Carlisle United's Brunton Park

City have a mixed recent record at Carlisle United's Brunton Park. A ground that boasts the unusual accolade of being the only League club to have a main stand that goes quite a fair bit beyond the boundaries of the pitch.

The site of one of my favourite games watching the Imps, I have fond memories of February 2003. The game had to be re-arranged from a few weeks before hand and even up until kick off, no-one was sure if the game would still go ahead. Infact, getting into Carlisle on the near empty coach, some of their fans were waving their hands in a motion that would indicate that the game had been cancelled. The weather had been horrific all day, snowing and only a vast amount of work from Carlisle officials and supporters made this game possible. I wonder if they thought the 4-1 win for Lincoln was worth the effort.

Despite that great memory, I lost all respect for Carlisle fans in the 2003/4 season when they started chanting "You're supposed to be deceased" at Keith Alexander following his brain surgery. From that point onwards I just lost complete respect for their fans.

Brunton Park is near enough on the outskirts of Carlisle, so getting to the ground is quite easy and the car park/abandoned field behind the disused stand is incredibly useful. The turnstile system is a bit awkward at times at Carlisle sometimes make you buy the tickets before hand and that often lead to "interesting" conversations between fans who didn't know this and the local turnstile operators.

The club shop is right around the other side of the ground and offers very little that you wouldn't expect at other grounds, such as replica shirts, programmes, DVDs (well, I'm assuming DVDs as the only time I went in there was whilst VHS was still the most popular media form) and numerous other things.

Other than the shop though, there didn't really seem to be a lot to do around the ground, but then again I will never claim to have explored the area properly.

The main home stand is actually quite good and as impressive as any other stand within the lower leagues, the unusual thing about this is the fact that around 1/4 of the stand goes beyond the pitch. The view from this section is excellent and even though at the most central point of the away end is level with the penalty spot, you still get an excellent view of the other end of the pitch.

This is one of 2 possible away ends, if you are in this stand, you share the stand with the home fans and they regularly try and antagonise the away fans, however, they can also have a laugh with away fans as during the League visit in 2002/3, I was the only Lincoln fan sat in the away end until about 5 minutes before kick off and they chanted "You've only got one fan" at me....I couldn't think of a witty response at the time.

The other possible away end is a terraced section behind a goal and although it offers a relatively good view for a "portrait" view, it is definitely inferior to the view from the other possible away end. The stand behind the other goal is a large terrace with a roof this time and an unusual "zig-zag" style roof. The final stand is a terrace section which is below several different sections of seating.

The atmosphere at Brunton Park is fairly overrated and although there are often a bunch of about 10 of them singing the same ironic song whenever they do pep up, it's only when they've scored that the fans start signing on a loud basis. Their range of chants is also pretty limited and you could count all their chants on one hand and still be wasting 2 fingers.

Depending on what stand you are in as well makes a difference to your interaction with their fans. If you're in the terrace behind the goal then there is little, but as I mentioned earlier, if you're in the side stand then they try and antagonise you, and if you score first then you don't quite feel safe as despite the distance between you, there isn't a lot stopping them from getting over to away fans.

Getting away after the game is a long, drawn out process and after an FA meeting it took about 30 minutes before we were out of the ground's car park.

Overall, a trip to Brunton Park really depends on your mood, if you're on a real downer about something, the last place you really want to be is Carlisle (trust me, I should know) but if you're really in a mood for a being abused by pure idiots of football fans, than Brunton Park is your place.