The Casuals are generally accepted as being one of the most endangered species around the Gigg Lane area. We should, however, begin our study by defining just whom we mean by The Casuals.

There was, for example, a group known as Casuals at many of our native football clubs back in the 1980s. This type of Casual was associated with crowd trouble, however, in much the same way as their 1970s predecessors the Bovver Boys. They looked radically different, though - instead of skin tight jeans and great big Doc Martens, Casuals used to sport Farah semi-flared kecks and them naff little grey slip-on shoes, cut tastefully low so as to expose acres of fluffy white sock material.

Instead of a shaved bonce, Casuals had hair that was short at the back and sides but long on top. Usually dark underneath, the forelock was often dipped in a solution of Henna and sulphuric acid, making it look as though you had a tortoiseshell cat on your head. Not only that, but Casuals had to buy the most expensive gear, even though it looked crap - we're talking V-neck Pringle golf jumpers here, folks, often a delicate shade of pink; or cheap looking t-shirts that actually cost £50 more that they should because they had a little crocodile motif stuck on.

This type of Casual was quite a short lived phenomenon - it was the shoes that brought about their extinction, I think. It was soon discovered that it was actually immensely difficult to kick someone in the goolies and run away when your slip-ons kept slipping OFF. Not only that, but the economics didn't add up - it was impossible to keep buying expensive clobber when you only had your dole. Some turned to crime, but by 1985 researchers discovered that there was nothing left to nick in the entire country.

However, dear reader, these are NOT the Casuals that concern us here. Casuals in our sense are those elusive, usually fairly uncommitted, occasional visitors to Gigg Lane. Casuals of this type - sometimes referred to as "floating supporters" - are the fickle, fluctuating fans who rarely turn up more than two or three times a season.

Casuals are, in fact, distant relatives of the much larger Gloryhunter tribes who can be seen overpopulating the successfully-hyped Premiership clubs. Casuals all but disappeared at Gigg during the sixties and seventies - coupled with the decline in the Club's fortunes, there was also a host of new leisure activities to tempt them away from the match. However, football suddenly became fashionable again by the nineties, and fanzines for example taught the thousands of bright young intellectuals that Colchester could be cool, Fulham could be fun and a trip to Gigg Lane could keep you in hilarious after-dinner anecdotes for a year.

HOW TO RECOGNISE A CASUAL
Casuals tend to be in their late teens or early twenties, some of them may in fact be students, a percentage of whom will actually be from another part of the country altogether. It's important to bear this in mind, or you could wrongly assume they are fans of the away team because of their strange, garbled accents.

Feeling no sense of allegiance to our beloved club, these part-timers are treated like royalty at some clubs, who feel Casuals need to be given preferential treatment to get them coming to games - whereas die-hards like you and me will, of course, put up with any old crap.

A Casual raiding party will often form in a student bar the night before a match. Several pints of subsidised beer later, a mystical state of altered consciousness will be reached - similar to the beserker cult in Viking times - where a raid is planned on an unsuspecting football ground. Twelve hours later they arrive, their foreign speech, long hair and wild-eyed expressions (a result of an almighty hangover) strike fear into the natives. I know what I'm talking about here - when I was at Sheffield Uni in the late seventies (here the Ed shows his age!) I got mixed up with the wrong crowd…and instead of ending up as leader of The Human League, I became a Barnsley Casual (but that is another story).

Not all Casuals, of course, conform to this stereotype. Some are of an older generation, perhaps lapsed regulars who have had one disappointment too many, or whose mental balance has begun to break under the endless strain of following our team. Many casuals of this clan manage to preserve their sanity only by approaching the environs of the ground when it looks like we may clinch promotion, or knock somebody out of the Cup (see Millwall at home and the forthcoming Man U game). One Casual I know doesn't go to matches at all now, but listens on the radio and - if we win - turns up after the final whistle to mingle with the fans leaving the ground. His case is currently baffling some of the best shrinks from Fairfield. One other group of Casuals consists of that nomadic tribe, who make it their life's mission to visit every single football ground at least once.

The unfortunate thing for the Club is that Casuals are by far and away the single biggest tribe; you don't actually see many of them in the ground, but they're all around Bury if you look carefully. Let's face it, for every person who comes to pay homage at the shrine of Gigg, there is another dozen who vowed never to return after the Pointer transfer/last year's play off defeat/relegation in 1969/devaluation of the pound… take your pick!

In the end, we should perhaps recognise that being a Casual is better than not being a supporter at all! What we should also remember is that every year a small percentage of Casuals will make the progression to being fully-fledged fanatics, like the rest of us. In the absence of sustained success on the pitch or the type of media hype the bigger clubs can take for granted, maybe the powers that be at BFC should make more of an effort to nurture and conserve this rare breed, in the hope that they'll return more often.