Get Her Off the Pitch! (7 page)

At 4.30 in the afternoon, a small team of German men in white boiler suits, four on each side, shouldered the nose ropes and solemnly walked our lighter-than-air dirigible to its launch position. It was a heart-stoppingly dignified operation. I felt there should be some Bach playing, and that they should be wearing powdered wigs. Then they let go of the ropes, Corky started the engine, and we lifted off. The instruments of an airship turn out to resemble
those of H.G. Wells's time machine - a bicycle wheel for a rudder; cotton reels on bits of string for adjusting the mixture of gases; pedals for something or other (presumably not brakes). Reassuringly, however, Corky had state-of-the-art headphones with radio contact to air traffic control, and at no point took them off in order to change into a Phileas Fogg top hat.

‘Move about if you like!' he shouted to us over the engine noise. ‘Open windows!' I discovered that I felt instant nausea if I looked at the ropes hanging from the unseen canopy's nose in the middle distance - so I sensibly stopped doing it. The aforementioned pitching and rolling, as we made our way north-east, then north above such landmarks as Epsom, Croydon and Wimbledon, made moving about quite difficult, but we survived quite well in the circumstances, with our stomachs knocking against our ribs. An astonishing number of houses had identically-shaped swimming pools, by the way: if you were a swimming-pool salesman with the Surrey concession, the view would have made you very proud. Anyway, Susan firmly declined the chocky cake, but was otherwise
OK
, as was the photographer (who found the chocky cake very acceptable). Evidently a
TV
puppet called Otis the Aardvark had been copiously sick on a previous flight, which we all found completely hilarious.

We could see Wembley from miles away. There is a wonderful Dickensian passage at the beginning of Patrick Hamilton's novel
The Slaves of Solitude
describing wartime London as a great, breathing monster, sucking thousands of tiny people in through all the train terminals in the morning, and breathing them out again at the end of
the day. This passage came to mind as we arrived over the great white stadium, which was drawing people towards it from far and wide on this light summer evening. Why doesn't
TV
use more aerial shots? It's such a missed opportunity. Of course, such shots would be easier to achieve if the airships could be stationary - which they can't: they have to keep circling, circling, circling, circling, otherwise they die, like sharks. But the view is phenomenal: 75,000 people assembling in one place for a sporting contest is a grand sight. The grass is incredibly green. The fans are (in this case) a beautiful white and a beautiful orange. Thousands of individual camera flashes make the scene sparkle. Once play starts, the 20 free-flowing outfield players spread and converge restlessly, like droplets of mercury being tipped about on a mirror - or like droplets of mercury all in mindful pursuit of a moving ball, anyway.

We were told we were flying at around 1,000 feet, but I don't know whether that was true. We could open the windows and lean out; we could see the players not quite well enough to identify them individually. And of course we had to keep re-orientating ourselves because of the non-stop circling. England are playing left to right. No, hang on, England are playing right to left. No, I was right the first time: England are playing left to right. But when the ball was destined to fly into the net (as it was four times for England in the course of that astonishing evening), seeing it from directly above was the best view you could possibly have.

What people tend to overlook about that generally well-remembered England-Netherlands match, actually, is how nice and varied the goals were for anyone watching
from overhead. First, there was the penalty in the first half - which helpfully got us used to the sight of a white ball punching into the back of a white net and dancing there. A chap in white (Paul Ince, as it turned out) appeared to trip on the edge of the penalty box, and play was suspended. Players stood back to watch while another chap in white (Alan Shearer, as we later learned, courtesy of the pager) placed the ball on the spot. Up in the airship, we were bloody excited. Above the roar of the engine, we could hear the cheering from the stadium - but, truly, only just. It was like watching through the wrong end of a telescope. There was a run-up; the ball was smacked into the corner of the net, and the jubilant little ant-sized player ran off at top speed while we danced about in our little gondola, and Corky made his mind up to stay for the second half - which was a relief, as his instructions had been to leave Wembley at half time and get us back to Woking before dark.

The rest of the first half was highly absorbing, by which I really mean unbearable. The Dutch kept getting corners; players increasingly smacked into one another on purpose; the daylight started to give way to floodlight; cameras flashed; the score remained 1-0. Chocky cake was no longer of interest. The only thing that mattered was the puzzle of how to get that ball from one end to the other, using only white players, and finally knocking it past the chap guarding the net. Tactics were wonderfully clear from the air: you could see how a goal attempt was made; how a defence could be divided and defeated. The picture that eventually appeared with my piece, incidentally, was one of the first taken that night - about an hour before the
match even started. It was in black and white, and showed the stadium half-full. The novelty was that the photographer was sending his pictures digitally from the airship via his computer and mobile phone, which was pioneer technology in 1996. The battery on his computer allowed him to send about three pictures before it ran down. It was such a shame. The picture did nothing to capture the thrill of being in a small but very airy room with a view of that glowing arena surrounded by eerily deserted - and ever-darkening - parks and gardens and streets.

The three England goals in the second half were all as fabulous from an aerial perspective as I'm sure they were from the ground. The first came from a corner: Gascoigne (it turned out) delivering a high, high ball into the thick of the English heads in front of goal, and then - bang! It was in the net. Having no access to replays, we didn't quite believe what we'd seen; it was so very quick and efficient. But we heard the cheers, and then the pager told us it was Teddy Sheringham who'd scored, and it was now 2-0, and I explained to Susan why it was a nice thing that Sheringham had done it, as this was his first goal in the competition, and she patiently put up with this bizarre instant-expertise stuff because she could tell I was excited. By this time Corky was on borrowed time, and we knew it, but we kept very quiet as we didn't want to jog him out of the circling - which I ought to mention had momentously reversed direction at half time.

What of the third goal? Well, it was marvellous in, again, a different way. This one was all about (yes!) getting the ball from one end of the field to the other using only white players and resisting the temptation to just knock it
a long way forward and hope the right chap got to it first. It was a glorious bit of dynamic teamwork, magical to see, and it culminated in three attackers ranged in a line across the goal, with Gascoigne (as I now know) passing it immediately right to Sheringham; and then Sheringham tricking everyone by neatly side-footing it right again to Shearer, who had a clear shot at goal. Even the photographer started to get excited at this point. England had never beaten the Netherlands in any European Championships before, or in any World Cup either, apparently. The score now stood at 3-0, and we couldn't help wondering, if you dropped a piece of chocky cake onto the pitch from this height by way of celebration, what would happen? How soon would it reach terminal velocity? Would it disintegrate? Or maybe form itself into a perfect sphere, on the same physical principle used in the manufacture of lead-shot? Or, if it landed - whump! - on Dennis Bergkamp's head, could it possibly knock him out? After all, by the time the police could work out what had happened, we could be miles away, possibly over the Channel.

I will always be grateful to Corky that we saw the fourth England goal before we had to tear ourselves away that night. Again it was different; again it was beautiful, and somehow pre-ordained. A great surge from England culminated in the somewhat useless Darren Anderton taking a running shot at goal, which was deflected by the hapless Dutch keeper (Edwin van der Sar, whose name, at the time, meant nothing). The loose ball was picked up with lightning speed by Sheringham and there it was again - bam - back of the net, 4-0, glorious. Now we could hear the cheering, all right. But we really needed to get going,
as there is a quite sensible law about flying airships over London after dark, and we had to get back to Surrey rather sharpish. Corky put on an astonishing lick of speed, shooting us back across London, across the river, over Putney Heath and Richmond Park, down the A3. We were all exhausted but extremely happy as we watched the darkening - and somewhat misty - landscape pass beneath us, and realised with a certain alarm that we were keeping pace with cars on the A3 travelling at 50 miles an hour. But it had been magical. I found myself humming ‘Lift Up Your Hearts' for the first time since school, and waiting for the inevitable show of emotion from the pager, to see if it matched my own.

We landed back at Woking and were greeted by the chaps in boiler suits. When the engine was finally switched off, it was like having someone take a nail out of your head: for the next few days I was so sensitive to motor noise that I jumped in the air whenever the fridge started up. But what a great night to be converted - finally - to football. Three weeks earlier, I hadn't heard of Alan Shearer. Now I wanted to have his babies. Three weeks earlier, the mind-altering experiment had seemed quite harmless and (at worst) reversible. Now the damage was done. I had learned to cheer and grumble, love and loathe. During the England-Spain quarter-final a couple of days later, I stood there at Wembley wringing my hands in misery at how badly England played. ‘Why are you passing it to Gascoigne?' I yelled (he was on terrible, dozy form that day). ‘You might as well pass it to the cat, son! You might as well dig your own grave and jump in it!' England survived that quarter-final, although we all knew they didn't
deserve to. But the following Wednesday, when England lost on penalties to Germany in the semi-final, I was all the more blank with grief, all the more inconsolable. I felt that I had been with our boys, in some sort of spiritual, eternal way, through the extremes of thick and thin.

It was impossible to imagine how Euro 96 might have passed entirely over my head, had I never had that lunch with Keith and David. Might I have heard the news of England's defeat with complete unconcern? God knows. Plenty of my friends certainly took no notice of Euro 96 and were blithely unaffected by its outcome. All I know is that, on the morning after England-Germany, I slung the food into the cat bowls and went back to bed to stare at the ceiling. No light-hearted songs today, kitties. No bath-running or kettle-boiling during the sports bits at twenty-five past the hour, either. On the contrary: I turned up the volume for Garry Richardson and cried softly onto the pillow, while desperately figuring whether - if I rigged it up to the mains and stood in a bucket of water - I could use the pager to kill myself.

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:

1. the name of a club's ground
   
2. the name of the manager
   
3. the name of the chairman, and
   
4. the nickname
   

- 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.