- ‘I step out of the ordinary; I can feel my soul ascending.’ And I would cry and cry for my poor helpless sister with her oxygen cylinder and her gasping terror of death. And then I’d pull myself together, and set about suppressing all these distracting howling feelings - pegging them down and flattening them and burying them - in order to deliver lively stuff on deadline about (say) that plucky nonswimmer from Equatorial Guinea who took almost two minutes to complete 100 metres in effortful doggy-paddle and soon became immortalised as Eric the Eel.
When Kay died on the Sunday morning, I think my boss was the first person I called, to tell him I was sorry to let him down. A few days later, I asked if I could leave. I had no idea how I would make a living. In terms of remuneration, sports writing was the best job I’d ever had: ditching my contract to stay at home and write radio scripts was madness. But there was no way I could go on, if only because the screaming and hitting scenario was not far-fetched at all. It had been a very stressful year, what with one thing and another, and I was already dangerously close to losing control. One of the bonuses of bereavement, I have learned, is that it makes you honest. It strips you of the lies you usually tell yourself, so you have no choice but to face facts. What I saw with great clarity at this critical time was that the press box at Stamford Bridge would be the wrong environment for me to grieve in, because it was the wrong place for me to be in, full stop. I was only there on sufferance. No one would miss me. Even after four years, friendly faces were few. And while I was in this mood for cards-on-the-table, the other points I made (to myself) at the time were:
You have a lot of other work to get on with;
This comfortless masculine lifestyle never suited you and it was sheer masochism to endure it for so long;
The sporting calendar is on a perpetual loop and will steal your life if you’re not careful;
All this crying and sobbing will do no good at all to the cause of women sports writers if you do it in front of the blokes;
You have coarsened as a person because of this job;
You don’t really believe sport is a subject worth devoting your life to; and, finally:
A joke’s a joke.
My boss was extremely kind about all this. He had seen it coming. What I said earlier about sports editors having hearts of stone - perhaps I was hasty. But what argument could he possibly put up against grief? Here was an undeniable obstacle to business as usual. What use is a funny writer who has, overnight, stopped finding things amusing? What use is a football writer who thinks football is meaningless, that sport is meaningless, and that life itself doesn’t have a lot of point in the long run, either? No, the truth was, I was no longer prepared to be a good sport - about football, or about anything that went with it. I didn’t have the strength. For four years I had turned anything unpleasant into a joke at my own expense. I had suppressed my hatred for hooligans singing obscene songs. I had tried not to make a hysterical scene when, at important matches, my colleagues got tickets, while I was put on a waiting list. I had stopped my ears when blokes talked freely in my company about the sexual rapacity of the women they’d picked up the night before. I had even made entertaining copy out of the miserable fact that the only entertainment for the lone professional traveller involves lapdancing and blowjobs. I had tried not to blame anyone else for the fact that I often shook with fear as I set off in the dark for my car in some alien industrial wasteland. But enough was, finally, enough.
For obvious reasons, though, it was the life-and-death argument that was the most powerful. How can you waste your time on sport in a world that people die in? I kept remembering something that had happened during the football World Cup in France, when I’d dashed back to England to see my mum in hospital, after she’d been involved in a bizarre accident. The paper had been terrific: organising tickets so I could get back on Eurostar and then fly back to France the following day, so that I didn’t miss a match, and didn’t miss a piece either (I was in the paper every day of the tournament). But I’ll never forget how I felt when I got the news that my mum had been hurt. I had just got settled in my seat at a damp and dreary Parc des Princes in Paris, for an evening game between the usa and Germany, and I was already feeling pretty fragile - mainly because the journey to the stadium had been like something from a Coen Brothers movie. Against my better judgement (my Times colleague had thought it was a fine idea), I had agreed to accept a lift from an unknown fellow British journalist who promptly set off the wrong way round the Périphérique and then made matters worse by shouting things like, ‘We’re going to be late! Where are we? I’ve never been to the Parc des Princes, have you? It’s got to be this way, doesn’t it? Do you know where it is? Oh my God, we’re going to be late!’
It was one of the worst journeys of my life. It was pouring with rain. Kick-off time was indeed approaching. We were travelling in the opposite direction from our preferred destination, at considerable speed, and I was apparently in thrall to a psychopath. I kept wondering whether I would ever have sufficient nerve to open the door of a moving vehicle and hurl myself out. My colleague and I dared not look at each other - especially as I had made a strong case for taking the media bus, which was a mere ten-minute ride in the safe hands of a French person who knew the way. Passing motorcyclists thumped the side of the car because our driver was straddling lanes; at one point, he swung off the Périphérique onto a slip-road and slewed the car to a halt, parking across two lanes in the smoking rain so he could jump out and ask directions from the bewildered, emergency-stopped Parisian motorists he had just attempted to kill. And on top of all this, while he was driving he took calls from London on his mobile about his job for the evening - which he fielded with a great show of professional competence (‘Five hundred by half time? All right, Kippo, leave it with me!’), after which he’d go to pieces. ‘They want 500 by half time. How do you do that? What are they talking about? How can you do 500 words when it hasn’t finished yet?’ And all we could do was yell, ‘Turn round! Turn round for pity’s sake! We’ll tell you everything you need to know if you’ll just turn round’’
So I was rattled by this journey, and also by the usual teeth-grinding, shrugging-French-person waiting-list business. And then I got the call about my mum being in hospital, and suddenly everything else - especially the football - seemed bonkers. Luckily I was sitting next to the colleague who had shared the journey, and I felt he owed me something, so I told him what had happened. Having calmed down once I’d got my press ticket, you see, I had suddenly got a great deal more agitated again, and I felt I ought to explain why I kept standing up and sitting down again, and muttering and whimpering, when my attention ought to have been focused on the perfectly good World Cup match unfolding on real wet shiny grass just a few yards from where I was sitting. Jürgen Klinsmann was on excellent fairy-footed form, as it happens; the USA were gamely battling to compete; interestingly, there was a player on the US team who’d been naturalised as an American citizen just a week before the tournament, apparently, and spoke no English. But it was impossible to concentrate on the supremacy of the German goal-making machine when I knew my mum was all on her own, in pain, in hospital, hundreds of miles away. ‘I shouldn’t be here,’ I moaned. ‘My mum’s in hospital and I’m at football ? How did this happen to me? I shouldn’t be here. I ought to go. I feel torn in half by this. How can I be at football?’
So we had a little heart-to-heart, this chap and I. And what he said, kindly, was that he absolutely understood how I was feeling. He had been there and done it. Moreover, something similar had probably happened to everyone else in this press box at some time or another. But what he said didn’t cheer me up at all. Some of the blokes here had been abroad when their children were born, he said. Some had been abroad when their parents had died. Some had been reporting the second round of the Frisbee championships in Timbuctoo when their wives had gone off with the bloke next door. I said this was one of the saddest things I’d ever heard. But he said no, it was just t
he price of being a sports writer. He himself had missed his father’s death, and then he had missed the funeral as well, because it all coincided with a busy time in the athletics calendar in the Far East. But such was life, you see. What was the point of beating yourself up, he said, about something that couldn’t be helped?
But it’s a well-known fact that human beings are quite shallow really, and that a sense of true proportion can never be maintained for longer than 90 seconds; thus, when you are depressed because a) your sister is terminally ill and b) against all that is holy, Gary Neville has been selected for England again, the two facts can loom equally large, and all you can do is observe this truth and accept it. The truth is that England, the football team (who are looking rather perky at the time of writing), had really started to get me down, to the point where I all but hated them. Everyone had warned me that watching England beat Holland 4-1 at Wembley from an airship on a balmy midsummer evening was not to be taken as a representative experience of supporting the national side. And, crikey, how right they were. Over the next four years I turned out for umpteen blizzardy qualifiers and friendlies as well as matches in the big tournaments, and I was for most of the time as miserable as sin. Having once walked in a Shearer Wonderland, I had now ceased to believe in that particular postal district; or only if it was a new name for one of the circles of everlasting torment. From being a neophyte Pollyanna, I was football disillusionment in human form. I had started off almost in love with David ‘Safe Hands’ Seaman. Towards the end of my period of duty watching England, someone cruelly referred to him as ‘a piece of meat with eyes’, and I not only laughed, I wished I’d thought of it first. As for Glenn Hoddle - well, to be honest, even now I can’t hear his name mentioned without wanting to stab myself in the face with a pencil.
To be fair, I did see England play well a couple of times. People forget how fabulous they were at St Etienne against Argentina in the 1998 World Cup, for example. But by far the best performance I ever saw from them was a World Cup qualifier in Rome against Italy in October 1997 - when England, miraculously, played like Italy and came away with a magnificent goalless draw. It was a night later famous for its tremendous pre-match tension, superlative midfield passing, reprehensible police violence, and Paul Ince running round with a bandage on his head so that (in Paul Gascoigne’s famous description) he looked like a pint of Guinness. The two teams were battling for automatic qualification as winners of the group. England, at the top of the points table, required a draw, while Italy required a win. In advance of the match, no one was optimistic for England’s chances. They remembered what had happened last time. In the previous qualifying match between the two countries, at Wembley, Hoddle had disastrously experimented with weedy Ian Walker in goal (ugh) and the lumbering Matt Le Tissier alongside Alan Shearer in attack, and Italy had won 1-0.
Neither Walker nor Le Tissier ever recovered from the ignominy of that night. In fact it was amazing afterwards that Le Tissier didn’t do himself a mischief, so appallingly emphatic was the Wembley crowd’s message to him that he was a useless, lazy lump of humanity who would do everyone a favour if he buggered off and died. It was like something out of Nineteen Eighty-Four: 75,000 people all turning the full force of their collective hatred onto one bloke, trying to shrivel him up on the pitch. Le Tissier was a large, low-bottomed and frankly sloth-like Southampton striker with a bad fringe who had been mooted for an England place for years, and whose record at the Dell was exemplary; but he hadn’t played for his country in Euro 96, so some of us were rather pleased to see him given his chance to impress the fans, and were dismayed when, dismally, he didn’t. There may have been a rocket up his bottom, but if there was, it failed to light. The result was that he made 75,000 personal enemies on the spot and for ever after took the blame for the defeat. Looking back on it a couple of years later, however - when one knew more about the weaselly psychology of Glenn Hoddle - one couldn’t help thinking how convenient it was for the England manager that all responsibility for the loss of a crucial match could be laid at the door of this one poor abused dobbin-like player who simply disappointed on the day.
Anyway, back in Rome, Hoddle did surpass himself. As did the team. Wickedly, I would like to point out that the injured Alan Shearer was not playing on that glorious night. But for the time being, I will say no more about that. The team that lined up against Italy at the Stadio Olimpico was: David Seaman, Sol Campbell, Tony Adams, Gareth Southgate, David Beckham, Paul Gascoigne, David Batty, Paul Ince (captain), Graeme Le Saux, Teddy Sheringham and Ian Wright. You will notice that the midfield is quite strong in this line-up - but if you were the worrying sort, you might also notice its collective potential for temper, brainlessness under pressure, and alcoholic amnesia. In the week before the match, incidentally, Hoddle had fed rumours that young David Beckham was at death’s door with the ‘flu, and that Southgate might also be unfit to play, neither of which scare stories turned out to be based on more than a smidgen of truth. If there was one thing Glenn Hoddle enjoyed more than anything, it was making things up to confuse the opposition, even if it meant losing essential credibility with the fans and really getting on the tits of the football press.
I will outline my own experiences that night, just because they remain so vivid. For a start, I was not in the press box. The Times had set me up with some corporate hospitality, so I was a guest of Carlsberg, whose offer was to fly a party of fans to Rome, take us to the match, and treat us to a lavish dinner afterwards. This sounds extremely lovely-jubbly, I suppose - but wait. By now you are wise to the cautionary tale that invariably attaches itself to even the most wonderful treat where this ungrateful female wretch is concerned. So here’s the beef. The problem was that the Carlsberg travel arrangements did not dovetail terribly well with my journalistic duties. Our flight to Rome was very early on the Saturday morning, and the match started quite late on the Saturday night (kick-off was 8.45 local time), and I was at no point in charge of my own destiny. Because of the return flying times, I would need to file copy by 11.30 on Sunday morning, from the hotel, without seeing any British papers, and (crucially) without the required technology. This being my first football assignment abroad, I had been issued with a brand new office laptop - but with some alarm I quickly established on arrival that the mobile phone that came as part of the kit did not work in Rome, and that the phone sockets in the room weren’t compatible with the leads I’d been given. (It was after this trip that I invested in a bag of tele-adaptors, for use in every country in the world.) No other journalist was staying at my hotel, so I couldn’t get help or advice. The it support team in Wapping didn’t work on Saturdays. Thus it was that I spent the Saturday afternoon in Rome (intended for sight-seeing) looking in vain for a shop that sold data connectors, as opposed to exotic-flavoured ice creams or little plaster models of the Coliseum.
Now at this point the special conditions that applied to this match need to be factored in. This was a big night for Italy as well as for England, and the stadium was a riot in embryo from the start. The police presence was the most menacing I ever experienced. When we disembarked from our coach, we were greeted by heavily armed carabinieri in robocop garb who wordlessly marched us miles away from the stadium in the dark, and rifle-butted people who asked questions about where we were going. During the match itself, they baton-charged England fans in their seats. And after the match (which ended at 10.30) they made us remain in the stadium for an extra hour and a half - partly to allow angry Italians to disperse; and partly, perhaps, to give the English time to set up makeshift field hospitals for the dressing of wounds - before marshalling us out in what was, to my mind, the scariest and most idiotically irresponsible part of the whole evening: funnelling thousands of people down narrow staircases, and risking having hundreds crushed to death.
Once outside, having run the gauntlet of yet more carabinieri, the Carlsberg group regained its high spirits. Personally, I thought it had been a fantastic evening of football, but enough is a
s good as a feast, I was a bit tired now from all the singing, and if I could get to bed before 1 a.m. I’d be a very happy girl. Maybe I had forgotten about the dinner included in the deal. Or maybe I assumed that the lengthy delay in the stadium would mean it had been cancelled. Either way, I was in for a shock, because one lone voice saying ‘Back to the hotel then?’ made no impact at all on this hospitality crowd who were all crying out for their promised five-course Italian blowout. Sure enough, having re-boarded the coach, we were driven for something like 45 minutes to an out-of-town restaurant where an enormous evening of food, drink, colour, heat, smoke, laughter and noise was awaiting us - and where brightly-clothed guitar players came weaving between the tables, playing jaunty Neapolitan tunes like ‘Funiculi Funicula’ and getting the punters to join in the chorus.
‘Will this take long?’ I kept asking. Well, it took till nearly five in the morning, and by the time the first food arrived, I calculated I had been awake for over 24 hours. I was too tired to eat, and I would have been mad to drink anything, given the deadline in the morning. I assumed a glazed smile, sipped a glass of water, rested my cheek on a mound of fruit, and waited quite patiently for it all to end, although when the guitar players were joined by women in red gypsy frocks, if I’d had a gun, I would have shot them. All I wanted was to escape, crawl on my hands and knees back to the centre of Rome, and solve my data connection problems. The shaven-headed fellow guest sitting next to me turned out to be a very wealthy publisher of pornography, and a supporter of Millwall. So that was nice. Feeling a bit like the Queen, I tried to take a polite interest by asking questions such as, ‘And do you find that takes up a lot of your time?’