SATURDAY, AUGUST 27 1994. IT is the second home game of the new season at Millwall's New Den and a match which is loaded with significance for the club. The team they play today are Derby County - a club who beat them in the First Division play-offs just two and a half months ago, denying Millwall the chance to play for promotion to the top flight. There is that score to be settled. More significantly, though, that fixture saw an explosion of the type of crowd violence which has dogged Millwall for decades; a problem which many at the club hoped had disappeared. It hadn't. On May 18 last year, during a bad-tempered and bitterly fought match, the pitch was invaded twice and two Derby players were, allegedly, attacked on the field. There was a running battle with Derby fans at the local Surrey Quays tube station. And, after the game, a Radio Derby car broadcasting from the game was set upon in the club's car park and turned over. This was the Millwall everyone's heard about. The Den of hate, Den of shame, Den of disgrace, Den of terror. Where reputation and folklore have combined to make a football club that has spent just two seasons of its 109-year history in the top flight, where the gates for last season averaged just over 9,000, arguably more famous across the country than any other team save, perhaps, Manchester United. It's a reputation that has inspired plays, documentaries and books, and the headlines "Mill-war" and "Mill-brawl" have become etched in the psyche of the nation. The newspapers loved the violence at the Derby game, made a big deal of it in a told-you-so kind of way. And Millwall supporters retained their tag as the most violent supporters in the land. It reaffirmed the club's status as the Beastie Boys of football. It was, in short, the sort of scene we are supposed to have forgotten about in the new age of Nineties football, of the middle-class fan, of the Fantasy League and David Baddiel, of Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch. But Millwall, despite having a brand-new, purpose built 20,000-seater stadium, are a reminder that while the Premier League elite have an unprecedented amount of money, facilities and prestige games, football violence, working-class machismo and a dogged loyalty to football clubs rather than football itself has not disappeared. The day after the play-off, May 19. the football establishment stamped on Millwall. By seven minutes past nine on that morning, the club had been charged for failing to control its supporters. The FA meted out a £100,000 fine, docked three points and ordered the club to play two games behind closed doors. A punishment like that could ruin a club of Millwall's size and so the FA suspended the sentence. Millwall, for this season and the next, has to play with the cloud of a major punishment hanging over it. If the club's supporters put one foot wrong, say the FA, then it's goodnight. TODAY'S DERBY MATCH IS CLASSIFIED BY THE POLICE AS A "CATEGORY C" game, and the Met are taking all possible precautions to avoid crowd trouble. The atmosphere is good: noisy and friendly. But it is a tinderbox situation, just waiting for a spark. The Derby County players jog down to the home supporters' end for the first half. As County's blond goal keeper Martin Taylor (one of the players attacked in the first game) takes his position in the goal in front of the Millwall end, he is met by a barrage of wolf-whistles. In response, he slowly raises a "fuck you" finger at them. For a split second there is a palpable silence. But, to the relief of everyone involved with the club, there is nothing more than a single taunt from one of the crowd. "Hey Taylor! You could have got your roots done before you came to the Den!" someone yells, and the tension fades away. Thankfully it is the only real incident of the whole game. There are no arrests and only one one person is escorted from the ground during the match. (And that's only FHM's photographer, who the police worry will incite the crowd just by taking too many photographs of them.) Millwall win 4-1, their revenge exacted on the pitch. Millwall's Chairman Reg Burr, accepts last season's FA sentence, but still protests that Millwall has been made an example of. "It wasn't a violent invasion," he says. "The video evidence was clear that the goalkeeper slipped when he swerved. When he was on the ground nobody put the boot into him, they just turned away from him. "I believe that Millwall supporters are no longer half-crazed idiots out to make trouble. Nothing that happened in that ground at the Derby game in my opinion happened because we were losing. The only thing that happened is some of the lads in one part of the ground did the conga. They were celebrating by not showing any other bastard that they were hurt- ing and that's the way of Londoners and that's the way of South Londoners. I can have no quarrel with that." One of his director's, Jeff Burnidge, goes even further. "The press particularly like the word 'shame'. 'Shameful scenes' and so on," he says. "Shame plays no part in my emotions... pride, not shame. To have achieved what we have achieved with the kind of supporters we've got, they should be giving us a pat, on the back. There's a case for giving us a grant, not a fine. I have no shame at all." But Millwall Football Club is like the naughty kid who gets caught and stands in the corner as a warning to the others. The song "No one likes, no one likes, us, we don't care, we are Millwall, super Millwall, from the Den," to the tune of Rod Stewart's Sailing, is their anthem. Millwall is the club that gets caught, and the supporters, the directors and even the local police know it. Chief Superintendent Chapman, who has policed Millwall since 1991 and is himself a dedicated football fan, says that the Lion's record on football violence has improved by leaps and bounds since the Eighties. Figures for arrests at the New Den average 4.9 a week, which compares to 4.8 at Chelsea and four at Arsenal. "Before the Derby match and before the first leg of that game, the intelligence we received caused us great concern," he says. "You've got football fans using mobile phones to organise a place and time away from police resources. Sometimes that can be a motorway service station, where you've got. innocent families, that are extremely hard to get to. In this case it was Surrey Quays. But it was a one-off." It was the support of the police, the local community and the video evidence which, reportedly, led to the FA suspending Millwall's sentence. The club has kept its doors open, launched a highly praised Millwall In The Community scheme and is regularly visited by European clubs looking for guidance on how to keep trouble from their own fans at bay. MILLWALL, THROUGH ITS FANS' EYES, is A CLUB WITH A REPUTATION FOR trouble to upkeep. And even though it now plays under the threat of a punishment that could ruin the club, trouble also means glory for the supporters who know that, however poor the club might be, however bad its results, they have this unparalleled name. The same name which still attracts the few floating hooligans left who still seek valour among their peers on the terraces. Tony has been a hardcore follower for 10 years, and involved in most of its violent incidents. Although he wasn't at the Surrey Quays battle, he knows about it. "The fight before the Derby game was organised from the first leg," he says. "They arranged to meet in Surrey Docks, without the police there, baseball-batted up. But they weren't all Millwall supporters. There are people who just go for the big games. If anything, there'd be Chelsea there. It's like Heysel. I know three from Chelsea went there. You want to go to Brussels for the weekend and have a fight. "There's still a bit of organisation. Then it's got nothing to do with football. It's football related — it's just to give the blokes that want to fight a name to call themselves. It's got something, it's all male ego. Some people have grown out of it but you get the younger ones coming on and saying let's show them we can do it. It's a hard club and that gets passed down from generation to generation. We're revered for it. That's why it's never really changed at Millwall. It keeps coming through. You can go to watch the game and they lose and you get pissed off and go for a fight to round it off." • Tony and his mate Winston talk constantly of the pride of being at Millwall. It is the team of working-class ethics and working-class moral ity. Where you stand by your mates. Where you don't run. Where you look after your own. Where you'll die for your players. Where winning a fight sometimes becomes indistinguishable from winning a game. "They've always seemed fearless, and they just want to prove it," says Winston. "I've never seen Millwall run. I remember being outnumbered in a subway at Wolverhampton and everyone just ran at them and they turned round and ran away because we've got a reputation." He shakes his head and reflects: "Very brave." "I remember one game at Southampton, where they caged us up like we were in a zoo. Up above there were two Millwall among the Southampton supporters and they started going for them. They were outnumbered three or four to one arid every Millwall fan was shouting up at them. You know what a fight is like? You're knackered after a couple of minutes. But one of these blokes was still giving it out, his arms flying everywhere, and that's what you expect. You give your all." This same fighting spirit is echoed in different terms all the way through the club. "Millwall became a crusade to me when I came here," says chairman Reg Burr. "What I saw was a group of people and a club that deserved better. They had old fashioned values. When I saw Millwall I said to myself these are decent, honest people who remind me of London in the Blitz; all for each other and very introspective. They'll fight the rest of the world and if anyone lays a hand on them, they'll die for them. They have all the old-fashioned virtues I grew up with. It's 1939 values." While Millwall fans have some of the old-fashioned virtues, it is doubtful that wartime fans would have chanted "You'll never make it to the station" to the away fans when Millwall go a goal down.A heavy, bruising tackle by one of the club's harder players, like the veteran skipper Keith "Rhino" Stevens, is met with "We are evil, we are evil" from the hard core. And for every team that came to the old Den, the Millwall fans managed to come up with a new chant to each: "Where've you parked your tractors?", for Bristol City; "Only sing when you're fishing", to Grimsby; "Only one Ken Barlow", at Manchester City. It was the Millwall away fans who first-pulled £10 notes from their pockets and waved them at Leeds supporters with the chant: "We've got jobs, we've got jobs." And just as Michael Heseltine announced his string of pit closures, they sang, to the tune of ChirpyChirpy Cheep Cheep, "Where've the miners gone?" to Derby County supporters. ECONOMICALLY, MILLWALL IS LIKE OTHER SMALL CLUBS BUT PERHAPS MORE so. Players have to be sold for the club to survive. Millwall's new ground was built because Reg Burr realised that without it, the club would forever be condemned to the lower divisions. "There was a 1,000 people difference in the gates of the two legs of the Coca-Cola Cup against Arsenal at the old ground," he says. "Arsenal took £270,000, we took £102,000, which was the highest monetary gate we had in our history. We were 83 per cent standing. Last season we played Arsenal and we took £254,000 because we were at a seated stadium. It gives us the opportunity that make money that will enable us to compete halfway fairly with the other clubs. Even Arsenal can no longer compete with Manchester United in financial terms. "We offered Teddy Sheringham £3,500 a week to stay with us and he refused us. By now it wouldn't surprise me if he was on £6,000 a week. Colin Cooper's wages went up five times before he went to Forest. But you can't blame players for wanting to earn few bob." Millwall fans, though, aren't so sympathetic. This summer Burr received a barrage of abuse and hate mail after selling defender Neii Emblen to Wolves for £600,000 (with a possible £400,000 to come if the team are promoted), and centre forward Jamie Moralee to Watford for £1/2 million. Burr claims the club lost of sponsorship worth £2 million as a direct result of the trouble at the Derby play-off match. It is clear that the chairman is concerned about this season. Not just that there might be trouble, but that the newspapers will again make a meal of it if, and when, it happens. "The problem is the unfavourable amount of publicity we attract for anything we do," he says. "If you read the papers you would think the landings at Omaha Beach were a picnic compared to what went on at the Den in the play off. "But we are always more vulnerable than any other side even though our current record isn't anything other than a peaceful football club. 'It's our reputation. If we sneeze we've got double pneumonia arid if we cough we've got terminal cancer." Now, he argues, the fans must take it upon themselves to keep the club from incurring the punishment slapped upon it after the Derby play-offs. Fans like Tony have to decide whether it is worth risking financial ruin in order to maintain their reputation as the toughest supporters in the country. "I think the sentence was right," says Tony, somewhat surprisingly. ''It's telling you to behave yourself; if you don't you'll have to pay for it. The FA have given us another chance. If we misbehave we'll get it." But what of Millwall's hard-earned reputation. What if they're really provoked? What then? Tony considers the question. "You ain't going to turn a blind eye if West Ham come down and they start giving it. It's a big thing to weigh up. If people are giving you abuse, what are you going to do about it? You're going to think, come on then you bastards. "There could," he adds ominously, "be real troublee then"