'Harrowing' - How the Champions League dream has turned into a nightmare for Aston Villa's disabled fans
The Champions League might be the world’s premier club football competition but for disabled supporters following Villa this season it has felt a long way from elite.
“Harrowing,” is the first word Joanne McKibbens uses to describe the experience she and a friend, both of whom use wheelchairs, endured before and during Tuesday night’s match in Monaco.
Stuck in a crowd outside the Stade Louis II for nearly an hour, to the extent they missed kick-off, they were then given an unwanted guided tour of the ground’s concourse before finally finding a member of staff capable of getting them to the disabled viewing point in the away section.
“By the time we got there and could start watching the match, it was about five minutes to half-time,” says McKibbens.
“Nobody seemed to know where we should go. We told the Monaco staff we were in the away section but they told us there were no wheelchairs allowed in that part of the ground, despite me showing them our tickets.
“At one point they tried to put us in the home section. The worst thing was the attitude. The way the staff spoke to us, we really did feel like criminals. They were so rude. At one point I’d had enough and asked to leave but they wouldn’t even let me do that.”
McKibbens, a Villa supporter of more than 40 years who has not missed a match home or away for a decade and attended every European away game in the past two seasons, was so worn out by the ordeal she is considering not bothering with any more away games in the competition.
“It is not just going to the match,” she explains. “It is also the challenge of travelling. There are so many more considerations you have to take as a disabled person and it is even more frustrating when you go through that process and only see half of the game.”
The trouble is while Tuesday was in McKibbens’ words the “worst so far”, it was far from the only time Villa’s disabled fans have had cause to feel let down during this season.
As chairperson of the Aston Villa Disability Supporters Association (AVDSA), she has either experienced first-hand or been told of major issues on every Champions League away date so far, from dilapidated facilities in Brugge, to inaccessible transportation in Leipzig, where she was among a group of wheelchair using supporters who arrived at the Red Bull Arena turnstiles to be greeted by six flights of stairs.
