THE MATCH
Less than a year later, by the time of the FA Cup semi-final at Old Trafford between Chesterfield and Middlesbrough in April 1997, I had come on a bit, footie-wise. In fact, it was terrifying how quickly I became a football bore after such a brief initiation. Many friends simply stopped talking to me, because all my stories seemed to involve either the manager of Wolverhampton Wanderers or balls grazing crossbars in the 89th minute. ‘Come round and watch the Newcastle match,’ I would say, and then wonder why they always had alternative plans. My boyfriend took me on a romantic weekend to a nice hotel in the New Forest which I spoiled by exclaiming, as we passed the bar on the way up to our room, ‘Oh, thank God, they’ve got Sky Sports.’
The thing was, I was now attending football every week, as part of my arrangement with The Times. Possibly acting from a sense of guilt when they saw how much Euro 96 had disturbed my normal equilibrium, my masters gently suggested I go once a week to a football match, sit in the stands with the supporters, and write a column about it. They did publish this column, I hasten to add. It wasn’t a considerate plot to help me through a difficult patch. And in a way, of course, it was a continuation of the experiment. Let’s see if this woman really likes football, then, when she finds out it normally takes place firmly at ground level, out of doors in gritty northern stadiums in the freezing rain, and involves watching everyday league players run around banging into each other (in the absence of such advanced international features as steering, acceleration or brakes).
Thus, one week I might go to watch Division Three Brighton and Hove Albion against Torquay United at the local Goldstone ground; the next I’d be at the Premiership match between Southampton and Middlesbrough at the Dell; then it would be England v Poland (World Cup qualifier) at Wembley. They called the column ‘Kicking and Screaming’ but it was quite clear to anyone reading it that I was having a high old time, and didn’t need to be dragged anywhere against my will. In fact, on weeks when there was no Saturday football (international call-ups being to blame), I would kiss the cats goodbye in the morning and then stand with my coat on at the front door, clutching my car key and rolled-up umbrella, just sort-of refusing to accept that I had no match to go to.
And it was a pretty good season, 1996-97, if you leave aside the fact that Manchester United ultimately won the league for the second year running. To the casual onlooker, this was a season notable mainly for the burgeoning practice of pinning outlandish hopes on foreign players, whose presence not only lent all kinds of new glamour to the game, but finally legitimised the hair band as a masculine fashion accoutrement. I remember a fanzine at Anfield highlighting the difference - in terms of allure - between Liverpool’s own Patrik Berger and United’s Karel Poborský. ‘We’ve got a Czech; they’ve got a Czech,’ it said, alongside unkindly contrasting illustrative photos. ‘Ours has got a hair band; theirs has got a hair band.’ The cruel point was, alas, that Berger resembled a rock star while Poborský - well, Poborský didn’t. Poborský was so old-crone-like in appearance that he evoked childhood terrors of the witch Baba Yaga in her house built on chicken legs.
Reaction to foreign players was bound to be mixed, given the proud xenophobic traditions of the game. But mainly, supporters needed a lot of reassurance that managers had not been out squandering their club’s precious Eurocheque facility on the footballing equivalent of pigs in pokes. At a Rangers-Hibernian match at Ibrox, the man sitting next to me indicated the tall blond figure of Erik Bo Andersen (a Dane, as the name suggests), and said, wearily, ‘See that man? Number 16? Really a heating engineer. Not many people know that. Can’t play football at all, just a mix-up.’ Andersen promptly made the worst unforced error I had ever seen. Standing a few yards in front of an open goal, he knocked the ball wide, to a general gasp of horror. ‘That was terrible,’ I said. ‘Uh-huh,’ said the Rangers supporter, taking his head from his hands. ‘But he’s a very good plumber.’
To a neophyte, however, the foreign players were extremely attractive and evoked no mixed feelings at all. Put simply, I was always on their side. This was the year Kevin Keegan deserted Newcastle without explanation, and left his dazzling foreign players David Ginola and Tino Asprilla in the hands of Kenny Dalglish, which was a bit like hiring Cruella de Vil as your puppy-walker. The consistent wronging of David Ginola (which continued when he moved to Spurs) became quite a theme of my weekly pieces, and I staunchly voted for him as man of the match week after week, even on occasions when he wasn’t playing. But the more the xenophobic crowds hooted the fancy dans, the more I personally rooted for them. When Chelsea’s handsome all-star international team took the pitch at Blackburn (it was one of Gianfranco Zola’s first outings), I heard shouts of ‘Go back to Spain!’ which annoyed me so much that I got out my notebook and wrote it down. When I was sent to see Middlesbrough at Southampton at the beginning of the season, it was principally to report back on the expensive foreigners that Middlesbrough’s manager Bryan Robson had just recruited: the Brazilians Emerson and Juninho, and the Italian Fabrizio Ravanelli. On that memorably golden autumn afternoon, Middlesbrough were roundly beaten 4-0 by the red-and-white British foot soldiers of Southampton FC, which was absolutely hilarious, of course. ‘What - a waste - amunny!’ was the gleeful chorus from the stands.
For me, 1996-97 was a time of all sorts of assimilation. I’d never bothered to find out before how football was organised, with leagues and so on. Was the Premiership a legitimate division, or was it just made up of clubs with TV contracts? As far as fixtures were concerned, I’d always assumed, given how much football there appeared to be every week, that the question of who-played-who was probably just everyone plays absolutely everyone else as many times as possible until the whole torrid business has to start all over again. Cup-wise, I didn’t know there was more than one cup. Meanwhile, I’d never wondered where the notorious Hillsborough stadium was, or whether it was attached to any particular club; and I had no idea about the system of promotion and relegation, either: I assumed that, if a team was in the Second Division (say), that was where it had always been, and always would be. Finally, I didn’t know that teams had nicknames like ‘The Crazy Gang’ or ‘The Owls’, or suspected that you only had to know:
the name of a club’s ground
the name of the manager
the name of the chairman, and
the nickname
- and then you would be able to decode Des Lynam’s script on Match of the Day. It was all quite easy really. ‘Now,’ Des might say, waggling his moustache, ‘Ewood Park had a visit from Ruud Gullit’s blue army,’ and I’d sit there, happily translating, ‘He means Chelsea went to Blackburn Rovers.’ Twice in the season, incidentally, I saw West Ham (The Hammers) in opposition to Sheffield Wednesday (The Owls), a fixture I found too rich in unfortunate imagery. I didn’t mind foxes beating magpies, or gunners beating spurs, but the idea of owls being beaten by hammers still affects me to this day.
What was most exciting about learning the language of football, however, was the discovery that an enormous number of my (male) friends had been speaking football for years, and I hadn’t been able to tune my ear to what they were saying. Suddenly, I could. Instead of a loud ‘fffffffffffffff’ noise, I could pick out quite a lot of words that made sense. This did not mean I could practise my own footie lingo freely in mixed company, though; oh no. I quickly discovered that, in footie conversations in social contexts, my female opinion counted for nothing, even though I’d probably seen more live football in six months than most men see in a lifetime (and was paid good money to write about it). If I asked questions, on the other hand, I was jolly popular. So that’s what I mainly did. I found it touching that chaps who knew about football were so generous about sharing their encyclopaedic knowledge. ‘So what is end-to-end play, then?’ I would ask. ‘Why do they call Tony Adams “Donkey”?’ ‘Which year did Brighton and Hove Albion get to the Cup final?’ And they would be more than happy to tell me. No one in the literary world
would be so forbearing in an equivalent situation, it seemed to me. Rude scoffing noises would be the entire response if you went about asking, ‘So who’s this A.S. Byatt, then?’ or ‘What’s the difference between a foreword and a preface?’ or ‘Did you ever meet Charles Dickens, or was he before your time?’
Not having a team to support was a problem, but I realised I couldn’t manufacture loyalty by buying a scarf. However, I did quickly adopt quite powerful likes and dislikes both for certain clubs and for individual players, and this was perfectly acceptable because if there is one quality cherished and indulged by all true football supporters, it is baseless prejudice. I discovered that it is really important to allow small flickering doubts about a player’s ability to grow as quickly as possible into a deeplyheld conviction (‘He’s useless! He’s fucking useless!’), and for that conviction to fester until it’s a kind of mental illness (‘Why can’t they see he’s useless? Can’t you see how useless he is?’). For example, I decided quite early on that Darren Anderton (of Spurs and England) was rubbish, and I still think I was right, actually, despite the fact that, when I consult my old Footballers Fact File 1997-8, I find that it describes him as a ‘quick, intelligent winger who made a terrific contribution to England’s Euro 96 campaign’, and goes on to call him ‘not only a pleasure to watch, but a must for inclusion at club and international level’.
Mm. Is it possible I was wrong about Anderton? Was it just his floppy haircut and vacant expression, really, that used to get up my nose? Surely he was always missing goals at key moments? But hang on, does it matter? We’re talking about football logic here, and the normal rules don’t apply. Thinking Anderton was rubbish was a perfectly legitimate standpoint, and (after all) was more about my right to an opinion than about his true abilities as a player. Thus, when Anderton failed to score in any match, a rational or disinterested onlooker might think, ‘Oh, what a shame, he missed it. Wouldn’t it have been nice if that had gone in?’ But I had given myself permission to think something else: something along the lines of, ‘Fuck that Darren Anderton! He’s so fucking useless! And why doesn’t he get a fucking haircut?’ Even when he did something undeniably good, such as score a winning goal, there was no need to reconsider this extreme position, either. No, if Anderton suddenly displayed talent in some incontrovertible way, I could fall back on that grudging, concessionary attitude of oh-all-right-I’ll-give-him-that-but-it-makes-a-fucking-change-mate (‘It makes a fucking change!’).
Other people did have clubs to support, though, and this made me very sorry for them, the lifelong misery of the football fan having been so vividly expounded in Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch. I do often wonder, however, whether it was the almighty scope for grumbling that truly attracted me to the game in the first place. I am terribly skilled at grumbling, personally; yet I still spend many hours perfecting it. Ask any of my friends. I am also an utter natural at whingeing and whining; and you should hear my railing - it’s world class. No wonder those grandstands felt like home. Sit with fans and you’ll find that they don’t happily wave a hand at their team, saying, ‘Aren’t they marvellous?’ No, despite being stoutly loyal through all the vicissitudes a cruel footballing destiny can chuck at them, they reserve the right to be permanently incensed, frustrated, fed up, and generally at their tether’s end. Loyalty is expressed almost entirely through abuse. At my first game (the Brighton one), I sat next to a man who said, flatly, ‘I’ve been coming to the Goldstone since 1958, and this is the worst team we’ve ever had.’ A few weeks later, at Selhurst Park, I explained to a Crystal Palace seasonticket holder that I didn’t know much about football, and he quipped, ‘You’ve come to the right place, then. This lot doesn’t know much about football either.’ On a moonlit night in Monaco in March 1997, after Newcastle had been publicly humiliated by a team that incidentally included the 19-year-old Thierry Henry (by three goals to nil in the second leg of the uefa Cup semi-final), I saw a Newcastle fan sum up his feelings about his noble team in tearful, regretful franglais. ‘You, vous, Monaco - très good,’ he told a surprised passer-by. ‘We, Newcastle - shite.’
I always felt sorry for the fans. What exploitation. Their loyalty clearly meant a lot to them, but it was worth so much more (in lovely heaps of fifty-pound notes) to the clubs that it was like witnessing tiny helpless infants being mugged for their Cheesy Wotsits, over and over again. Purely in terms of value for money, football is shocking. I mean, what did fans get for their money at an average match? A cold, hard place to sit in the draughty outdoors, surrounded by mouthy maniacs, with the possibility of a thin beaker of scalding tea with lumps in it. True, they got a football match, but football obeys no known laws of entertainment, so there’s no promise of anything worth seeing. Obviously, when I pleaded in print for the urgent invention of heated seats, I wasn’t completely serious. I got quite accustomed to the frozen-bottom sensation, and eventually learned to wipe rain off the seat before sitting down. People also explained to me that no one goes to football for the culinary experience, either. But I still felt weekly outrage at how badly the punters were catered for. Seat ticket prices might be the same as for West End theatre, but the ‘Food’ information in my Football Fan’s Guide covered only such matters as whether the pies were hot or cold, what the cost of pies was, how many pies were tested, where to buy pies, and how much filling the pies had got. The highest praise was reserved for drinks with lids on. True, there was usually a burger van, but I’ve never been able to eat from a burger van since seeing that incident in one of the Roddy Doyle films of someone being served a deep-fried nappy with chips. I suppose I could have packed a Tupperware box with sandwiches and salads and a nice green apple to eat on arrival at the ground, but I never did, because - well, because it would have been entirely out of character, that’s why. So, instead, I often drove literally hundreds of miles to football stadiums (‘Here we are! Elland Road! And it only took five hours!’) only to realise I was, yet again, in the middle of nowhere with only the crumbs in the seams of my coat pocket to prevent me from keeling over.
At this stage of my professional sports writing, I never questioned my instructions. My editors would say, ‘We think you should see Wolverhampton v Port Vale at Molineux next Saturday.’ And I’d say, ‘Okey dokey. That sounds like an old-established ground.’ And they’d say, ‘Yes, it does, doesn’t it? But in fact it’s quite big and new, and it’s even got big screens, and we think you’ll have a field day.’ It seemed to me that it was all experience, you see. I had no way of knowing whether a game would be good or not, so I didn’t try. And, until you’ve actually been to Molineux (say), you can’t possibly know that a game at Wolverhampton on a wet Saturday against Port Vale operates precisely like the Dementors in the Harry Potter books, sucking all the hope out of you by means of a stringy black cyclone coming out of your face, and leaving you afterwards a mere crumpled husk of gibbering despair. So I always said ‘Okey dokey’: to trips to Blackburn Rovers, Nottingham Forest, Liverpool, Bristol City, Coventry, Leicester, Aston Villa and so on. I would set off at dawn from Brighton, to allow plenty of time for getting lost (stadiums are rarely signposted), and for figuring out a way to leave the car somewhere unpleasant, unlit and dangerous in the surrounding streets, guarded by enterprising junior extortionists who charged you £5 to let you walk away alive. Such logistical issues loom large in the life of sports writers, I’m afraid. By the end of my first season, someone might tell me innocently that they saw the game of the bloody century at White Hart Lane, and I wouldn’t enquire about match details: instead, I’d say, hysterically, ‘White Hart Lane? On Tottenham High Road? Where did you park? Where the fuck did you park?’
Anyway, I mention all this naïve okey-dokeyness because, on my way to Old Trafford for the semi-final of the FA Cup between Chesterfield and Middlesbrough, it suddenly occurred to me, somewhere on the M6, that I might have drawn the short straw. Hang on, I thought. Two hundred miles back down the road, at Highbury, the other semi-final was taking place be
tween Wimbledon and Chelsea. Damn. That could be a great match! True, I’d seen Middlesbrough a couple of times in the season (once in March at their magnificent Riverside Stadium, where they beat Derby in a Premiership match by a spectacular 6-1), but I’d formed all sorts of attachments to both the London teams which would surely make their semi-final the right one for me to see. For the first time in my sports writer career (but not the last), I actually felt quite hard done by. Why was I driving all the way to Manchester to see Middlesbrough demolish itsy-bitsy Chesterfield, a Second-Division Derbyshire side who should never, by rights, have got this far in the competition? I knew only three things about Chesterfield: Tony Benn was its mp for a very long time; it had a church with a curiously wonky spire; and it was where the sofas came from. Evidently 25,000 Chesterfield fans were making for Old Trafford today, leaving the town virtually deserted. It occurred to me that a visit to Chesterfield on this semi-final day might be a much more interesting proposition than covering the match. The population is only about 70,000 at the best of times. Imagine those empty streets. Imagine the poor lame lonely Derbyshire-accented child left behind because he couldn’t keep up with the fans racing for the buses (I was thinking of The Pied Piper here). And above all, imagine the enormous opportunity for criminal chesterfield-rustling while the entire populace was elsewhere: out-of-town desperadoes herding thousands of deeply-studded, highbacked leather sofas, mooing and slipping, into the backs of vans.
What I hadn’t really noticed, despite reading nothing but footie journalism for the past six months, was that Chesterfield’s Cup run had been one of the most romantic Roy-of-the-Rovers affairs. The Spireites (nickname of Chesterfield) had conceded only two goals along the way to this semi-final, and had beaten Bury, Scarborough, Bristol City, Bolton Wanderers, Nottingham Forest and Wrexham. The fifth-round 1-0 victory over Forest had been a particularly glorious and notable occasion, at Chesterfield’s small home ground, Saltergate: referee David Elleray had sent off Forest’s goalkeeper for rugby-tackling a Chesterfield player. Blimey. There had been a red card, a burst of protest, and a firmly pointed arm. Unsurprisingly, passions ran very high indeed. In particular, Stuart Pearce (player-manager of Forest) was seriously peeved, despite the clear justice involved. Tom Curtis then scored elegantly with the ensuing penalty - for which there was a substitute goalkeeper, you will be relieved to hear, but only a rather dazed one who probably wished he hadn’t got up that morning. I rattle off these names now, don’t I? But when I perused the programme before the match, none of the Chesterfield personnel meant anything to me. No, no, never heard of any of them. There was a Jamie Hewitt listed, which briefly piqued my interest. Was this the notorious love rat who broke the heart of Princess Diana? On balance, given that he played in defence for Chesterfield, probably not.