The ground we visited was the County Ground at Swindon for a West Country derby match in the LDV Vans Trophy on Tuesday the 30th November.  The group of us had only recently adopted Bristol City as a team as we are at University and therefore in exile from our respective home teams (an accumulation of Southend United, Gillingham and Brentford I believe, plus a couple of newcomers!)  We were all looking forward to the game itself,  having been to all of City's home LDV ties previous to this, we decided that the short trip up the M4 would be well worth the effort, especially  after a long day of practical's and lectures!  I personally have visited about 10 away grounds before with Southend but for a lot of the guys this was the first away visit of any sort so this definitely added to the excitement levels for everyone, coupled with the fact that it was a local derby, and we had a great mix and were looking forward to a good evening out. 

Getting to the ground was no trouble and we managed the journey in about an hour, arrived at the ground about half an hour early and parked in the car park at the County Ground at a cost of £4 which is fairly reasonable.  To spend the time we ambled around the ground for a bit taking in a bit of the atmosphere pre-match before we started queuing to get into the ground.  This seemed fair enough as there was an away support of about 1,000 and the queue moved fairly quickly, mainly to be fair, to some fairly efficient stewarding.  Searches were carried out briefly but the stewards were not pushy or arrogant and just did the job and were generally quite friendly.  When inside the ground we were all fairly impressed by the  ground, our seats had fairly standard leg room and were high enough up to give a good view of the ground and pitch.

As the ground filled the atmosphere began to build until just before kick off when both sets of fans were singing loudly and generally supporting their respective teams very well.  The game itself was played at a fairly high tempo and it was clear that both teams really wanted the bragging rights.  It was Swindon who took the advantage in the second half with a well worked move against the run of play, that allowed Sam Parkin to slot home from close range.  Soon after, a controversial decision by referee Thorpe failed to award City a penalty after Lita was tripped in the box when through on goal.  Mr Thorpe further infuriated the traveling support by booking Lita for diving.  This lead to some fairly ugly scenes from some sections of our support, including an  incident where a coin was thrown from behind the goal where a lot of the  city support had chosen to overspill to from the allocated away section of  the Arkells Stand.  However the culprit was caught and was lead away by police fairly efficiently.  Praise has to go to the police and stewards for dealing with this as it is too often that actions like that go unpunished. The game ended with Swindon winning 1-0.