A Cherished Moment

Today is my 'sort of'' birthday.  When there is no 29th of February, I usually opt for 1st March as a substitute.  It is a time for getting a bit misty eyed and nostalgic for the ‘old days’.  Actually most of the old days were rubbish but with my newly acquired age-related rose tinted eyesight that matters not and amongst the wealth of good times one or two fond memories sit above the rest.  Most of my best moments have a music based foundation but not the one I am about to relate.  This has to do with football and no rose tinted sight is necessary here.

I am about 10 years old and it is roughly 2 o’clock in the afternoon.  I am sitting on the cold parquet flooring of my junior school classroom by the shoe racks putting on my football boots.  Why?  Because it is a school match day and I am captain of the rabble we call our school football team, about to take on another rabble from the local school a mile or so away.

My heartbeat is quickening and my breathing getting shorter as adrenalin floods through my body.  The anticipation is almost unbearable and I love it.  If I was to pick the best feeling in the world it would be this moment.  Not only am I about to miss French/English/Maths on offer that afternoon (strike out those that do not apply), I am about to do the one thing I love most in the world – play football for my school.

Outside, it is late autumn and a watery sun tries in vain to penetrate the mist that hangs around the football pitch, now carpeted with autumnal leaves from the towering Elms that line the school field.  The morning dew still clings to the grass and sends up a halo of wetness as the sodden leather ball zips across it.  I am proudly wearing a school football shirt (with real cuffs and collars – that dates me) of pillar-box red with white sleeves, the same as the Arsenal in those days and feel a million dollars.  We line up and the match starts…

We probably won that day – we normally did, having a half decent team which finished top of Division 3 that year and won promotion to Division 2.  It was a time of youthful exuberance and a certain naivety about life to come.  No baggage, no regrets.  Whilst I can still feel the heady exhilaration of those times, I know that I will never recapture them.  It was a time that only the young can experience.  When I look at the 10 year old me now, I see an enthusiasm that I no longer have and a head full of dreams of playing forever.

The dream ended abruptly the following September when I transferred to secondary school.  A rugby playing school.

England Lose World Cup...Again

So England exits yet another World Cup at the hands of the Germans and on the back of the poorest showing since 1958. I can’t see us winning a major tournament ever again. But it wasn’t always like this.


When I was at junior school a lifetime ago, I was already a convert to our national sport, football, or soccer as the Yanks insist on calling it (correctly, I might add) and played it every spare minute of every day, but nothing had prepared me for the sort of playground politics that come with being a fan.

‘So what team do you support then?’ was the question that threw me, as giving the wrong answer could be fatal and the truth was, I didn’t support anyone. Luckily, the following Saturday saw the staging of the 1963 FA Cup Final when Manchester United stuffed Leicester City 3-1. I’d actually heard of Man U and as they were clearly winners, they would do for me. Thus it came to pass that a home counties boy who’d never travelled north past Luton let alone to the far north-west of the country became a Man U supporter for no other reason that they were there and I’ve followed them ever since.

So by 1966 when I would sit goggle eyed in front of our flickering black & white TV watching the World Cup games, it was United’s Bobby Charlton and Nobby Styles that I cheered on (in lieu of my true hero at United, Dennis Law, but he was Scottish). One of my fondest memories is Bobby’s thunderbolt goal against Mexico in the Group stage, a goal that still looks amazing today. Just have a look at that mazy run and catapult shot that bulges the net before the goalkeeper has time to reach it.



There was much comment at the time about Alf Ramsey’s assertion that Martin Peters was a player ten years ahead of his time. Actually if he had truly been ten years ahead of his time, he would’ve sported long greasy hair and wide lapels, but we’ll let that pass. In truth, Alf had picked the wrong man. Hindsight shows that it was Nobby Styles that was genuinely ahead of his time by his relentless harassing of the opposition and his willingness to stick the boot in. Watching those games from the 1960s, it is obvious that players had slightly more time and space to play. These days, the opposition close you down relentlessly, but not so then – except for Nobby who gained a reputation for doing just that with terrier-like tenacity.

Alf’s theory about Peters was that he had the ability to ‘ghost’ into shooting positions so late that he was never picked up – a trait that few possessed. But actually Geoff Hurst could do that as well, as his goal against Argentina in the bad-tempered quarter-final shows. This is actually my goal of the ’66 tournament and a memory that will never fade. It made me gasp at the time and still looks good today. The skill with which, Hurst glides in at the near post, unmarked, and just lets the ball skim over his head with enough purchase to guide it into the far corner of the goal is just awe-inspiring. Such delicacy in what was an ugly and spiteful game.

Subbuteo

‘Even at the age of ten
Smart boy Kevin was a smart boy then
He always beat me at Subbuteo
‘Cos he flicked a kick and I didn’t know’

As a kid growing up in the sixties, I almost inevitably became an expert Meccano engineer, Scalextric racing driver and Subbuteo table football champ, by a sort of osmosis. I loved my Meccano but Subbuteo was the top game, as immortalised by the Undertones in the above lyrics from ‘My Perfect Cousin’. Subbuteo, whilst still played today, really belongs to the sixties when it evolved from its initial flat plastic figures to the famous moulded plastic ones with weighted bases we know today and I spent hours playing it – usually by myself. I had a 1966 ‘Continental’ set with the usual ‘red’ and ‘blue’ team, both of which became the most accident prone teams in football history with broken arms and legs all round. Playing on the floor where my mother often walked probably had something to do with it.

I remember playing most games by myself in those days and this was no exception. I played both sides and even had a league for a short while but the reds and blues suffered mightily from either my knees or others’ feet. It was worse than the Somme.

Eventually, in a fit of pique over playing with two paraplegic teams, I spent the whole of my school dinner money for a week on a brand new team (team 3 - blue and white striped shirts/white shorts) from a school friend and nearly starved in the process. But even they suffered fractured limbs on my floor field so it was with much relief that I was allowed access to a table top and soon the casualty rate fell dramatically.

At this time I felt flush enough to buy another team - number 6 (gold shirts/black shorts) representing my local team, Watford and then team number 40 (claret and sky blue striped shirts/white shorts) before I gave up the game due to old age. But guess what? The latter two teams turned up in the back of a cupboard recently and they are in their original boxes and in perfect condition. A quick look on ebay suggests that I may have something valuable on my hands. Ha! And my mother thought I was wasting my money – again.