In September 2000, I decided to stop sports writing for The Times. I phoned them up, I said I was sorry, and I jacked it in. There seemed to be no alternative. I felt I was on the edge of a nervous breakdown, and that if I had to argue with just one more man with just one more clipboard, I might start screaming and hitting - and then I’d end up in court, or in a mental hospital, or on a park bench with a bottle in a brown paper bag, and no job was worth that, not even one that other people would kill you for. But what on earth could have precipitated this sense of - well, precipice? I know what you’re thinking. It was England’s poor performance in Euro 2000. It was bloody Gary Neville. But no. Depressing though the Euro 2000 England campaign assuredly was, my reasons for quitting my job and burrowing under a duvet for the next two years were not connected with sport. The short explanation, which cannot be avoided, is that my sister died. I apologise for not mentioning this before. The right moment never seemed to come up. Kay, my only sister (indeed, my only sibling), was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer at the start of the rugby World Cup in 1999 (I was on a bus coming home from a launch with the All Blacks when she told me on the phone), and she died less than a year later on the morning of Sunday September 24, 2000, on Day Nine of the Sydney Olympics. I can be so specific about what was concurrent in the world of sport because, the evening before, I had assured my boss that I would definitely be ok on that Sunday morning to file my usual 900 words about the bbc coverage of the weightlifting (or whatever) before setting off for the hospice.
‘What a shame you missed the Olympics,’ one of the other sports writers said to me, rather tactlessly, a couple of months later, at the Christmas party. I had been accredited for Sydney, you see. I had been due to go. My sister had even ghoulishly promised not to die till I got back. But I had wrestled with the dilemma and finally decided it is a good thing to be at the deathbed of one’s closest relative if you can manage it, even when there is the alternative of being on the opposite side of the planet watching fireworks. And so I cast the whole idea from my mind. Four years later, in 2004, I was invited to Melbourne for book promotion purposes, which meant that my publisher needed to apply for an Australian visa. ‘Well, that was a waste of time,’ they reported back. ‘You’ve already got one. Why didn’t you say?’ I was at a loss to explain it. How did I have a visa? I had never been to Australia. I had never planned to go. For a week or two I entertained paranoid fantasies that someone had stolen my identity - and then I remembered the Olympics. Missing the fabulousness of Sydney 2000 had clearly not been a festering regret, then. Four years later, I had forgotten that it had ever been on the cards that I should go.
In any case, I didn’t miss the Olympics in Sydney. I watched them with a great deal of grim emotional intensity at home. Other people may think they have a special raw, racking, sobbing connection to the sight of a coxless four from Great Britain taking the gold by the tiniest of margins, but let me tell them they don’t have the first idea of the feelings it can evoke. Kay and I watched the games in the night together, when she couldn’t face going to bed. In the early hours I would drive to my mother’s to sleep; then I would wake up to the bbc coverage in the mornings. And so the Sydney Olympics framed the long days in the worst week of my life. I found solace in them, and I also hated them. I wanted them to stop and I also wanted them to go on for ever, because I didn’t think Kay would survive them. Every morning I would start work to the accompaniment of Heather Small’s anthemic song ‘Proud’
- ‘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 the 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 as 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?’
When we got back to the hotel, I slept for two hours, then woke up and wrote my piece - all the time in the worrying knowledge that I probably didn’t have the means of sending it. At around 10.30 a.m., I put some shoes on and carried my open laptop downstairs, with the lead attached, and - having got the attention of the man at reception - mimed the act of plugging it in. His response was to mime a big shrug of indifference, and then to do another, throat-cutting mime to indicate that breakfast was finito,so he hoped I wasn’t expecting any. But I still had reason to be glad I had gone down, because it was while I was standing in despair in reception that I happened to spot a British football journalist outside on the street. Here was a stroke of luck. I went outside and said help, help, what can I do? And it turned out that many members of the proper accredited British media were staying in a quite modern hotel right next door to mine, and that this hotel had a fax machine that would take the lead I had, although I might need to reprogramme the tricky copy-filing software to include some international codes. Well, that all sounded quite acceptable. In fact, it sounded great. My coach was leaving in twenty minutes, and I hadn’t showered or eaten yet, but at last I felt I was winning: kneeling on the floor of a back office in a neighbouring hotel, groping for a universal phone socket behind a photocopier, saying ‘Thank you thank you thank you’ in Italian, and praying that the stuff would go through.
In these days of universal wi-fi, bluetooth and tri-band mobiles, these transmission problems seem quite primitive and tragic, I suppose. But in 1997 we thought we were up to date just saying the word ‘modem’; we were ahead of the curve having portable computers that weighed a mere three stone and had a battery life of more than 15 minutes. At night I would dream not of ponies or heaps of gold, but of the far-off invention of the lightweight laptop and of a newspaper that would one day accept copy sent by email. As things stood, the software for filing copy from the Times laptops was a laborious one which seemed to send your pieces one word at a time, weighing them for quality in the process, and always reserving the right to reject the whole thing if it found something it didn’t like. ‘It’s going!’ one would gasp, as the correct initial connection message came up - but then the worrying started. An image like a protractor (a semi-circle on a flat base) would indicate the tortuous progress of a file transmission with a dial going slowly through 180 degrees. ‘I think it’s going,’ you whispered, as the dial started to move. What you soon learned was that getting over the hump of the 90 degree mark was no guarantee of success. It just ratcheted up the tension. ‘Halfway!’ you would moan, with head in hands. Many was the time that the dial would get to 137 degrees (or maybe 140) and then pause, stagger, and conk out.
On this occasion, on the third attempt, I was lucky. It went! ‘Grazie grazie grazie,’ I said to the hotel person who had helped me. At this point, a normal sports writer would have gathered his stuff, whistled a tune, and put the whole thing behind him, but I knew I wouldn’t. I would brood on this. Improvising under pressure gave me no satisfaction. Quite the contrary: it made me seethe. But thankfully there was no time to dwell on anything right now. With ten minutes to go, I ran back to my own hotel, got washed, changed and packed. Mission accomplished, I boarded the bus to the airport, dragging my laptop case, and started thanking those generous Carlsberg people for my lovely-lovely-jubbly weekend.
* * *
But would I have missed this match? Not for anything. Not for worlds. The atmosphere in that stadium was phenomenal, for a start. It is traditional for triumphant footballers to thank the supporters for their part in proceedings, but there was no doubt that the non-stop lusty Great Escape stuff from the crowd that night grew out of a quite valid kind of magical thinking: with the team playing so well from the outset, the chanting must never stop, never. As long as the fans were singing, the boys would maintain this amazing football, this enchanted football, which was like watching eleven blokes with a history of poor coordination balance a priceless egg on their combined fingertips and miraculously deliver it intact across a minefield. England’s clear ambition was to keep the ball: to play Italy at their own game. Their performance required skill, and control, and collective intelligence; above all, it required them to take care. And bloody hell, they did! When the English fans sang the taunting variant of ‘Bread of Heaven’ that goes ‘You’re suppo-osed to-o be at home’, it was brilliantly apt. Not only did the Italians appear not to have home advantage, but the English players had apparently just walked in and stolen their tactics. England looked very much at home in the Stadio Olimpico. There were no long balls. There was no putting it in the mixer. There was no Route One. The side of the elegant English foot was employed as never before. And what made matters especially wonderful was that it drove the Italians crazy. As Gazza put it so well afterwards, ‘It was great to see them running after the ball for a change. They were desperate, and it was a really nice feeling to see that.’
Great matches sometimes reveal themselves rather late in proceedings. Not this one. From the start, you could see qualities in the English game-plan that were so much like answered prayers that it was hard to believe one’s eyes. Here was Gazza consistently outwitting Albertini and Baggio. Here was Paul Ince throwing himself into tackles, but not in a manner to get sent off. Here was the 22-year-old David Beckham keeping cool under provocation. Here was David Batty with a clear linchpin role, acting as a human shield. In defence, Tony Adams was at the height of his remarkable powers (and of course, he should still have been England captain, but we’ll come back to my feelings about Alan Shearer later). The point is that from the start of the match, everywhere one looked on the pitch, one saw not-very-English footballing traits such as guile, subtlety, control, elegance and forward thinking. While the Italians ran around exhausting themselves, our chaps used their energy efficiently, and seemed to be ruled by the idea of not letting each other down. The Italian fans threw bottles and coins onto the pitch, but they ignored them. A banner said, ‘GOOD EVENING BASTARDS’. They ignored that, too. Mentally speaking, throughout the whole 90 minutes, the match was a logically impossible stasis in which one team was always smoothly and consistently going forward and the other was always frantically scrambling back.
Afterwards, Italian defender Paolo Maldini (son of the coach Cesare Maldini) announced that his team had been ‘psychologically destroyed’ by the match - which was highly gratifying, obviously. Striker Gianfranco Zola said, rather oddly, that he would have given his finger to win the game (which one?), but that Italy had been outnumbered in midfield, so his talents had been wasted, as he’d been obliged to keep pedalling back. ‘I found myself running after Batty like a madman. In such conditions, I burnt up precious energy. Let us tell the truth, I was neither fish nor fowl. I say honestly, to play such a role it would have been better to have had another player than Zola.’ The Italian papers in subsequent days had headlines like ‘Povera Italia’ (poor Italy) and ‘Courage Drowned in a Sea of Incompetence’. An editorial in the Gazzetta dello sport said England had contented themselves with controlling the game against ‘an opponent that managed to explore nothing but its own impotence’. What music to one’s ears.
On that night, I can honestly say I loved the England team. When Sheringham hugged Beckham for post-match pictures, I was in tears of joy and pride. As the Italian fans quickly left the stadium in disgust - empty-pocketed, presumably, after flinging anything portable at the rival fans, or onto the pitch - it was a fabulous moment of togetherness for us. We didn’t even notice we’d been locked in. England had qualified for the World Cup, and had done it beautifully. David Beckham’s cold had got better. Glenn Hoddle was a genius. Ince had been a hero. Adams would live for ever. It was a fine night in Rome. The carabinieri, despite all their best efforts, hadn’t actually killed anyone. And, just as a sentimental bonus, Gazza had returned to the stadium of his old club Lazio and shown them what he could do when he was trying.
Too much has already been written by genuine life-long football fans about the exquisite misery of the long-suffering supporter. The tiny ups and the lengthy downs, the heartbreak, the locking oneself in a shed for five years. So as a way of dealing with my bitter disillusionment with England, I’ll just get Alan Shearer off my chest, because it was such a curious thing, the way I quite quickly grew to loathe that man, and to rant at anyone who dared to stand up for him. Now that Shearer’s England captaincy is in the past, I find I can put the whole thing behind me. On my desk as I write this is a little model of Shearer in Newcastle strip which I look at regularly for inspiration. People with cruelly good memories will gladly remind me that, during Euro 96, I not only offered myself as mother to Alan Shearer’s children, I even had a happy dream about him working in a furniture shop. But in the dark days of 2000, if he was named man of the match, I would say, ‘Oh for Pete’s sake, what’s wrong with you people, don’t you have eyes?’ and heartily spit on the floor.
I blamed him, you see. He was captain of a consistently under-performing England team. At a time when it was fashionable to refer to certain individual players (such as Eric Cantona) as ‘talismanic’, Shearer’s personality seemed to influence the England team, and in only negative ways. In Shearer’s image, England was mean, dirty, tight-lipped, bullet-headed and pointy-elbowed. It expected to get away with stuff, and huffed when it didn’t. It had all the grace and daintiness of a bulldozer. It was opportunistic instead of inventive. It waddled instead of ran, and always had its arm up in appeal for a penalty. It didn’t deign to look sideways or backwards. Its goal-scoring record in no way justified its arrogantly high opinion of itself. Worst of all, in a world of sexy football, beautiful football, and lanky, nifty football, it was resolutely unattractive. Basically, it had thick white yeoman legs with hairs on the backs of its knees.
What really got to me about Alan Shearer, however (oh yes, there’s more), was that different rules seemed to apply to him. This was the thing that drove me crazy. He fouled all the time, yet he wasn’t booked or sent off. He played half-heartedly, yet he wasn’t substituted. He seemed to exert a power that wasn’t commensurate with his true value as a footballer. What was going on? Did he know where bodies were buried? Why was everyone scared of him? Famously, when Ruud Gullit dared to leave him out of the Newcastle team, the decision was interpreted as an extreme folly for which Gullit would (and did) rightfully pay with his job. Some might argue that the loyalty shown to Shearer by a succession of England managers is sufficient evidence of his worth. And to be fair, many people told me I was barking up the wrong tree, and that having Shearer leading the England team from the front gave it bulldog qualities of strength and purpose. ‘Alan Shearer knows where the goal is,’ they would say, meaningfully. But at the height of my Shearer obsession, I considered such arguments mere propaganda. It seemed really obvious to me that the non-negotiability of having Shearer in attack was limiting England’s options in disastrous ways. Why did tactics - and team selection - have to be tailored to suit this bloke? Why was he exempt from criticism? Why was he untouchable? Why did no blame attach to him after St Etienne, when it was his foul on the Argentinian goalkeeper that lost the match for England (when Sol Campbell’s goal was disallowed, and Argentina ran off and scored while England were still celebrating)? I remember a Football Writers’ Dinner where I was lucky enough to sit next to Ted Beckham (David’s dad), and instead of asking him to marry me (what a wasted opportunity), I just moaned on and on to him about Bloody Alan Shearer.
The last match I attended for The Times was in October 2000, a few days after my sister’s funeral. And the good news is: Alan Shearer wasn’t in it. However, the bad news is: it was still unwatchably awful, so he might just as well have been. His mean little spirit still hovered above it. It was a 2002 World Cup qualifier against Germany at Wembley (the first of our campaign), and even on first sight it seemed to contain every ingredient for a paradigmatically miserable afternoon of English football. Somebody had decided to make this a celebratory occasion by entitling the match ‘The Final Whistle’, but this was never going to be a party, no matter how many Cross of St George flags were sold to unsuspecting children down on Wembley Way, and no matter how many times the aggravatingly upbeat stadium announcer played ‘Three Lions’ over the PA and yelled, ‘The world will be watching! It’s a family occasion! It’s a World Cup qualifier! Don’t run off at the end of the match, we’ve got a show that’s fantastic!’ This was, you see, to be the last match played at the old Wembley before demolition, and equivocal feelings abounded. It was, on the one hand, rather melancholy to reflect that the ghostly echoes from 1966 of ‘They think it’s all over’ would be silenced for ever by the wrecking ball; on the other hand, the place was dank, stinky and uncomfortable and deserved to be struck by lightning. When the Red Arrows failed to show up (pleading weather conditions), one could only applaud their good taste. Nothing to celebrate here, mate. Nothing to celebrate here. You mark my words, the England fans will soon be singing, ‘Stand up if you won the war,’ because it will be the only pathetic little straw they can grasp at.
Why anyone thought an England-Germany game with important points attached to it would make a suitable last fixture for the old place, I couldn’t imagine. True, they couldn’t have predicted it would be cold and raining, but they must surely have known we would lose. England’s performance in Euro 2000 had been pretty terrible, and it was clear by now that, as manager, Kevin Keegan had only ever had one idea: build the team around Alan Shearer and see what happens. By this point, sadly, Keegan’s supposed motivational skills were no longer a source of wonder. His talent for tactical idiocy, however, was universally acknowledged; in fact it was reckoned to be unsurpassed at this level of the game. On this occasion, for a World Cup qualifier against the Germans, Keegan put out a midfield of three - Beckham, Scholes and Barmby - and set Southgate the task of patrolling behind them. In the press box, some of the blokes looked at this lineup and put their heads in their hands. It was the work of a madman. It was insane.
Personally, I cried. I never stopped crying, in fact. This being a few days after my sister’s funeral, I started crying because of personal circumstances, obviously - but there seemed to be no practical reason to cheer up once I’d started, so I didn’t. On arrival, I realised that I’d been allocated a seat next to Brian Glanville, a veteran football writer of high renown, tangled ascetic appearance and haughty intellectual condescension, who had never made a secret of his dislike for me (sometimes he even did it in Italian). A couple of years before, at a Charlton game, he’d been given my ticket by mistake, and when a steward asked him for it he’d said, rather shockingly, ‘If I’d known it was for her, I’d have torn it up.’ Now, for four years fortune had spared me the necessity of sitting next to Brian Glanville, but naturally I had kept myself keenly prepared for the eventuality. By way of practice, for example, I had recently dealt quite successfully with one of his like-minded woman-hostile colleagues, by saying as I sat down, ‘Look, I’ll only say this once. But if there’s anything you don’t understand, just ask.’ It would have given me considerable satisfaction to say something similar to Brian Glanville. One day the opportunity would arise, I was sure of it. I was ready for him. I had nothing to lose.
But today, when I saw him sitting there in the next seat - damn it, I just welled up and cried. And since he steadfastly ignored me (possibly in Italian), I felt I had full permission to give vent to all my feelings. In this noisy stadium, no one would notice, after all. So I cried throughout the pre-match stuff, which included a playing of ‘Jerusalem’ (which had been sung at my sister’s funeral). I cried during the fireworks, which we couldn’t see because it was daylight, and in any case, they were on the roof. I cried with everyone else when I saw the team sheet. I cried when I spotted the Wembley groundsman, with whom I’d once spent a really pleasant day learning about sports turf management; I cried when the England fans booed the German national anthem; I cried right through the match and the half-time sandwich, cup of tea and orange-flavoured Club biscuit. And after the defeat, when Kevin Keegan announced his resignation as England coach, I cried at that as well, not because it was such a shock but because it was the opposite: it was so miserably inevitable. When you are in a state combining personal grief with despair for England, nothing is a surprise, you see; bad things just confirm your worst fears. So of course Keegan would choose this moment to quit the England job. Hadn’t he abandoned clubs and jobs all his life? Hadn’t I been saying he would do this at the worst moment, when we had another vital qualifying match in just a few days’ time? Wasn’t that just typical of him to slink off but dress it up as the honourable thing?
In a way, though, I reckon it was fitting that I should spend the whole of my last ever football match openly piping the eye and wringing out tissues. Sport doesn’t permit a really good cry, and I had begun to think that this was one of the main things wrong with it. Although it’s a widely acknowledged fact that watching sport is an emotionally gruelling business, isn’t there an unsatisfactory gap where the catharsis ought to be? You get all worked up - and then, because no one dies, you gradually calm down again and nurse a curious sense of emptiness. People sometimes say that sport educates the emotions, but the range of feelings it promotes is pathetically small, when you think about it. Anxiety, frustration, unbearable misery and almighty relief - that’s about it. Whenever the subject of ‘Is sport the new religion?’ came up in my day, I’d say no, or at least it’s no substitute, because sport is designed to make people anxious whereas religion is supposed to do the opposite. Watching sport is about placing your temporary emotional well-being in the hands of a bunch of fallible athletes; religion makes you put faith in an infallible God for the sake of your own ultimate spiritual security. The fact that people make ‘gods’ out of footballers is merely a symptom of paltry understanding and bad taste. When Kevin Keegan had made his flit from Newcastle in January 1997, the quasi-religious grieving was quite shocking. Fans with fresh ‘RIP’ tattoos on their stomachs hung around outside St James’ Park, hoping to see him rise again. One fan pledged to explain about Keegan to his toddlers ‘when they were old enough’. ‘He Never Forgot Ordinary People’, ran the headline in a local Newcastle paper. At the time, Keegan was advertising Sugar Puffs on the telly, and in this climate of religiosity I remember thinking it would have been quite a simple matter to change the Sugar Puffs slogan to ‘Eat these and think of me’.
But the very reason sport is so ascendant in our day, I reckon, is that its drama requires such shallow emotional engagement. It isn’t very complicated. It is self-centred. It’s unhappy/happy. It’s lose/win. Empathy doesn’t really come into it, let alone anything so profound and human as pity. Sport legitimises quite shameful feelings such as naked triumphalism and - especially when German people are involved in a rare defeat, tee hee - schadenfreude. Sometimes we might feel sorry for losers, but it’s up to us; it’s optional. I remember quite a yelling match I had on the night of England-Argentina in 1998, when my boss called from London and told me to focus on Beckham’s red card, and the issue of pity came up at an extremely bad moment. This sending-off incident was one of the lowest points of my sports writing career, I must confess - not for what it represented in the history of English football, but because it happened right in front of me and I missed it. I was bent over my keyboard at the time, and looked up only when I heard the roar from the crowd and the yelled expletives from all round me in the press box. What I saw on the pitch was Beckham inexplicably untucking his shirt and striding off. What? The crowd was going mad. What on earth -? People in the press box were hopping up and down. And I just sat there, swallowing and blinking; waiting for an explanatory replay on a nearby monitor, and all the time thinking, ‘If I ask what just happened, I’m dead.’
Anyway, back in London they wanted me to ‘go for’ Beckham. They had obviously mistaken me for some rottweiler alter ego, who went for people. I don’t know. I can’t explain it. I just knew it was pointless asking me to call for David Beckham to be burned in effigy, and that, luckily, I worked for a newspaper that would not insert the words ‘I hereby call for him to be burned in effigy’ unless I actually wrote them. And I wouldn’t. ‘If we lose this, they’ll crucify him!’ my boss yelled. (He was hoarse by the end of the night from yelling to his troops in the cacophony of St Etienne.) And I yelled back, hopelessly, ‘But I feel sorry for him!’ And he’d shout, ‘He did something really stupid!’ And I’d shout, ‘Pardon?’ And he’d shout, ‘He deserves what’s coming to him!’ And I’d shout, ‘That’s why I feel sorry for him!’ I had to re-file my piece twice because it wasn’t strong enough, but I still refused to have a go. I said Beckham was incredibly talented, and it was tragic that there was nothing he could do to repair his mistake. In the end, the last edition went and my voiceless boss was obliged to forgive me my milksop girlie failings; characteristically, he never referred to the incident again.
What he always loyally loved to tell people afterwards instead was that I was the only one of his writers in France who had predicted the home side to win the World Cup, which is a bizarre sports writing distinction I can’t not mention here, since it’s the only one I have. The paper had asked all its footie writers for its ‘top four’, you see, and printed them before the tournament. My prediction was: France, Brazil, Holland, England - which was extremely uncanny as things turned out, being correct in three out of four cases, with the top two in the right positions. More learned chaps such as Brian Glanville had gone for Brazil, Argentina, Italy and Germany (not that this gives me any pleasure to recall, you understand). However, my success was mostly fluke. Also, as I was always quick to point out, I had misunderstood the question in any case. I thought that by ‘top four’ they meant the teams that would make it to the semi-finals. It was only when colleagues reported to me, chuckling with mirth, ‘I see you tipped France to win, Lynne,’ that I found out what I’d done.