One of the things I miss about home living in London is the chance to watch the mighty Blackburn Rovers on a regular basis. Before I moved to the capital I’d had a season ticket for about 15 years and giving it up was harder than I thought it would be. Still, being in London does mean there are at least five opportunities to see the mighty Rovers each year. Yesterday I took the opportunity to take Miss G to Stamford Bridge as we made the trip to the out of form Chelsea.

Chelsea are one of the few teams in the Premier League who provide free tickets to disabled supporters and their personal assistants. Say what you like about the billionaire backed club but I always think that is a nice touch. Getting to the ground was also easier than I thought it would be and it is a 20 minutesish bus ride on the 211 from Waterloo.

Once off the bus I was reminded of the stark difference in demographic and location of Chelsea compared to Blackburn. You don’t pass many designer underwear shops and fancy restaurants on the way to Ewood Park. I don’t suspect many Chelsea fans would buy their clothes from the Ewood Dress Agency but they could get a good take away from Wok Star if they wanted!

One of the odd things that struck me when you get in the ground is that it  unreserved seating. This also applies to the wheelchair seats, so I would advise getting to the ground early so you can get a good vantage spot. As far as I could tell there are three places you can sit if you are an away fan in a wheelchair, all are in the lower tier and only one of those three is slightly elevated.  Therefore, if you don’t get in the elevated bit you miss most of the match when the row in front stands up every time there is a corner or a mere hint of goal mouth action. Being a Rovers fan means that there is a chance there will always be a few empty seats so Miss G and myself had a quiet word with the stewards and they let us sit behind a section which was empty and therefore we could watch Chelsea do a number on us completely with viewing obstruction. This also meant we saw the signs reminding people there are wheelchairs behind them so to try and not stand up. Not sure how effective this would actually be but again a nice touch.

I’d also give a slight warning not to get too carried away with abusing the home fans or generally being a bit of an arse as from what we saw the stewards don’t need much encouragement to randomly pick people to throw out. That being said I’m not sure who was more at fault on one such occasion the overzealous stewards or the one Rovers fan who when thrown out decided to leave his four kids who all looked under the age of 12.

One last thing as you might expect there wasn’t much in the way of gluten free goodness but Miss G did have a vegetarian pie and was highly impressed. Oh and you will need a radar key to use the disabled loo.

The result by the way was a 2:0 victory to Chelsea. Not great for Rovers but in the very short time we were able to get the ball we did look like we were trying to play a bit more.