Hartlepool Fans Travel 800 Miles Dressed As Stormtroopers To Watch Their Team Lose 5-0

As the beating heart of football culture, many people have tried to profile the archetypal away supporter. What do we really know about these rare and idiosyncratic beasts? Away supporters are perpetually in the minority, and thrive on their factional status. Away supporters are cultish, territorial and value loyalty above all else. Away supporters are willing to follow their club up and down the country, and expend a high proportion of their collective resources on the anthropological quirk that we call football. Away supporters are capable of travelling absurdly large distances by Megabus, and surviving for long periods on nothing but laddish chanting and Carlsberg Export.

These are the things we know about the archetypal away supporter. However, hundreds of unique traits and characteristics have been observed among the various subspecies of travelling fan. Take Hartlepool United's away faithful, if you will.

While they adhere to the vast majority of archetypal traits we'd expect to see in a bunch of lads from the North Sea coast, they also display one or two anomalous behaviours. They are well known for their love of fancy dress, for instance. So – for this weekend's 800-mile round trip to Plymouth – they wore Stormtrooper suits en masse, apparently as an elaborate joke about their team's shot conversion rate.

Hartlepool fans going to Plymouth as stormtroopers, in honour of their team not being able to get a shot on target pic.twitter.com/wsbswWp7SV
— Enough Of That Now (@AndyGilder) May 7, 2016

Here are the Hartlepool away fans in all their glory, milling about like a mass of unherded goats at Torquay train station. Their Stormtrooper helmets gleam in the sun, their body carapaces protect them from hostile locals, while each and every one of them is wondering how the hell they're meant to piss out of their space suits. Is there a zip? Are you meant to just flop your wrinkled gentleman out of the suit, or take the whole thing off and let it hang around your midriff? If you choose to go with the simplest option and urinate into your slacks, what sort of dry-cleaning bill will you incur? After several hundred tinnies on the train, the answer to these questions could be crucial to their survival.

Hartlepool fans in Plymouth today. pic.twitter.com/OopQxq1pOW
— Football Away Days (@footyawayday) May 7, 2016

Forget the fact that these Stormtrooper suits are completely impractical. Forget the fact that you can't drink a pint through one of the helmets without sloshing a large quantity of lager top down your front. These suits are an expression of Hartlepool fans' identity, proof that they are tribalists to the very core. When a Hartlepudlian sees a fellow fan in a Stormtrooper outfit, swaying on his feet, cramming a roll up through his helmet's mouth slit, he feels a sense of affinity that will remain forever alien to the rest of us. This is the natural kinship of the football fan – a bond so strong, not even a return trip to Plymouth can break it.

Not only did Hartlepool's away support make the 800-mile round trip to Devon, they also witnessed their side lose 5-0 to a rampant Plymouth Argyle. Nonetheless – as much as that must have hurt – they are immune to such setbacks. The camaraderie of the away fan stirs them to action. While other supporters might break in the face of adversity, Hartlepool's away boys don Stormtrooper suits, grab a couple of best-price megapacks and load their entire community onto the relevant Great Western service – the Great Western service to a brighter future, the Great Western service to an affinity of the soul.