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:
- 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 between 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.
One thing I had learned over the course of the season was that you can never trust a programme, in any case. I still always bought them, but I was wary. The team listed on the back is never the team that plays, which is fair enough, since selection tends to take place quite late in the day. But there is an additional sod’s law applying to football programmes, called The Curse of the Programme Overtaken by Events, by which the player featured on the cover will almost certainly be crying with pain on a treatment table on the day of the match; if he gets a double-page feature, moreover, he will probably have either already left the club under a terrible cloud, or died. The programme for England’s appalling World Cup qualifier against Italy in February had illustrated the point pretty well: the cover showed David Seaman diving for a save (this was the night weedy Ian Walker, as next-choice goalkeeper, became one of the most reviled men in England); inside were features on Paul Gascoigne and Gianluca Vialli (neither of whom played) and on that overoptimistic World Cup bid ‘England 2006’ (which was never going to happen). The only time I experienced an exception to The Curse of the Programme Overtaken by Events was at a twice-postponed third-round Cup tie between Brentford and Manchester City at Griffin Park. True, by the time the match was played, only five of Man City’s original line-up were playing (and most had changed numbers). But a wonderful thing had happened. Players who got personal write-ups for the original date (but hadn’t played) were actually fit again when the day finally arrived. One of them had even recovered from a broken leg. I found that incredibly cheering. Wait long enough in life, you see, and it all comes right. It reminded me of Lewis Carroll’s excellent philosophical point about a stopped clock being better than a slow one, because twice in every 24 hours, it tells the right time.
Back at Old Trafford, though, I am neglecting the prematch atmosphere, which was sensational. This was my first time inside this stadium (at that date it held over 55,000), and I loved it. My immediate surroundings I wasn’t too keen on, as they were dominated by a small, violently fanatical Middlesbrough child supporter determined to poke me in the eye with his red flag; but the ‘Blue army! Blue army!’ chanting from the Chesterfield supporters was very uplifting. Blue-and-white face paint, blue-and-white curly wigs, blue-and-white shirts, loads and loads of blue-and-white balloons: gosh, someone in the Spireites’ club shop had really risen to the occasion kitting this lot out. It did occur to me that the whole contingent of 25,000 could not really call themselves hardcore regulars, incidentally, since Saltergate holds fewer than 9,000 - but then I realised that this was what made them all so happy: these were johnny-come-lately, fancy-free, over-excited fans (a bit like me supporting England at Euro 96) who had known only glory, success, and the fluke-ish sending-off of other people’s goalkeepers. They were programmed for joyous victory, because it was all they had known. Any other result was beyond their comprehension.
Compare the grim, tense and punch-drunk emotions of the Middlesbrough fans who had seen their team get to the late stages of both the FA Cup and the Coca-Cola Cup this year, but were at the same time facing relegation from the Premiership. ‘If you love Boro, stand up!’ was significantly the chant of the day, because it exhorted the fans not to lie down on the ground in a foetal position, moaning and sobbing. The previous Sunday, a last-minute equaliser from Leicester’s Emile Heskey in the Coca-Cola Cup final had meant there would have to be a replay - which was, in itself, pretty demoralising. However, much worse was the fact that Middlesbrough had been penalised earlier in the year for not turning up for a match against Blackburn. Evidently, manager Bryan Robson hadn’t given sufficient warning, or adequate reason (or something), and the upshot was, three points had been taken away. Now, having been to Blackburn myself, I personally didn’t blame Robson for not wanting to go, but the Football Association saw it differently, and never reconsidered its position, despite a lot of pleading, sulking and threatening. Fans had been seething for months about the deduction of the three points, which would prove to seal their fate. When the time came for a line to be drawn under the 17th team in the table, three clubs would wave a reluctant goodbye and drop through the trapdoor down to Division One - and Middlesbrough was at No. 19.
As for Middlesbrough’s high-profile fancy-dan players, the honeymoon period had long been over, on both sides. More foreign players had been brought in - the Italian Gianluca Festa, and the Slovakian Vladimir Kinder - but the policy had started to look a bit desperate. Ravanelli’s problems with scoring were beginning to grate with any number of people (‘Why can’t Ravanelli find the goal?’ I harrumphed, one week. ‘No one moves it, do they?’). Meanwhile the saga of Emerson’s repeated attempts at escape from Middlesbrough was a more-or-less constant source of hilarity to anyone unconnected to his employers. The twinkle-toed, raven-ringletted midfielder had the lightness and grace of a Gene Kelly, and there was a lovely shot of him in the Match of the Day opening titles doing a fond kissy-kissy at the camera - but this warm-blooded young black man kept flying down to Rio and neglecting to come back.
His preference for Brazil probably had something to do with the contrasting number of sunshine hours of Teesside and South America, but no one knew for sure. Anyway, ‘Emerson goes awol’ seemed to be the story every couple of weeks, especially in the grey depths of the winter. His fellow Brazilian Juninho was another matter, however. Totally committed, totally tireless, he flogged his heart out for Middlesbrough - and the more he did, the more tragic his situation appeared. The great Marc Overmars (who would join Arsenal just a couple of months later) had the same keen, doggy quality, I always thought. Throw a ball whatever distance and he would apparently really enjoy tearing off after it on all fours with his ears flapping behind him.
What a build-up. What an occasion. Both sides had so much to win, so much to lose. ‘Blue army, blue army, blue army!’ chanted the ecstatic Spireite supporters. Or, to be more precise, ‘Blwami, blwami, blwami.’ It occurred to me that, should Chesterfield meet Chelsea in the final, the meeting would have to be called a ‘blwamiad’, and the two sets of fans would have to agree in advance not to chant the same thing. But at this stage, the idea of Chesterfield winning this match was absurdly far-fetched. Great occasions do not generally go with great football games, unfortunately; usually the reverse. This was so fabulous and uplifting an occasion that I braced myself for the inevitable let-down once play commenced. Middlesbrough would probably score two in the first half, then kill the game. The Chesterfield balloons would gradually deflate. The tackling would get desperate and nasty. The boy with the flag would either successfully take my eye out or get the clip round the ear he was asking for. Tempers would fray. And I would pass out through lack of anything to eat since breakfast and also through fretting about the safety of the car, which was doubtless already wheel-less, before kickoff, resting on bricks with its engine removed.
But it was the highlight of my year, that semi-final. I had not drawn the short straw. If football does not obey the laws of entertainment, the point is that sometimes, gloriously, a great story writes itself right there in front of you on a piece of historic turf with an enormous number of interested people present - and you really know it when you see it.
The first half was notable at the outset mainly for its gusto, and for the pleasant surprise of Chesterfield’s classiness in defence and downright nerve in attack. This was clearly going to be a free-flowing and dynamic game, with accurate long balls and intelligent strategies on both sides (as opposed to most football, on most days). Annoyingly, Chesterfield’s shirts didn’t have the players’ names on, but apart from that, it was easy to see what was going on. A clear shot from Middlesbrough’s Craig Hignett was blocked and caught by goalkeeper Billy Mercer (big groans; big cheers); another shot by Steve Vickers went wide. Meanwhile, Chesterfield’s forwards seemed to make easy work of out-running Middlesbrough’s defenders - to the evident frustration of Vladimir Kinder, who got booked for a late tackle, and then, just minutes later, committed a gross act of shirt-pulling in plain view of the entire crowd. The whistle blew, and referee David Elleray raced towards him with his hand in his top pocket. ‘Hasn’t Kinder already been booked?’ I asked, unable to believe my eyes. ‘Yes, he has,’ said the fan beside me - and sure enough, oh blimey, Elleray showed Kinder a second yellow card, then a red one, and sent him off. Middlesbrough quickly reorganised themselves, with the ineffectual Mikkel Beck taken off and a new defender, Clayton Blackmore, brought on as a substitute. But this was a situation. It is not unknown for ten men to outplay eleven, of course; but nobody opts for that ratio voluntarily, especially in the semi-final of the FA Cup, unless they are raving mad.
At half time, despite the goalless scoreline, I was feeling quite strung out with excitement. Supporting both sides equally in such a match feels wrong, but it certainly doesn’t make you indifferent. Mixed emotions can be just as powerful as the straightforward kind. Faint from hunger, and ready to snap a certain child’s flag in half over my knee in a minute, I was absolutely desperate for more of this stuff. I scanned the programme for information about Chesterfield. They were the fourth oldest club in the Football League, apparently. Not long ago, they had been in the old Fourth Division. In fact, they’d got into the Second Division just two years ago. They all appeared to be English: Jamie Hewitt was even born in Chesterfield. Their shirt sponsor was North Derbyshire Health, which seemed rather wholesome by comparison with the Premiership’s assorted mobile phone companies, electrical goods manufacturers and brewers. On the whole, they seemed like a very good thing. Unearned self-satisfaction is the besetting sin of sports writers, and I felt it now. ‘Here am I,’ I thought, smugly, ‘at this terrific game. A lot of people would like to be in my shoes.’ And then I remembered that I’d been quite fed up about it in the car, expecting only a wasted afternoon, so felt jolly ashamed of myself.
Nine minutes into the second half, this great match got even better, with the introduction of goals to the story. A long ball from midfield was picked up by Chesterfield’s Jonathan Howard on the right wing. He beat his defender, and passed the ball goalwards to his accelerating team-mate Kevin Davies, who stretched and shot towards the bottom left-hand corner. Middlesbrough’s goalkeeper Ben Roberts (with girlie hair band, as it happens) threw himself down to stop the ball, but deflected it directly to the feet of the immensely tall Chesterfield striker Andy Morris, who happened to be loitering with intent at the far post. Morris looked down, saw the ball, gave it a little kick into the back of the net, and sort-of strolled off, evidently thinking, ‘Well, that was easy.’ One hardly had time to absorb this thrilling development when, a few minutes later, Morris was sprinting towards goal, holding off Festa. Inside the 18-yard box, Roberts threw himself down again as a human barricade, and Morris rather elegantly tripped over him, the result being a penalty to Chesterfield. Were the underdogs to go 2-0 up? No, surely not. But captain Sean Dyche drilled the ball into the middle of the net, so yes, yes, yes. No one was dreaming. Suddenly, Chesterfield were winning the FA Cup semi-final.
Sensing the game getting away from them somewhat in this second half, Middlesbrough made an effort to pull themselves together, and constructed an extremely businesslike goal in reply, with Emerson lofting a beautiful long ball to the unmarked Blackmore on the left, who raced forward and crossed it so perfectly into a knot of defenders surrounding Ravanelli right in front of the goal that it almost couldn’t fail to go in. While getting one back was a bit of a relief, it was evidently no cause for timewasting celebrations, as far as Ravanelli was concerned. He smartly collected the ball from the back of the net and made a big show of grimly waving his team-mates back to their starting positions. ‘No time! No time!’ Could Chesterfield maintain their lead? Well, yes. They actually scored again - a great shot from Jonathan Howard ricocheting from the crossbar almost vertically into the goal and being knocked clear. But although the linesman gave the goal, the referee disallowed it. In the stadium, we had no way of telling whether this was a good decision (it wasn’t). All we knew was that within five minutes Juninho had collided with Sean Dyche in the penalty box at the other end and contrived to win a penalty for Middlesbrough. Hignett took it and scored. It was 2-2. I had vowed at the moment I took up watching football that I would never, ever say, ‘If we’d scored just now, we’d be one-up!’ because it’s such a stupid remark. However, on this occasion, the temptation was too great. If that goal had not been disallowed, I reckoned, Chesterfield would have led 3-1. But now it was 2-2, and the 90 minutes were nearly up, and the whistle blew, and we were heading for 30 minutes of gut-wrenching extra time.
God almighty. A lesser person honestly could not have taken the emotional knocking I was taking here. A lesser person would have crumpled. But I think what I mainly felt was grateful to be here; grateful to see something so good. There were afternoons at football, I’m not kidding, when the action on the pitch provided roughly the same excitement as watching week-old kittens failing to get out of paper bags. Players in lower divisions sometimes just chased the ball, like little boys, instead of constructing anything; sometimes they crowded so badly, there appeared to be about forty of them on the pitch at once. Sometimes every pass seemed to go to an opposing player. Sometimes, the football just wasn’t very good. This was not one of those afternoons.
Extra time saw no letting up of commitment from either side. In the first period, Middlesbrough got corner after corner, and made shot after shot. I believe I started to knit my hands in front of my eyes, as one does in wildlife films when the injured antelope is brought down by persistent hyenas who are fed up with being made fools of. ‘Keep running, Chesterfield! Keep running! They haven’t got you yet!’ But in the end, it happened: Steve Vickers took a shot at goal that hit the crossbar and bounced back over the head of Juninho, falling near enough to Festa for him to score. Middlesbrough thereby took the lead for the first time in the match, and their fans went wild. But could they increase this lead? Could they hold on to it till the whistle? The answer, unbelievably, was no, and no. In the 119th minute of the match, Chesterfield equalised. Oh my goodness. Jamie Hewitt - the man who was not a famous love rat and who, astonishingly, hailed from the very town he played for - headed the ball in a high arc over Roberts into the goal and saved the day. If only Hollywood cared tuppence for football, this could have been described as a Hollywood moment. Time stood still. It was the most beautiful and death-defying ball I’d ever seen. It was clean. It was unstoppable. It curved just under the lip of the bar. And it happened in the very last minute of the game. On the field of play, the stars of Middlesbrough lay down in despair. Maybe it was finally time to face facts: this really wasn’t going to be their year.
I was at the Cup final on May 17. Middlesbrough had beaten Chesterfield in the replay, but they lost at Wembley to Chelsea (2-0) and took away from their heroic season precisely nothing. I felt so sorry for Juninho that I cried. As is often the way with finals, it wasn’t a patch on the semi. An Australian chap sitting next to me, high up in the stadium, had paid £400 to a tout for his ticket, and had never seen live football before, which made me all the more conscious of the lack of real dramatic interest. He didn’t even enjoy seeing Sir Cliff Richard in the pre-match entertainment, or the marching band of the Royal Marines. After Di Matteo’s amazing opening goal (which took place after 45 seconds), there were long periods of nothing much, which made me impatient on the Australian’s behalf. ‘Give us another goal!’ I wanted to yell. ‘This man only works in a pub!’
Looking back on my first season, I had loved it, but I was seriously worried about its effect on my brain. My understanding of the geography of England had been completely warped by football. Coventry was no longer a cathedral city of car manufacture with a terrible history of war-time bombing: it was principally a place where little Gordon Strachan jumped up and down on the touchline. Nottingham, which had once meant D.H. Lawrence and Boots the Chemist, was only the dismal Trent-side area of Meadow Lane (Notts County) and the City Ground (Nottingham Forest). Manchester, famed for its progressive 19th-century politics and modern metrosexual night-life, was represented by the industrial complexes of Trafford Park Road. Wimbledon had meant the novels of Nigel Williams and shortbread at the Windmill tea-room on Wimbledon Common; now it meant an image of Vinnie Jones reaching behind him to hold a young Paul Gascoigne by the scrotum, while threatening to tear someone else’s ear off and spit in the hole. A few years later, I did a tour of England doing talks in bookshops, and I found myself saying things like, ‘If you turn off here, you get to Villa Park’ - as if anyone was interested. I had been to Anfield, but not to Liverpool, and that was fine. It was as if Liverpool was a city attached, peripherally, to a very important football stadium, rather than the other way round.
I now read newspapers starting at the back, and had incredibly strong opinions about a lot of things that were utterly unimportant. I had started to get exasperated with Emerson, for example, in these last two FA Cup games. Having watched him any number of times during the season, and sympathised with his homesickness, I still found it annoying that he pulled out of tackles nine times out of ten. Was this another Anderton-type prejudice on my part? Probably. But I had eyes in my head and it seemed to me that Emerson, in his rather crucial central position, had perfected an infuriating form of missing-the-bus football, whereby he would spot the ball nearby and accelerate towards it (‘Wait for me!’) and then realise the bus was drawing away (‘Ding, ding!’), so give up instantly, and stop expending unnecessary effort. Swinging his arms, he would slow to a contented strolling pace, as if to say, ‘Oh well. There’ll be another one along in a minute.’
But what worried me most was the way these footballers had started to displace other knowledge. Emerson had previously been an influential transcendentalist philosopher whose house I had visited in Concord, Massachusetts. Well, not any more. Similarly, the name Zola had been a straight-forward matter for me until a year ago, as a French realist novelist of the late 19th century who dealt with dark subjects and got mixed up in the Dreyfus affair. Where was that Emile Zola now, in my brain? I searched about, but he was hiding in some dark recess, supplanted by a small, brilliantly gifted Italian goalscorer whose kit looked as if it had been hand-sewn by his mum for a slightly bigger boy. Looking just at the Chelsea team list for the Cup final, Hughes had been Poet Laureate, Newton a great scientist, Wise the short fat hairy-legged half of a great comedy duo, and Sinclair the inventor of a small motorised vehicle that never caught on except as an object of derision. Now they were all, emphatically, these other chaps in blue shirts, about whose day-to-day adventures I was absurdly over-interested. One day I saw the headline ‘Adams in Talks’ on the front page of a newspaper, and was disappointed when I discovered this was a reference to Gerry Adams and that the talks were about bringing peace to Northern Ireland. I had naturally jumped to the conclusion that this was a story about the much more important Tony Adams (of Arsenal and England) doing some sort of contract renewal.
The best thing was that I’d met a lot of fans, most of whom were nice people with a pretty innocent enthusiasm for a sport that had a lot of merit. Of course I was scared from time to time, usually after the match, as I scuttled back to the car (or, occasionally, to the station, which was worse). I’ve always been fearful of crowds, so it was a big effort to propel myself, week after week, to places where tens of thousands of other people would also turn up. As for football-fan behaviour, a drunken man shouting foul abuse from the seat behind could certainly ruin any match for me, and it happened several times, but I was generally more interested in the less clichéd behaviour that no one had told me about. At Southampton, for example, I heard a couple of fans chatting learnedly at half time about the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe, and I certainly wasn’t prepared for that. Then, at Selhurst Park, the man on my right had been supporting Crystal Palace since the 1930s, and occasionally rasped an exasperated ‘Leave ORF!’, while the much younger fan in front brooded like a human volcano and at intervals erupted with the shout, ‘NOTHING HAPPENED!’ At Brentford (which I loved), the fans yelled encouragement to their individual boys (‘Come on Marcus; come on Nicky’) - but one man in particular was evidently convinced that the players and the ref could hear him, which was a bit worrying. ‘Ref !’ he shouted officiously. ‘Three minutes left!’ And he held up three fingers to prove it. As for the chanting, it was sometimes funny, sometimes crass. I particularly enjoyed ‘You’ll never beat Des Walker,’ chanted by the Sheffield Wednesday fans - which, ok, isn’t that interesting, except that for a long time I thought they were singing, ‘You’ll never meet Des Walker,’ which seemed like a really useful philosophical point to make, because most of us never will.
Obviously, after a year of this, it was time to stop this pretence of sports writing and re-enter the real world, before it was too late. With any luck, I’d be able to get my Zolas back into perspective in a year or two if I did a lot of deep breathing with my eyes closed. But then my bosses suggested I expand my sports portfolio to take in tennis, golf, motor-racing, rowing, cricket, horse-racing and rugby, so I had to think again. And I’m afraid I pictured Emile and I pictured Gianfranco, and I thought, in a genuinely befuddled way, ‘Real world? Which of these represents the real world?’ Before me stood the shade of a great French writer whose stories were already written, and a lively, brilliant and engaging football player who made new stories every time he set foot on a football pitch. Emile would always be there. Gianfranco wouldn’t. I wanted to be in the real world, apparently, so I signed up to be a sports writer. I signed up to be one of the boys.