Get Her Off the Pitch! (24 page)

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.