Army. Lance-corporal Derby, as the current mascot is known as presented to the Mercians by the Duke of Devonshire. Derby is paid £3.75 a day, draws his own rations, and, as the Derby Telegraph reports, he even has to have his leave card with him when he takes his annual holiday on the Duke’s Chatsworth estate. 

American country and western star Merle Travis once recorded a version entitled Darby’s Ram. Identical twins the Kossoy Sisters recorded a version titled The Darby Ram on their 1956 album Bowling Green. And in 1963 the New Christy Minstrels released Down to Darby, an adaptation of the Derby Ram on their album The New Christy Minstrels Tell Tall Tales.

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Every fortnight we cover the best and worst football songs from every club in the UK from our book ‘The Sound Of Football: Every Club, Every Song’. You can buy it here

Dagenham & Redbridge

Nickname: The Daggers

Ground: Victoria Road

Stadium Capacity: 6,078

Song: The Digger Dagger

Bands dream of one day performing in the O2 in London, the world’s most popular music venue. But not Dagenham-born ex-England manager Terry Venables. He dreamt of performing on the O2. In 2010, he made history by becoming the first singer to perform on top of The O2. He sang the Elvis Pressley song ‘If I Can Dream’, released to support England on its South African World Cup campaign. The song raised money for both Help for Heroes, and Malaria No More UK.

It’s not the first time El Tel has appeared in unusual musical circumstances. He was also on the cover of ‘Dagenham Dave’ by Morrissey, released as a single in 1995. It was only the second time Morrissey had not appeared on the cover of his own song. Instead he picked a picture of Terry Venables sticking his tongue out. Morrissey might have written some classics but this one is clunker. It was reviewed in the weekly musical paper, the NME, and it was described as “piss-poor old crap” and a “tune-impaired three-minute drone.“

Dagenham & Redbridge was formed in 1992, making them only three years older than ‘Dagenham Dave’. It was formed after a merger between Dagenham and Redbridge Forest.

Redbridge Forest was also an amalgamated club having been created from Ilford, Leytonstone and Walthamstow Avenue. so the full name of the side should really be Dagenham & Redbridge & Ilford & Leytonstone & Walthamstow FC.

Dagenham is the setting for the film and musical ‘Made in Dagenham’ which chronicles the 1968 Ford sewing machinist’s strike. This was a landmark labour-relations dispute that led to the passing of the Equal Pay Act 1970. The women who were skilled workers walked out when they found out the plant was downgrading their pay to a lower category than the equivalent male worker. It seems an unlikely idea for a musical but who would have thought that a barber who kills people and turns them into pies would be a huge success. What next? A bunch of cats singing songs? Madness!

Dagenham’s nickname is the Daggers for reasons which are self-evident. And the club’s anthem is based on this nickname and Chelsea’s ‘Zigger Zagger’.

It’s a simple call and response: one fan leads and everyone else shouts the reply.

“Lead: Digger Dagger, Digger Dagger

Crowd: Oi Oi Oi

Lead: Digger Dagger, Digger Dagger

Crowd: Oi Oi Oi

Lead: Digger

Crowd: Dagger

Lead: Digger

Crowd: Dagger

Lead (faster) :Digger Dagger, Digger Dagger

Crowd: Oi Oi Oi“

(Source: fan chant)

The ‘Zigger Zagger’ has a long history. It’s thought it was derived from the Cornish “Oggie, oggie, oggie!” chant. An oggie was Cornish slang for a Cornish pastie. Legend has it that this was called out by Cornish woman to make their menfolk aware that they were about to drop the freshly baked pasties down the tin mine. The original chant was adopted locally by the navy and later used at rugby matches. Famous Chelsea supporter, Mickey Greenaway (see Chelsea for more on Greenaway), is said to have introduced the ‘Zigger Zagger’ version in the early sixties. With his booming voice, he would bark out the call and the crowd would reply with an “Oi, oi, oi!”. It quickly spread to other clubs, including Dagenham & Redbridge.

Buy the Sound of Football from Amazon.

Every fortnight we cover the best and worst football songs from every club in the UK from our book ‘The Sound Of Football: Every Club, Every Song’. You can buy it here

Crystal Palace

Nickname: The Eagles

Ground: Selhurst Park

Stadium Capacity: 26,309

Song: Glad All Over

In 1851, George Jennings invented the public toilet. Unfortunately, the toilets were found in the Crystal Palace exhibition hall. It was called Crystal Palace because it was made out of glass. And, you would think, it would be the last place you would have a toilet as it had clear walls and ceilings. This led to the short-lived proverb: ‘folk in glass houses should not throw stones… or go to the toilet’. More accurately, it also led to the phrase ‘spend a penny’ as George Jennings charged a penny to use the facilities.

Although the hall was originally built in Hyde Park to house the Great Exhibition of 1851, it was moved to Sydenham in south London after the exhibition finished, an area which then became known as Crystal Palace. In 1905 workers at the hall formed a football team and named it Crystal Palace.

The exhibition hall, the area and the football club share more than just a name. Both club and hall suffered from financial difficulties.

In 2010, Crystal Palace went into administration. In the 1850s, the company that built the original hall also failed to pay its debts. It had made a fundamental mistake. Most people worked six days a week with only Sundays off. The hall was only open six days a week, and it closed on a Sunday. Even a candidate on The Apprentice can spot the flaw in this business model. Most people could not visit without taking time off work, and when they did, it was pounds, not pennies the builders needed.

Unusually, Palace’s great rival is not a London side but one that is over 40 miles away – Brighton.

The rivalry with Brighton had simmered for several years but ‘officially’ started in 1974 when Palace was in the third division. Both sides had many away supporters, regularly taking 12,000 to each other’s grounds.

An FA Cup match saw the rivalry boil over after Brighton was awarded a penalty. Brighton scored, but the referee ordered it retaken as a Palace player had crept into the box. The second penalty was missed, and Palace went on to win 1 – 0.

Alan Mullery, the Brighton manager, was enraged and, as he marched off the pitch, he encountered trouble in the tunnel.

“As I was walking up the tunnel,” he told The Guardian, “a load of boiling hot coffee was thrown over me by a Crystal Palace supporter. So I pulled a handful of change out of my pocket, threw it on the floor and shouted, ‘That’s all you’re worth, Crystal Palace.’” 

Mullery added further insults, and gestures involving his fingers, before storming into the Palace dressing room to confront his old Tottenham Hotspur teammate and then Crystal Palace manager, Terry Venables. It was reported that Mullery threw a fiver on the floor and told El Tel he wouldn’t pay that much for the entire Palace team, which was true if 36 years too early. In 2010, following administration, he could have picked the whole team up for nothing.

Crystal Palace adopted the Dave Clark Five song ‘Glad All Over’ as its anthem in the 1960s. It was released in November of 1963, and it got the group their first-ever number one in January the following year.

Unlike other football songs, the transition from chart to terraces was instant. Usually, it can take several years before a song is widely accepted as tradition, but in the case of ‘Glad All Over’, it had easily caught on within the year and was a matchday tradition by the end of the decade. Since then, the song has been sung before, during and after matches (providing Palace win). 

Perhaps part of its success in crossing over was how the Dave Clark Five wrote and recorded their songs. Their live shows were famous for audience participation, usually led by Dave Clark ‘conducting’ the crowd and getting them to stomp their feet in time to his drumming. Dave Clark has said: “I’d pay somebody 5 Pounds to go switch all the lights on and off in the ballroom, in time with the stomps. That’s what gave [us] the idea for ‘Glad All Over,'” whose chorus featured a “boom boom… Glad all over!” chorus. 

The song’s link to the club was reinforced in 1990 when it was recorded by the squad and released for the club, reaching the FA Cup final. Unfortunately, Palace lost the final after the match was replayed following a 3 – 3 draw at the first attempt.

The song has been adopted by Blackpool and other English Football League teams such as Rotherham United, Port Vale and Swindon Town.

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