Part five IS HERE.

FOR AS FAR BACK AS I CAN REMEMBER regularly tipping up at the football on a Saturday afternoon, Belle Vue has been a comfortable enclave, as familiar as a well-worn (and well-chewed, slightly smelly) old slipper. A second home where I’ve seen a free-scoring, free-wheeling and sometimes indeed drug-dealing array of players of various endearing limitations chuffing up and down the length of the hallowed turf of Belle Vue.

Think of Belle Vue and you think of crumbling terraces, you think of the smell of fried onions on hot dogs of ill-repute, the rickety intimacy of the wooden Main Stand. You think of avuncular old Ken Avis, so many years the voice of Saturday afternoons over the tannoy, of the unforgiving, puddle-ridden terrain of the Rovers car park.

Personal to me, I remember Darren Moore single-handedly keeping the team in the Football League the season prior to our eventual demise into the Conference. I remember being awe-struck with excitement over the massive crowd of 6,626 for what turned out to be a 1-4 home reverse in the FA Cup against Huddersfield - the biggest Rovers crowd I’d been amongst by far at the time. I remember the excitement as people milled around outside on the car park hours before the Conference play-off final at Stoke, a game that turned out to be the beginning of the redemption of this football club.

So many memories from just 12 (largely unsuccessful, in relative terms) regular seasons of attending games. As it turned out, both the first and the last games I saw at Belle Vue were victories by a single goal to nil and I suppose that there’s a certain symmetrical completeness to be taken from that. Nottingham Forest were the final visitors to Belle Vue on December 23 2006, a fixture on paper providing a fitting backdrop to the main event of farewell to the old stadium from a cast of thousands of regular punters and occassional well-wishers.

The build-up to the final match could not have gone much better. Successive away wins at Brentford (4-0) and Northampton (2-0) were followed by progress to the 3rd Round of the FA Cup after a 2-0 defeat of Mansfield, ensuring a bouyant and positive atmosphere prevailed in what had suddenly turned, after a turgid couple of months under O’Driscoll’s tenure, into a vague threat of actual play-off assault.

The right result, the only result that there could be, ensued on the day, and I will always be grateful for that. That the winning goal, from Rovers’ on loan defender Theo Streete, was as bizarre and comical a strike as you could hope to see (Theo, mooning up just past the half way line on the right hand touchline in front of the Pop, attempting to sling a diagonal ball into the box, yet slicing across the ball horrendously. The ball suddenly arcing towards goal - Forest goalkeeper re-positioning himself to field an unexpected catch makes a complete twatbasket of it, and the ball skids off him and into the net, framed by a thousand Forest fans swinging their fists at the rank absurdity of what just unfolded) was a fitting finale for the Old Girl, who had seen it all spanning the two decades of it’s life. Sublime to ridiculous. I’d like to think the Gods of Rovers past were shining down on us that day.

For all the need to progress facilities to match ambitions, for all the desire to more and more punters in bigger and better stadiums, as the rank and file left Belle Vue for the last time that evening in December, we surely all left a little bit of Doncaster Rovers behind, on those terraces upon which we stood shoulder to shoulder in solidarity with our brethren. Left behind acquaintences whom we might never see again, with whom we’d shared a joke, or crossed word, and certainly left behind a bygone experience of what watching football used to be.

The lure of opulent new surroundings and 15,000 crowds all too quickly drew us towards gazing ahead to 2007. A new start, in a new ground, under a new manager. Time waits for no man, eh?