IT’S A FEW minutes before 3 on a mid-winter’s afternoon and what little daylight that’s left is fading fast. You’ve been looking forward to Saturday all week, and here it is at last. Now you are impatient for the game to get started.
Perched towards the top of the Bobby Moore Stand you shift your gaze beyond the confines of the rapidly filling stadium to the north east, where the grey sky has merged seamlessly with the colourless landscape below. And, with a sudden chill in your heart, you are gripped by the terrible realisation that everything is about to go horribly wrong.
There’s no logical reason for this surge of pessimism. Everything up to this point has been fine. The players looked sharp enough in the warm-up. There are a couple of injuries, but that’s to be expected at this time of year. The opponents are mid-table and their away form is woeful. Even the ref is one you can live with.
You are prone to the odd superstition but have done nothing to anger the fates – you even put on your lucky claret socks in the right order. What’s more, things augured well on the way to the ground. It’s not as if the Tube let you down again. Sure, there was the usual hold-up waiting to get into the station but it was nothing out of the ordinary. Better still, you actually managed to smuggle that can of lager past the security guy on the turnstiles for once and you’re grateful for a swig of it now. You thought your mouth was dry because of the salty bacon in the sandwich you bought from the burger stall. But you know the cause is something different. Not panic, exactly. More a certainty that today is going to end in bitter defeat. You’ve had this feeling before, and you’re rarely wrong.
You try to shake it off by singing ‘Bubbles’ at the top of your voice. You give them an ear-shattering ‘Come On You Irons’ before you resume your seat and try to tell yourself that things will be all right. You even brighten up as we win a throw in their half.
Then the bloke behind you starts to moan to his mate. He is of the opinion that we won’t have scored even if we’re still playing this time tomorrow. You fear he’s right, but you don’t want to hear him say it. He’s still saying it ten minutes later, by which time your illicit can is empty and it’s become clear that the last time this man set foot inside the ground Scott Parker was still in the team. What’s worse, he’s one of those clowns who think Parker was club captain.
You want to turn around and say something but you keep your thoughts to yourself. Another pass goes astray in midfield and, in the defensive scramble that follows, we’re forced to concede a corner. You have no doubt that this is the moment they will score.
We’re still one down at half time and you can’t be bothered to fight your way to the bar to get another beer. Instead you remain in your seat, grateful that the idiot behind you has gone – in his words – ‘for a pie and mash’. In your day it was an Arthur Bliss, but it’s painfully obvious that composers of classical music no longer register in popular culture and it appears Arthur has been aimed out. Time moves on, and you fear it may be leaving you behind.
Sitting alone quietly you try to make sense of it all.
You know that you can’t win ’em all and you don’t expect the Hammers to sweep all before them. Not these days anyway. Besides, you don’t support a club like this one for the glittering prizes. It’s been a long time since a West Ham captain hoisted aloft a significant trophy (the piece of Ratneresque crap they hand out for winning the play-off final doesn’t count – that game is about promotion, not silverware). And you’re not expecting to win anything any time soon, certainly while the finances of modern-day football mean clubs regard Cup competitions as an annoying distraction from surviving in the Premier League.
It’s not simply the fact we’re losing that has brought on this blac-kdog mood: you’ve seen West Ham get beaten before and, while it still hurts, you can cope with the disappointment better than you once could. This is something more fundamental. And dangerous. You are on the point of asking yourself why you do this in the first place – knowing that a failure to answer satisfactorily will make a mockery of your entire life.
You can’t invest fifty years of heart and soul devotion into something only to discover that it’s utterly pointless.
Things, undeniably, have changed in that time. For a start the football itself rarely excites you in the way it once did. You will concede that the game is more athletic than when you first stood on the Upton Park terraces: the players are fitter, faster and stronger – but brawn is no substitute for brain. You still appreciate a defender throwing his body in front of an opponent to block a shot but it doesn’t send a little shiver down your spinal nerve-ends in the way Bobby Moore did when he stepped in to intercept a pass, taking the ball on his chest and instantly bringing it under control before side-stepping an onrushing attacker in his own penalty area and springing a counter-attack with an inch-perfect pass.
There’s no place for risk in today’s game. Flair has to be sacrificed for points. Get the ball into the channels and then press until the other side makes a mistake. Forget precision passing; now the order of the day is to play the percentages. Get it forward as quick as possible and look for the second ball. It brings results, but it doesn’t make the hair on the back of your neck stand to attention.
Not everyone agrees with you though. You’ve been informed by the younger generation that the West Ham you once knew has gone for good. Now we’ve got to mix it up: you can’t just hope to pass your way through a well-drilled opposition, you’ve got to be more direct. Get the ball wide and bombard them with crosses.
You counter with the suggestion that 4–4–2 produces a brand of football that’s easier on the eye than 4–3–3, only to be told in no uncertain terms that no one plays 4–4–2 these days. It’s said in the same way you’d have once told an old bloke with a fondness for the way things used to be that 2–3–5 had been consigned to the dustbin of history along with the dodo.
Fashions alter – you know that. So do tastes. Take clothes: it used to be that you wouldn’t wear a pair of jeans unless they were made by Levi Strauss; now you prefer the ones with a stretchy waistband from Marks & Sparks. Or music: as a teenager you were obsessed by Rod Stewart and the Faces – you even had your hair cut like the diminutive Scotsman. The Roundhouse; the Rainbow; Hammersmith – you’d go anywhere to watch them belt out ‘Stay with Me’, ‘Maggie May’ and ‘You Wear It Well’. Now you wouldn’t get out of your armchair to watch Rod the Mod do a gig if he were playing in your back garden. Then there’s food: you used to love a sweet and sour; now you only ever eat Chinese when you’ve been outvoted by the rest of the family who reckon it’s time to give the Indian takeaway a miss for a change.
So, while you’ve moved on in so many other ways why do you maintain this unswerving loyalty to a football team you picked for the flimsiest of reasons when you had barely passed the age of reason? The players change, the managers change, even the shirt changes every couple of years with a view to parting you from large lumps of money in the club shop. All things must pass (except the midfield in a 4–3–3, it seems) but your support never wavers. You’d be well within your rights to hand in your notice – this isn’t what you signed up for all those years ago. Not that you’d even think of switching your allegiance to another club; there’s more chance of you applying for French citizenship than supporting someone else. But you could let it all go without anyone unfairly accusing you of cowardice in the face of the enemy.
The world didn’t stop spinning when you gave up the season ticket, did it? You told yourself that it was a sacrifice that had to be made now you were a family man because you could no longer justify the expense. Yet part of you was secretly relieved that the ball and chain of hauling up to East London from the south coast every other week (regardless of how badly we were playing or who the opposition was) had been sprung from your ankle. Not that you would ever voice that thought in public.
However, you still feel the gravitational pull of Upton Park. You may not go to every game now but it’s unthinkable that you’d never come here again. Everything else about the club may be different but the Boleyn Ground is a constant reference point in your life in the way the North Star has been a focal point for navigators over the centuries. But your personal star is going to go supernova when the demolition men’s wrecking ball puts an end to a century of football. What the hell will there be to hang on to then?
There are the memories for a start. There are just too many of those to stuff into a suitcase and hide away in the loft in the hope they might be forgotten like the rest of the junk that’s up there. There are all those heroes – too many to name, in fact. There are the villains as well – the donkeys are just as much a part of the jigsaw puzzle as the thoroughbreds.
The emergence of home-grown talent still excites you. Watching the youngsters come up through the Academy and force their way into the first team allows you to believe the club hasn’t yet lost its heart and soul.
And there are all those intangibles: pride in the club’s heritage; the comforting sense of solidarity that comes with being a supporter; respect for those players who exhibit a determination and effort that shows how much wearing claret and blue really matters to them; the unalloyed joy of a goal; the simple silliness of match day rituals. Best of all, occasionally, is the immeasurable pleasure of beating one of your Billy Big-Bollocks London rivals.
The way you feel about your football team can’t be compared with your preference for a pair of chinos or a chicken jalfrezi. This isn’t a commercial transaction – it’s a deeply personal relationship that begins with blind passion and then, if you are among the lucky ones, turns into true love, allowing you to grow together and recognise there are sometimes faults on both sides but being able to forgive one another’s mistakes too. A bit like marriage really.
For better or worse you know you are going to be hitched to West Ham until the day you are finally called to the celestial Bobby Moore Stand, where the angels are dressed in claret and blue and you never have to queue for a beer at half time. It’s a comforting thought in so many ways.
The second half is under way when the bloke behind returns to his seat, disturbing everyone around him as he does so. He has barely settled down before he starts talking nonsense again. The fella clearly doesn’t recognise half the players. True, these days you are a bit hazy about some of the opposition. There was a time when you could instantly identify every player in the division and be able to pronounce all their names, but you don’t seem to have the time and enthusiasm to maintain that level of knowledge these days. Still, unlike the bloke behind, you’re savvy enough to have bought a programme – and you know how take to a surreptitious shufti at the runners and riders without giving yourself away. More to the point, you can name all the West Ham players. You may be getting on a bit but you’re not senile.
It’s reaching a point that you’re having trouble concentrating on the game. Your brain is drowning in his inane prattle. The muscles in your neck are getting tenser by the minute and your overworked sense of humour has decided to take the rest of the day off. For the second time you consider telling Motormouth to button it but then think better of it. There’s no point having a row with someone sitting behind you – their position gives them a strategic advantage that is almost impossible to overcome.
You think back to the good old days when standing made it the easiest thing in the world to gently sidle away from someone in whose vicinity you’d rather not be. For the first time that afternoon you smile inwardly as you think back to the time you told the buffoon selling his inflammatory pamphlets in Priory Road precisely where he could stick his Nazi propaganda, only to find yourself standing next to him on the Chicken Run half an hour later. It was apparent from the way his ape-like forehead knitted slightly when your eyes met that he knew he’d seen you before but couldn’t remember quite when or where. By the time he did you were down the other end of the terrace, proud to have struck a blow for free speech. (It was a complete coincidence you opted to watch your football from the other side of the stadium for the remainder of that season – large skinheads with extremist views and a taste for violence don’t frighten you.)
When you do manage to focus on the game once more, West Ham are no better than they were before the break. They have days like this sometimes – perhaps all teams do. It’s just the opposition never seem to have their off-days when they’re playing us. There’s no explanation for a performance like this, but you try to rationalise it anyway.
Perhaps we’d have been better if this was live on the telly. Trouble with that is it means one of those stupid start times you hate so much. You’re a traditionalist at heart and you believe that three o’clock on a Saturday afternoon is the right time for a football match to kick off. The TV schedules made a mockery of all that with their 12.45s and 5.30s, and you know you should be grateful that your body clock hasn’t been jolted out of its finely balanced precision by one of these untimely fixtures. That early kickoff is the worst – it completely throws the rest of the day. But this is a dismal performance on a dismal day and you’ve seen too many of those over the years. Sod tradition. A 3 p.m. start may be great for everyone else but it clearly doesn’t suit West Ham.
The bloke behind is off again, stumbling slightly and steadying himself with a hand on your shoulder. You really don’t appreciate being manhandled in this way. Why do you put yourself through afternoons like these? Then it’s as if a giant filament is suddenly illuminated inside your head. The answer is so simple you wonder why no one has ever thought of it before: don’t play in the afternoon – play in the evening. All our games should be under lights!
You get a different crowd at evening kickoffs – not quite the uncompromising support of an away game but certainly not as many whingers. There’s a totally different feel about the whole experience. The team simply plays better.
If only that bloke hadn’t shambled off again; you might turn around after all and astonish him with your encyclopaedic knowledge of floodlighting at Upton Park, which you picked up from the brilliant book your wife got you for your birthday. (You must remember to see if the author has written anything else and ask for it at Christmas.)
You could recount, for a start, the fact that West Ham first played under lights at Upton Park in April 1953 when we beat Tottenham 2–1 in a friendly. At that stage, floodlighting was still considered too unreliable for League games.
The lights did famously fail more than forty years later but that was down to skulduggery rather than technical problems. We had just come back from 2–0 down against Palace to equalise in the sixtieth minute when the ground was plunged into darkness. No one could find a shilling for the meter, which meant the game had to be abandoned and a crooked betting syndicate based in the Far East who had gone for the draw cleaned up. (Don’t be tempted to try this yourself. UK bookmakers do not pay out on games that are called off – unless you’ve actually backed them to be abandoned, in which case you are liable to find yourself talking to the Serious Fraud Office under caution.)
You could also dazzle the bloke behind with your new-found knowledge that Arnold Hills, the man who made West Ham possible, experimented with floodlighting when he founded Thames Ironworks FC back in 1895. The first night game took place nine days before Christmas. Apparently there were ten lights, each said to have the power of 2,000 candles, and the ball was dipped in a bucket of whitewash beforehand. Come to think of it, you’ll dip that guy’s balls in a bucket of whitewash if he kicks the back of your seat again when he gets back from the gents.
You savour that thought as you think back to some of those classic encounters under the floodlights at Upton Park. Back in the ’70s and ’80s you had some fantastic games against European sides with exotic names like Ararat Yerevan, Dinamo Tbilisi and Politehnica Timisoara. More recently there was that 4–0 thrashing of Man Utd in the snow when Jonathan Spector played like Pelé. And there was the 2–0 victory in the second leg of the play-off semi-final against Ipswich that took us to the Millennium Stadium – God, the ground was rocking that night.
Then you recall an evening that helps to explain why the bond between you and West Ham will never be broken.
Your parents-in-law lived a five-minute walk from the ground and you often went to games from there. Your mother-in-law wasn’t as young as she used to be, so you offered to cook the evening meal she insisted you ate before going to football. You did a shepherd’s pie – one of her favourites. She wasn’t an easy woman to please and looked suspiciously at some of the things you threw into the mix. But she loved it! You got a hug and were told that you were a mate. Compliments from your mum-in-law just didn’t come any higher than that! As you dodged the traffic crossing the Barking Road on the way to the game it was as if you were a winner already. When Stuart Slater went on to inspire a sixth-round FA Cup victory against Everton, the bloke in the seat next to you forgot the usual English conventions about how total strangers are supposed to behave towards one another and you got your second hug of the evening in celebration of the winning goal. He bent your glasses, but you didn’t mind. Life doesn’t get much better than that…
My favourite game under lights? Sorry, I was miles away there. Nice of you to ask. Actually, it was a League Cup tie against the all-conquering Liverpool. It was many years ago now but I can still picture the goals as if the game were played yesterday. More interestingly, perhaps, I recall the feeling of total confidence that we would win. Without wishing to wax too lyrical here, it enveloped me like a warm blanket on a chilly November evening.
This was Liverpool, right? They were the reigning champions. And back in those days the big boys didn’t put out weakened teams in Cup games – they wanted to win. In the League we were deep in relegation trouble. Even so, well before we took our seats in the West Stand I just knew we were going to triumph that night. It wasn’t hope – it was absolute certainty. A rare sensation for any West Ham supporter, I admit. But it’s a fantastic feeling when it happens.
My optimism was well founded. With Alan Devonshire playing brilliantly on the flank and Liam Brady demonstrating all his old skill in midfield, we took the Scousers apart. The first goal was truly sensational. I was in line with Paul Ince when he hit the volley from the edge of the box – if he’d leapt much higher he would have been considered a danger to passing aircraft – and then struck the ball as sweetly as any ball has been struck before or since. Minutes later we were two up – Ince again, this time with his head. The boy was clearly destined to be a West Ham legend. It was obvious to anyone with eyes to see that only by doing something sensationally stupid would he be denied his rightful place in the pantheon of Upton Park greats. (Oh, I don’t know what exactly – being photographed in another club’s shirt perhaps? But who’d be enough of a prat to do that?)
Kenny Dalglish’s team pulled one back from the penalty spot but my faith waivered not one jot, scintilla or iota. (To be honest, I’m not sure what that adds up to in real money – but, take my word for it, I kept the faith.) Then in the second half we restored our two-goal lead courtesy of Liverpool’s international defender Steve Staunton, who deftly headed an aimless David Kelly cross into his own net. And as the red wall formed while Tony Gale lined up a free kick, I was utterly sure this would be the crowning glory of a fabulous performance. Up … over … and in. 4–1. What a truly magical night!
Anyway, I liked the idea of playing all our games under lights so much I did a spot of research to see if the floodlit effect did to our League form what it did in Cup games. I’m sorry to say my findings were not encouraging.
In our Saturday–Tuesday grind of the Championship in 2011/12, we had five home games that kicked off at 7.45 – and we didn’t win a single one of them. Four draws and a defeat against Ipswich produced a miserable return from a possible fifteen points. On top of that there were two games in the twilight zone. The 5.20 starts saw us beat Derby 3–1 and draw 3–3 with Birmingham in a real roller coaster of an affair. Those old fashioned three o’clock kickoffs, however, were really good for us. Played eleven; won eight; lost two; drew one. Goals for: twenty-six. Goals against: thirteen. Points: twenty-five.
Since being back in the Premier League we have won a few and lost a few, none more painfully than when Tottenham came from behind to snatch victory in the dying seconds with a wonder goal from Gareth Bale … which left me wondering why I continue to put myself through this sort of torture after all these years.
Yet who needs ice-cold statistics when your heart tells you something different? Every Hammer knows that floodlights lift Upton Park out of the gloom and transform it into a theatre, where we’re entitled to expect a happy ending.
Sadly, of course, there can be no joyous finale for the Boleyn Ground itself. The final curtain will come down all too soon, and that will be that. From then on the drama that is West Ham United will be played out elsewhere. We are told the Olympic Stadium will provide the perfect stage for a club that is on the verge of greatness but I’m not buying a ticket for that particular piece of fiction.
We’re going to Stratford, not Stratford-upon-Avon. And the key difference between a football match and a Shakespearean play is that the crowd at a game are not merely spectators – we are actually part of the ever-changing plot. Without us, or at least our active and vociferous participation, what happens on the pitch is – to borrow a few words from Macbeth – ‘a tale told by an idiot … signifying nothing.’ Worse still, it’s missing the sound and fury that makes it all worthwhile.
The OS is an impressive-looking arena (I bet the floodlights are second to none). No doubt, on occasions, it will be packed with bubble-blowing supporters who will sing their hearts out as they dream dreams and scheme schemes. But I can’t believe a stadium like that will ever be able to generate the passion and the involvement of the people who have made the club what it is in the same way as the Boleyn Ground.
Yes, in property terms we’re trading up to posher premises, although I wonder at what cost to us as supporters? East Ham, meanwhile, will have a few new flats and a statue where it once had a heart. I fear for its future, as I fear for ours.
Still, there’s no rewriting the script now. As supporters we have pledged to follow West Ham over land and sea – which, I guess, includes a couple of miles on the 104 bus to Stratford. There is one thing I’d ask, though. Will the last person to leave Upton Park please turn out the lights?
Thank you.