Nearly Reach the Sky (15 page)

‘Only went for a burger, he only went for a burger,’ was the greeting from the travelling claret and blue support as our Brummie friend took his seat.

A burger, you will notice. Not a steak pie. Which just goes to show the first thing on the menu that pops into the typical football supporter’s mind doesn’t come wrapped in pastry but is generally found between two slices of some form of bread (for me it’s a bacon sandwich – the Great Dane – if I’m in Priory Road). Case proven, I think you will agree.

Perhaps it will all be different at the OS. If the proponents of the move are to be believed, this will be the promised land offering a
half time of fine dining and service with a smile. The queues, sir? Ha-ha, we don’t have those here – they are so E13. This is Stratford.

Come to think of it, I won’t be sorry to leave queuing behind. And I suppose if I want a bit more live entertainment on the pitch at half time it’s only right I learn to live with some theatrical traditions in the stand as well. Did you know that at the theatre it is possible to pre-order half-time drinks even before the play has kicked off? They leave them on a table in the bar with your name on them. And when you go to get them at the interval they are still there!

They also give you a bit of warning that the second half is about to begin so you can return to your seat in plenty of time. Gadzooks, is that the two-minute bell already? Excuse me while I polish off the last of this dry sherry – I’d hate to be late back and annoy the rest of the audience.

However, if the Olympic Stadium is to be a theatre, please don’t use an old theatrical expression to wish someone good luck before they go out and perform. Knowing West Ham’s luck, tell one of our players to break a leg and they probably will.

A
S I SAT
outside the Neasden branch of Tesco sipping my second can of Carlingsberg Extra Stripe and feasting on a sandwich stuffed with sausage, egg and what was almost certainly bacon, I was supremely confident that nothing could ruin my day.

We had just beaten Blackpool in the play-off final at Wembley and, while my plan to find a welcoming pub away from the ground and sink a few celebratory pints had gone awry, I was looking forward to getting home, ordering a curry, opening a bottle of red and watching the game all over again – safe in the knowledge that Blackpool squandered their chances before Ricardo Vaz
Tê smashed the ball into the roof of the net in the eighty-sixth minute to put us back in the Premier League.

Two hours later the wine was poured, the ruby was on its way and I was sitting expectantly in front of the TV, aching to relive the ecstasy of our glorious afternoon in the sunshine. What could possibly spoil that?

I will tell you what spoiled that. Chelsea – the team I detest like no other – won the Champions League. And I was forced to watch them do it to appease my son who, although a claret and blue loyalist, was adamant we had to watch the biggest club game of the season before replaying our own triumph. Anyway, he insisted, Chelsea would lose to Bayern Munich, making our own victory that much sweeter when we watched it on Sky Plus. Only Chelski didn’t lose, did they? And to make matters worse they dragged it out into extra time and a penalty shoot-out before they picked up the trophy that made them, if only for one season, the best side in Europe. (Geoff now insists that we had to watch the game live because there was no room left on the Sky box due to the number of
Columbo
episodes I had recorded – but, as the world’s greatest fictional detective would undoubtedly prove if given the chance, there is no truth in that whatsoever.)

For me Chelsea’s triumph was harder to swallow than the dead rodent found by the unfortunate Katie Crabtree in her Tesco sandwich some weeks before I bought mine. (According to Ms Crabtree, who was expecting chicken and bacon rather than chicken and a small furry animal, she bit into something that ‘was black and had hair’.) But that’s Chelsea for you. Just when you think they can’t depress you any more than they already have, they go and do just that.

Those of you with grey hair and long memories will remember that back in 1970 Chelsea played Don Revie’s Leeds in the FA Cup final. It was one of those games I really wanted both sides to lose. As a naive thirteen-year-old who went to a school where most of the kids supported Chelsea I tried to convince myself after the first encounter at Wembley was drawn that they would slug it out for a couple of months in replay after replay, then the authorities would call the whole thing off with neither team being awarded the Cup because England had more pressing matters in Mexico that summer. But those hopes were dashed when the west London outfit won the second game at Old Trafford.

Had my wish of a never-ending Cup final been fulfilled Chelsea keeper Peter Bonetti wouldn’t have been in goal for the national side and made the fateful blunders that turned a 2–0 lead over West Germany into a stomach-wrenching 3–2 World Cup quarter-final defeat. That all came about because England’s real No. 1 – the matchless Gordon Banks – was stricken with food poisoning (which undoubtedly had nothing to do with a Tesco sandwich because in those days the supermarket chain didn’t have an Express store in Leon). Had we won that game we’d have surely beaten Italy in the semi and given the world the encounter everyone wanted to see – a re-match of Pelé versus Bobby Moore in an England–Brazil final.

Where was I? (You’d be surprised how quickly Memory Lane turns into Alzheimer’s Avenue when you get to my age.) Ah yes, Chelsea.

There was a time when the club I loathe and the one I love were evenly matched. Take the game at Stamford Bridge in the World Cup-winning year of ’66. Chelsea 5 West Ham 5 – you don’t get
more evenly matched than that. But that same year, in the Russian city of Ukhta, Mr and Mrs Abramovich were digging out their best bottle of vodka to celebrate the birth of their son, and we all know how he went on to tip the balance of power.

The day I celebrated my fifteenth wedding anniversary – 1 July 2003 – Abramovich founded his unholy Roman empire at Chelsea (we got a babysitter and had a nice meal out in one of Brighton’s many excellent restaurants – thanks for asking). As all romantics will know, this was our crystal wedding anniversary. Fortunately no one gave us a crystal ball as a present; had they done so and enabled me to see what the immediate future held for us, in comparison with the newly formed legions of glory hunters at Stamford Bridge, I would have probably jumped off the end of the Palace Pier (don’t ever let anyone tell you it’s called Brighton Pier).

By this time, West Ham had been under the tender care of one Terence Brown for a little over a decade. Brown, the chairman and majority shareholder, effectively owned the club but it’s fair to say he wasn’t getting a lot of thanks from his ungrateful flock on the terraces. To be honest, Terry was despised by most supporters.

He became chairman after West Ham were relegated in May 1992. His first year at the helm saw us win promotion under Billy Bonds, but it meant we had missed the debut season of the new Premier League. As this is when the modern era in English football is generally considered to have begun it is an obvious starting point to compare the latter-day fortunes of two clubs originally separated by ten miles and now distanced by several billion pounds and an entire football culture.

In ’93/94, our first season back in the big time, we finished thirteenth, with Chelsea fourteenth in what was now the FA
Carling Premiership. At the start of the ’94/95 season, in which four teams would be relegated as part of the process of slimming down the top division from twenty-two teams to twenty, Brown gave Bonds the tin tack. Bonzo’s assistant Harry Redknapp was promoted to the managerial hot seat made vacant by the unseemly departure of his best mate, but H shrugged off the controversy that surrounded the move and steered us to fourteenth – three places behind Chelsea. The following year he got us to tenth, with Chelsea eleventh.

After that, Redknapp never managed to finish above Chelsea, but during his time in charge the gap was never more than nine places – and that came in the season that saw Brown lose patience with his garrulous manager after a fearsome row about the transfer kitty and replace him with the rather more tight-lipped Glenn Roeder who, in his first season, took us to seventh place – just one behind Chelsea.

In all, West Ham and Chelsea were in the Premiership for ten seasons before we vanished through the trapdoor once more. Of the twenty League games between us we won nine, Chelsea eight and there were three draws. Pretty even-steven, I’d say.

The 2002/03 season will haunt the West Ham supporters who were forced to live through it ’til the end of their days.

It had begun with such promise. We’d had three players in the England squad at the World Cup in Japan and South Korea. The side was a nice balance of experience (James, Sinclair, Kanoute) and youthful brilliance (Cole, Carrick, Defoe). We had captured the mighty Gary Breen after he’d starred for the Republic of Ireland in the Far East. We had a young manager with fresh ideas. And we had Paolo Di Canio. Too good to go down? We were destined for a place in Europe!

The reality turned out to be rather different. It would be wrong to pin the blame on Roeder for everything that went wrong that year, and we are all delighted he recovered from the terrible brain tumour that struck him down minutes after the Middlesbrough game had finished. But he does have to shoulder his share of the responsibility for the shambles that was on display week in, week out.

There were a lot of games from that season I’d like to forget. One particular encounter that I would pay a competent psychiatrist good money to have scrubbed from my memory is the débâcle against Leeds at Upton Park one Sunday afternoon in November.

They had earned themselves a place in Europe by finishing fifth the year before (we were seventh, remember), but had just been knocked out of the League Cup and were struggling in the Prem. Manager Terry Venables, like the hapless Roeder, was under mounting pressure. One newspaper dubbed this game the P45 derby.

If we were going to start the long climb out of the relegation zone and drag Leeds down into the mire with us this would have been as good a place as any to start. However, as a rule, teams rarely improve their League position by conceding four goals in the first half.

The booing started long before Leeds got their fourth. They opened the scoring with their first attack after eleven minutes as Ian Pearce made himself look a chump by misjudging a hopeful punt from their keeper that led to a cross which left David James no chance with the header that followed. We pulled one back through Di Canio, who nipped in to reap the benefits of a shot from Michael Carrick that was only partially saved and rebounded to the ever-alert Italian. Then we chose to re-enact the ancient Japanese ritual
of hara-kiri (which is not to be confused with Harry Kewell, who scored twice for Leeds that day).

Tomas Repka was having a dream of a game, only it was the sort of dream that ends with a screaming fit and a pool of icy perspiration in which the tormented soul who’s having it is left to quiver with fear at the horrors that have just been dredged up from the deepest, darkest levels of the subconscious mind. When he wasn’t kicking Leeds players he was failing to mark them in our penalty area. To say he went missing doesn’t even begin to cover it. He was having a long weekend when they scored their second from a corner and had gone on a full-blown sabbatical when they volleyed home their third. He was lucky not to be subbed before half time.

The fourth goal, in stoppage time, was just too much to bear for hundreds of West Ham supporters, who headed for the exit rather than take any more of this cruel and unusual punishment (only it wasn’t so unusual that season). Christian Dailly failed to notice one of Leeds’ chunkier strikers as he attempted a back-pass to James, and the Australian with a surname that sounds like an unpleasant foot complaint charged down the attempted clearance before rolling the ball into an unguarded net. Try enjoying a pie and a pint at half time after that.

We did stage something of a fight-back in the second half but, as with everything else we did that season, it was too little, too late. Like so many of the fans, Repka didn’t come back after the break. Di Canio did though, and won a penalty which he then converted. The masked Trevor Sinclair, who had somehow managed to break his face in circumstances I can no longer recall and was wearing a protective device that made him look like a bug-eyed monster, then gave us hope – the cruellest of all the emotions, as West Ham
fan John Cleese observed in the film
Clockwise
– by scoring with a quarter of an hour left, and Pearce would have salvaged a point in injury time if his header had been on target.

The scoreline flattered West Ham – 3–4 doesn’t sound so bad if you say it quick. And it spared Roeder the humiliation of being called into Terry Brown’s office and getting his marching orders. I was pleased about that in a way.

I recall arguing with a bloke I knew that, given time, good old Glenn would get it right. What’s more, I pointed out with some pride, he was a really decent fella who conducted each post-match interview with dignity and gravitas. ‘Get shot of him or he’ll get you relegated,’ grunted my acquaintance, who clearly had more football acumen than I gave him credit for. You can probably guess which club he supported. The fact he had to store his blue flag where the sun don’t shine for a couple of games as we did the double over his team proved to be of little consolation as he was proved right and we slipped out of what was now the Barclaycard Premiership – albeit with dignity, gravitas and a record points total for a side relegated from the top flight.

Que sera, sera
, whatever will be, will be. Yes, we really were going to Grimsby. (Only we weren’t, as it turned out – they went down the relegation snake too.)

Now, while you all take a moment or two to ponder the mystery of how a collection of so many top-quality players could contrive to finish in the bottom three (ours, not Grimsby’s), I will use the time to slip on my bullet-proof vest and a hard hat before writing the next sentence. I believe Terry Brown saved West Ham from total disaster after we were relegated in 2003.

Yes, that’s the same Terry Brown who presided over the ill-fated
bond scheme, under which incredulous supporters were asked to part with the thick end of £1,000 for the privilege of being allowed to buy a ticket. Yep, honestly – I’m talking about the much-maligned £1.2 million-a-year Terry Brown, who later left the club with a ticking timebomb by agreeing the Tevez and Mascherano deal with Kia Joorabchian, and then walked away with £33.4 million after selling us to an Icelandic businessman whose financial affairs smelled worse than a beached trawler full of rotting cod. So, we’re clear about this: I am defending Terry Brown, whose worst offence in the eyes of many fans was to fence West Ham’s crown jewels after we were relegated. Guilty as charged, Your Honour. But at least he sold them for decent money rather than letting them go at criminally low prices.

Brown held his nerve when a fire sale looked inevitable. The signs were ominous when Lee Bowyer and Les Ferdinand were allowed to leave on free transfers almost immediately the season had ended. The pressure to offload highly paid players who would actually fetch some cash was enormous – and it grew day by day as managers who knew we needed to sell bombarded Brown with requests for the likes of Cole, Carrick and Defoe.

The crucial deal was the sale of Glen Johnson to Chelsea for £6 million halfway through July. It was the first signing they made under Abramovich. Yes, we all knew the boy had bags of potential but he was still an unknown quantity in terms of top-flight football. In short, Chelsea were prepared to take a punt – and Brown made sure they paid top dollar.