FROM Karl Duguid’s Wembley tears to an animated promotion party down in the Somerset sunshine, Warren Page has been there to cover all of Colchester United’s ups and downs, over a 30-year period.
You name it, the experienced photographer has seen and captured it all, in a brilliant career.
But after travelling the length and breadth of the country on a weekly basis and attending nearly 1,500 games covering Colchester and Ipswich Town, he’s now decided to blow the full-time whistle on photographing football.
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“I’m getting older and it’s taking me longer to recover from the trips,” says Warren.
“That’s part of the reason; being cooped up in a car for so long.”
Warren, from East Bergholt, started out as a full-time newspaper photographer, shooting pictures for local and national newspapers and was a Daily Gazette staff member, before going freelance.
The industry had changed beyond measure since he started out, partly thanks to advances in digital photography.
“We’re almost privileged to have seen such a change in the tech,” he says.
“We’ve come a long way from black and white prints and physically getting your fingers wet, putting bits of paper into trays full of chemicals, running up stairs with damp prints to have three pictures by 9.30pm.”
One of Warren’s earliest long distance experiences of photographing Colchester came back in the mid-nineties, when he travelled down to Plymouth Argyle for the U’s division three play-off semi-final at Home Park.
“That was my first really long away trip,” he recalls.
“We were 1-0 up after the first leg and Frannie Ponder and I went down to Home Park.
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“I’d arranged a Travelodge overnight and I didn’t get there until 3am, because I was supposed to be uploading my photos as a matter of urgency from the Plymouth paper; they thought they were going to lose and everything got turned on its head.
“All my films had to wait while all their stuff went through first.
“There was a pitch invasion and all of the players having to run up the tunnel – it was chaos.
“Colchester was my first love, even though I was brought up in Ipswich and went to my first Ipswich game in 1974.
“I used to work quite closely with Colchester and had a lot of good times with them; they were always that little bit more friendly and accommodating.
“I used to use Chief Executive Marie Partner’s desk to wire from.”
Warren has snapped countless Colchester players in action over the years – so who were his favourite U’s players to photograph?
“Lomana (LuaLua) was my favourite player,” he says.
“Players like him, Scott McGleish and Jamie Cureton were great to photograph.
“They were good for a goal and a celebration.
“I’ve got a lovely picture of McGleish doing a somersault at Wycombe, where he’s miles in the air.
“I’ve got one of Junior Ogedi-Uzokwe, who came on for his debut in the last five minutes in the very last game at Exeter and the irony was that it was probably my best picture of the season.
“He leapt doing this flying kick and the goalkeeper, who was Nick Pope, dived out simultaneously and managed to get to the ball fractionally first but they’re both in mid air.
“But my favourite picture was the one of Doogie crying at Wembley.
“It was one of those moments when you knew you had the photo.
“There were three other Gazette photographers there who didn’t get it and I just wound them up, all the way back!”
The mid-2000s were a memorable and fruitful time for Colchester particularly the 2005-06 season, when they won promotion from League One under Phil Parkinson.
He said: “The U’s bus top parade with Parky was good but the game at Yeovil was one of the most tense afternoons I think I’ve ever gone through!
“It was a 0-0 draw and I don’t think anything from the game ever got used!
“It was all about photographing the thousands of U’s fans who had made the trip – the actual football itself was just secondary.
“The cup run that Phil Parkinson’s team had when we beat some big teams like Sheffield United and Derby and then went to Chelsea was great.”
Warren has certainly clocked up the miles, covering the U’s and Ipswich.
He has only missed kick-off once; Ipswich's game at Fulham in October 2001 when the A12 was flooded and he had to divert to the London Underground, to get to Craven Cottage.
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There have been a few close shaves, too, including a U’s game at Bristol City back in September, 2000.
“They kicked off almost as I sat down and Tony Lock scored after one minute, which I got,” he recalls.
“It was the first picture I took practically and then nothing happened for the rest of the game.”
Warren, by his own admission, is a perfectionist, which is one of the main reasons for his longevity in the industry.
“For me, it was finding a niche - that’s why I’ve lasted 30-odd years, not many people wanted to travel away from home every weekend for nine months a year,” says Warren, who last photographed a Colchester game in 2020, their Carabao Cup first-round tie at Reading.
“Everything has to be nice and sharp.
“I had a lot of very good people who took me under their wing and told me what made a good sports photo and what doesn’t.
“I think the background of being a newspaper photographer is another thing that separates me a lot of the time from other photographers around.
“You get a nose for the story and I think a lot of the time, football photographers get a little bit carried away with the action and miss the story and the connotations of it.
“You’ve got to tell the story of the game – that’s primarily it really.
“You can take as many pictures as you like of the bloke with the ball at his feet but what does it say?
“I love the physicality of the game – that’s probably the thing that kept me going, through all these years.
“I love the challenge of photographing football; it’s the one thing in my job that still has that buzz of making the deadline and getting the best picture.
“You want that moment when the bloke sticks his foot up and it’s right in the other bloke’s face.
“Football throws variables at you – wind, rain, trying to predict where the ball’s going to go next and who’s going to score but you need a lot of luck, too.
"I have travelled for hundreds of thousands of miles with so many good people over the years - I’m very privileged to have experienced what I have.
“If I miss anything, it will be the camaraderie of travelling with the press pack.”
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