Nearly Reach the Sky (17 page)

Quite how we came by those colours is something of a mystery. There is a wonderful story that we acquired them from Aston Villa as a result of a bet but, sadly, there’s not a shred of evidence to support the tale.

This particular legend has it that a man named Bill Dove, who helped train the Thames Ironworks team and was the father of one of the better players, was at a fair in Birmingham when he was challenged to a foot race by four Villa lads who were there as well. What’s more, they wanted to have a few quid on the result.

Unfortunately for them, Bill was a top-class sprinter and romped home a clear winner. More unfortunate still, they didn’t have the cash to honour their debt – and no one took plastic in those days. Just as it was all on the point of turning ugly it transpired that one of the Villa boys was responsible for doing the club’s washing and he offered a complete set of kits by way of payment. The story goes he later told his incredulous bosses that the gear had mysteriously ‘gone missing’.

Remember historian John Simkin? He’s the man who poured cold water on the Pears soap association with ‘Bubbles’. He doesn’t believe the Bill Dove story either – but he reckons there might be an Aston Villa connection. He says: ‘They were the most successful club side during this period having won the League title five times in seven years. It has been argued that the Hammers might have adopted Villa’s colours partly to be associated with the success of the club.’

So when did West Ham first play in claret and blue? ‘The earliest photograph I have been able to find showing West Ham wearing today’s colours was taken on 16 January 1904,’ says John. ‘The game was against Plymouth Argyle at the Memorial Ground.’

And before that? ‘Thames Ironworks’ first match was a friendly against Royal Ordnance on 7 September 1895. The result was a 1–1 draw. I have been unable to discover any written documents that reveal the colours that the team played in. However, there is a
photograph taken in 1895 that shows the team wearing dark shirts and trousers. If we assume that Arnold Hills selected the colours, I would think that they played in dark blue. These were the colours of Oxford University, the team Hills represented in the Varsity Match and in the 1877 FA Cup final.

If only the Bill Dove story were true – there would be a delicious irony in receiving stolen goods from the Villains. Although in this case Aston Villa may not be the villains of piece – they could even be the heroes. Simkin says:

I guess we’ll never know.

You’d think that no shirt would be complete without a badge, but study the old photos and you’ll see that West Ham teams of the past often played without wearing one (a badge, not the shirt – this isn’t Newcastle). And when they did there was no castle. Early shirt badges merely had the two crossed hammers that represent our ship-building heritage. The highly stylised fortress which is supposed to be the Boleyn Castle didn’t appear until later.

The awesome website theyflysohigh, the brainchild of Steve Marsh, has a terrific display of photographs featuring various items sporting the club badge. ‘A castle was added to the official match day programmes from the start of the 1921/22 season,’ says Steve.

Interestingly, though, the first picture I can find anywhere of a shirt badge that includes the castle is taken at the 1964 FA Cup final against Preston.

The move to the Olympic Stadium has prompted another redesign and the Boleyn Castle has got the chop once more. In the
supporters’ poll that preceded this decision I suggested that on the new badge we replaced the castle with a wrecking ball, but nobody seemed very interested in that idea.

The revamped crest also includes the word ‘London’, which I guess is handy if at any time you forget where you are. But I can’t help thinking we’ve missed a trick here.

Rather than merely listing the name of England’s capital city, we could have given the badge an extra touch of class by adding a motto. If we’re going to be a superpower in European football as a result of taking up residency in such grand surroundings at Stratford we might as well have all the trimmings. Not that we have to waste a lot of time dreaming up one of our own – we can simply borrow someone else’s. It doesn’t matter much what it says, but it does have to be in Latin. It’s just not a proper motto otherwise.

There are a few to choose from. Tottenham go with
Audere est facere
(to dare is to do) but we don’t want anything from them, thank you very much. Man City’s motto is
Superbia in proelia
(pride in battle) while Everton’s is
Nil satis nisi optimum.
That translates roughly as ‘only the best is good enough’ – but for my generation those words will always be preceded by the line, ‘The Milky Bar Kid is strong and tough’, so it doesn’t quite fit the bill.

For Blackburn the way forward is
Arte et labore
– by skill and hard work – but look where that has got them; Bolton’s
Supera moras
(overcome delays) sounds as if it was created as an early radio traffic bulletin for anyone using the M6; and, despite the best efforts of several managers in its recent history, Sunderland still have some way to go
Consectatio excellentiae
– in pursuit of excellence.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Queen’s Park, the Scottish outfit whose home ground is Hampden Park even though they themselves
are amateurs. There’s nothing like thinking big in my book. Their motto,
Ludere causa ludendi
, means ‘to play for the sake of playing’ – and while that may not quite tie in with the club’s ethos of recent years, I reckon it sums up what West Ham are all about.

Incidentally, if there are any Jesuit scholars reading this who quibble with the Latin translations I suggest you take up the matter with my learned friend who provided them, Professor Vic E. Pedia.

As I say, I’m not a great one for replica kit. Admittedly I did buy the BAC away shirt before the Keith Hackett semi-final against Forest, but we all know what happened there. Needless to say I never wore it to another match – home or away.

On special occasions I dust off the Wembley 1980 commemorative number (it’s white with claret and blue trimming and a nicely understated FA Cup motif ). I was lucky enough to be at the Cup final against Arsenal. Looking back on that game it is apparent that replica shirts had yet to make their appearance in the stands. Back then we contented ourselves with scarves.

There’s a lot to be said for a scarf. They look fantastic when held aloft by massed ranks of supporters, they don’t cost the earth – and they keep you warm on a chilly winter’s afternoon.

Be honest, the replica shirt poses problems when the weather turns nasty, doesn’t it? There’s no point spending all that money and not displaying your expensive purchase, so you don’t want to wear it under a fleece. You either have to wear it on top of something else, which looks silly, or you go with just the shirt and freeze your bits off.

The scarf, unlike the replica shirt, can be displayed in all weathers – leaving no one in doubt which team you support. Although, as I discovered many years ago, that can sometimes cause problems.

My mum knitted my first West Ham scarf – alternate squares of the sacred claret and blue with tassely bits of wool at both ends. I loved it. Sadly, the other kids with whom I went to school didn’t – especially the ones who supported Chelsea. Things came to a head in the playground one day when some of these boys in blue tried to part me from my precious knitwear. But we all know these colours don’t run and I had no intention of giving them up (although I have to admit now it was not because I have ever been particularly brave – the truth is there was no way I was going home to face my mother without that scarf, which she had sweated over for hours).

I’m not going to exaggerate here – this wasn’t the Rumble in the Jungle. Nor was it the Thriller in Manila. This was the Tussle with the Tassels. Even so, with a couple of kids pulling one end and me desperately clinging on to the other the immediate future was looking decidedly bleak for my scarf.

My mum wasn’t the world’s most enthusiastic knitter (I’d had to beg for months before she got cracking with her needles) but she obviously knew what she was doing. As the tug-of-war became more intense it seemed inevitable her creation would come apart in our hands. Amazingly, it didn’t. But it did stretch. By the time my assailants lost interest that scarf was about 12 feet long. The squares, so carefully created, were no longer square – they were distinctly rectangular. However, they were still in my possession and now I had an item of clothing that I could wrap around more than just my neck. I could have mummified myself in it.

This was some years before Tom Baker became Doctor Who (I think it was Patrick Troughton at the time). But I did wonder in later years if one of the small crowd who had witnessed my rather undignified struggle had gone on to be something in the BBC’s
wardrobe department and convinced the producers that what a Time Lord really needed was a scarf as long as the District line.

Not that replica shirts were unheard of when I was kid. It was just that we used to wear them to play football rather than to watch it. Anyone who has seen Brian Glover live out his Bobby Charlton fantasy in the classic film
Kes
will have some idea what the pitch at our school looked like at the end of the ’60s.

Perhaps I was ahead of my time, but I wanted something that I could wear on all occasions that would demonstrate my undying love for West Ham United FC, so I persuaded my mum to find her knitting needles again. No – I didn’t ask for a bobble hat to match the scarf (I had my suspicions the Chelsea mob would try to do something with that which would not be to my advantage). Instead I talked her into making me a tank top in light blue with two claret hoops – our away colours at the time and a design which is still regarded as a classic by those with an eye for fashion. How classy is that!

There were three problems with my new pullover, however:

1 – We always lost when I wore it.

2 – The Arsenal boys who had hitherto left me alone joined the Chelsea lads in making fun of me.

3 – I outgrew it remarkably quickly.

That’s the trouble with teenage boys and their sleeveless jumpers: one grows and the other doesn’t. By the time I was fifteen I knew exactly how Dr Bruce Banner felt when he had one of his turns. (Not that I see myself as the Incredible Hulk, you understand; I never had his physique and the only time I’ve ever turned green is on a cross-Channel ferry.)

As a parent myself I do realise that it would be impossible to fob
off your kids with a bit of homemade knitwear these days. You’ve just got to smile bravely and visit the club shop knowing full well you are going to have to put your hand in your pocket.

However, if you are in that awkward position yourself you may like to use the following piece of football trivia as a way of recouping some of the outlay.

Wait until you on are on a long drive home from an away game and tell your travelling companions that the game which led to teams having to wear different colours in a match took place in 1890 when two sides confusingly turned out in red and white stripes. Be generous and inform them at no extra cost that the home team was Sunderland. (If you’re stuck in a traffic jam and really want to spin this story out you could add that when differing kits became compulsory in 1892 it was the home side which was compelled to change if there was a clash, a rule that was in place until 1921. I’ll leave that up to you.)

Providing your mates are still awake, you now raise the prospect of making this discussion more interesting by suggesting a small wager that no one can name the other side in red and white stripes at this historic encounter. Give them three guesses – the chances are they won’t come up with the right answer. It’s Wolves. Unless you’ve got a right clever dick in the car it’s got to be worth a punt that none of them will know that. Just don’t put your shirt on it. And if you do, make sure it hasn’t got a gigantic 13 on the back.

S
ECOND ONLY TO
the insult of ‘glory-hunter’, the greatest abuse you can heap on the head of a fellow supporter is to call them an ‘armchair fan’ – which is a bit harsh, really, seeing as most of us spend an awful lot of time sprawled over some part of the three-piece suite watching football on the telly.

The point of the barb, of course, is the suggestion that the recipient never actually goes to a match and therefore can’t feel the pain and the pleasure of true supporters, who regularly pay to go through the turnstiles. But, as we all know, watching your team lose can hurt every bit as much when it’s televised as when you’re there in person.

Winning, perhaps, isn’t quite as pleasurable. Jumping around the sitting room making loud guttural noises as you celebrate a
goal and startling the cat who had been dozing peacefully in the other chair cannot compare with the collective thrill of being part of a crowd that rises in unison to salute that sublime joy of the ball hitting the back of an opponent’s net. But it does ensure that the moggy gives you a wide berth for the rest of the day and pesters another family member when it requires feeding.

There was a time when live televised football was about as rare as a John Radford goal in West Ham colours (actually, that’s a bit unfair – nothing is as rare as a John Radford goal in West Ham colours). We got the Cup final and the occasional international, but not much else. What armchair fans did have, however, was
Match of the Day.

As with my West Ham love affair, it too can be traced back to 1964. The first game shown, in August of that year, was Liverpool v. Arsenal. Unfortunately for the home fans it was shown on BBC Two, which at that time was unavailable in much of the north of England. The television audience was estimated at just 20,000 – half the number of people who were inside the ground to watch the game live.

By 1969 the programme had moved to BBC One and in November it screened its first game in colour – West Ham at Anfield. One of the reasons later cited for the choice was the vivid contrast of the team strips: Liverpool in their traditional all-red; the Hammers in the classic light blue with two claret hoops. We’ll draw a veil over the result, but it was generally agreed among fashionistas that West Ham were simply gorgeous, darling.

Perhaps I’m being over-sensitive here but I don’t think
MOTD
likes West Ham very much. By my reckoning, unless we are playing one of the so-called big clubs, we seem to be last up every week.

I always preferred ITV’s
The Big Match
, which began in 1968 and was the perfect antidote to the Sunday lunchtime purgatory of
The Clitheroe Kid
and
The Navy Lark
which, as nippers, we were compelled to listen to as we sullenly chomped our way through cheap fatty lamb from New Zealand while our parents laughed like drains at the rubbish coming out of the radio.
The Big Match
went out on Sunday afternoon and it regularly showed West Ham as its main match.

These days we all record the matches we go to, allowing us to replay that wonder-goal or re-examine the dodgy offside decision over and over again when we get home. But, believe it or not, there was a time before video recorders when, if you missed a crucial moment at a game, you missed it for ever.
The Big Match
allowed you to lollop on the couch, let your roast dinner go down and relive the match you’d seen the day before.

What’s more, it boasted the wonderful Brian Moore as its principal commentator. Forget David Coleman and his ‘Lorimer, Bremner, Giles, Clarke … 1–0,’ routine – likewise Kenneth ‘they think it’s all over’ Wolstenholme. Brian Moore was to TV commentary what Bobby Moore was to football itself. Both had no equal.

The one time I watched a match from start to finish with my dad it was on television. West Ham weren’t playing but they were there in spirit, as my grandma used to say. This was the England World Cup team of 1982, managed by Ron Greenwood and starring Trevor Brooking (well, it would have starred Sir Trev if he hadn’t been laid low by an injury that kept him out of the side until the dying minutes of what turned out to be our final game in the tournament and his last as an England international).

Despite being in my mid-twenties I had accepted an invitation
from my parents to join them on a family holiday in the south of France. While we were there the World Cup finals were being held in Spain. England’s first group game was against the French and I had spied out a little bar with a TV that was going to show it. I had mentioned a couple of days beforehand that I would be watching the match so count me out of any family plans until England had concluded their business in Bilbao. I knew that no one would be surprised, but I didn’t expect anyone to be interested in joining me.

My dad had taken me to cricket on a number of occasions when I was a kid, but we’d never gone to football together. So I was astonished, on the day of the game, when he asked if he could come with me. I was highly suspicious about his motives, to be honest. He loved everything about France (including the French) and I thought there was every chance he planned to support Les Bleus. How wrong I turned out to be. (About as wrong, in fact, as he was at the first Test match he took me to at Lord’s and after first assuring me the weather was going to be glorious, therefore I needed no more than shorts and a tee-shirt, was then adamant that the rain which had started to fall was nothing but a shower and would stop soon. Several hours later, having traipsed around the sodden home of cricket wearing his oversized plastic pac-a-mac that trailed behind me through the puddles as I trailed behind him like a vulcanised Wee Willie Winkie, I realised, at a painfully early age, parents are far from infallible.)

In the bar I had reconnoitred earlier we nodded politely to the locals, ordered ourselves a couple of
pression
beers and found two seats towards the back of the packed room. It was clear the French were confident. It had been twelve years since England had been to the finals and our participation in these had been touch and go
at one stage. In the qualifying group we had only managed to finish as runners-up to Hungary, despite doing the double over the Magyars. In the away tie Trevor Brooking had scored twice, one of which was a bullet of a shot that was hit so hard it stuck in the top corner of the oddly designed Budapest goal-frame. But Brooking wasn’t fit to play against France, and neither was Kevin Keegan with whom he had formed a formidable strike partnership. The other half of the entente cordiale, however, were a decent side captained by Michel Platini and they had high hopes of going all the way in the tournament.

The anthems completed, England kicked off with every Frenchman for miles around surrounding me and my Francophile father fully expecting to avenge their humiliation at Agincourt 567 years beforehand. Twenty-seven seconds later it became clear they would have to wait a little longer. That’s how long it took Bryan Robson to score what was then the quickest goal in World Cup finals history after being given the freedom of their 6-yard box and hooking home a Terry Butcher flick-on. The French were stunned. But they weren’t as surprised as me at my dad’s reaction to the goal. He celebrated as if we’d just won the World Cup itself.

Never having been to a football match, he simply didn’t understand the etiquette required of an away supporter sitting among the home fans when your side takes the lead. (Nor, I suspect, did he appreciate the health and safety issues involved.) He thought that the French were all jolly nice people who would enjoy a good ribbing over something as trivial as a game of football. And he didn’t let up for the full ninety minutes. Fair play to my old man, he applauded sportingly when France equalised. But when Robson restored our lead in the second half he ripped
le piss
out of our hosts
even more mercilessly than he’d done before the interval. What’s more, he had the French to do it, having studied the language at night school for years. It was good to see that all that effort didn’t go to waste. Paul Mariner put the game to bed with seven minutes left, and the scrape of chairs on the tiled floor could be heard in Paris as the French contingent in the bar stood as one man to leave. I’ll never forget the delighted beam on my dad’s face as he peered through the Gauloise smog and wished them all au revoir. He hadn’t had as much fun in years.

Twenty years later I found myself on another family holiday in France, with children of my own. It was the back end of the school holidays – and the start of a new football season. Little did I know at the outset, but this too would be a campaign that featured Trevor Brooking – in circumstances that no one would have wished for.

Our first game that year was away at Newcastle. Always a tricky fixture, I know – yet one where I had high hopes. This time there was no bar showing the match, however. The part of rural France where we were staying had clearly failed to get the email telling it the entire world was fascinated by the English Premier League and it was their responsibility to keep visiting Brits fully up to speed about events on and off the pitch as they happened. I couldn’t even get a commentary on the car radio.

The Newcastle game was on a Monday night – and we weren’t due to go home until the following weekend. All I could do was imagine what was going on at St James’s Park while my family debated the pressing matter of whether we should go for second-rate pizza again or suffer in the silence of a provincial French restaurant that believes the mysterious parts of unidentifiable animals it serves up really constitutes the finest cuisine in the world.

The following day I persuaded my wife and kids to make the 20-mile trek to a reasonably large town on some false pretext I made up at the time which was really no more than a thinly disguised excuse to find a shop that sold English newspapers. And we found that shop! The only trouble was, the papers it was selling on the Tuesday were Sunday’s. It was clearly going to be some time before I got the result of our opening game of the season.

I’m not saying I spent the entire week fantasising about the match, but in the absence of concrete information I would occasionally lie back on a hard-won sunbed by the caravan park pool and allow my mind’s eye to picture a Joe Cole free kick crashing into the back of the Newcastle net, followed by a Jermain Defoe tap-in and a wonder save from David James. As I gave my imagination free rein it became obvious that Glenn Roeder really was the messiah we had been waiting for. (I would just like to make it plain at this point that never did I picture myself being called out of the crowd as a surprise substitute and snatching a hat-trick in the last minutes to turn a 2–0 deficit into a glorious away win – I admitted to myself a few years ago that is unlikely to happen now.)

As it turned out we’d lost 4–0. And had I known what the rest of the season had in store for us I probably would have stayed in France – the miserable food notwithstanding. Even those awful green beans they insist on serving with everything would have been more palatable than the prospect of Sir Trev, having taken over from the desperately ill Roeder, presiding over a forty-two-point relegation after coming within a hair’s breadth of avoiding the drop.

Now, of course, I wouldn’t have had to put myself through the agony of expectation. I could have witnessed the slaughter on Tyneside as it happened, courtesy of the internet and live streaming.

Thanks to the wonders of broadband it is possible to watch any Premier League game, no matter what time it is being played. As a UK citizen you cannot view a 3 p.m. Saturday kickoff live on television, but somebody somewhere in the world will be getting it beamed into their living room – and that transmission will, in turn, be streamed via the net.

True, reception isn’t always all that clever. Watching a streamed game can be very frustrating as the broadcast breaks up into a series of still shots that jump one to another at random intervals until the whole picture freezes and you’re left with the dilemma of quitting and trying to find a better stream or hanging on in the hope the one you’ve got will jump back into life.

Even when it doesn’t grind to halt, the picture quality has a certain jerkiness about it. It’s reminiscent of the flick-books we used to make as kids. What do you mean, you don’t remember flick-books? Don’t tell me you never took an exercise book and painstakingly drew a picture of a stick-man kicking a ball in the corner of each page – altering each illustration slightly so that when you folded them back and let the whole lot cascade off your thumb you got the animated effect of the ball going up in the air and back down again (or whistling into the Spurs net if you went to a little extra trouble with the drawings). Next you’ll be telling me you’ve never made a clothes-peg crossbow or a cotton-reel tank. It’s tragic that these old skills have been allowed to die. No wonder this country is going to the dogs.

The other problem with streaming is that there is a delay between what you are watching and when it actually happened. So if your wife is doing the washing up and listening to the radio at the same time (I still marvel at people who are able to multi-task) while you
are watching a game on the laptop she will know if West Ham have scored (or conceded) a good couple of minutes before you do. Which makes it particularly disconcerting when your significant other vacates the kitchen and joins you in the sitting room for no obvious reason. You try to read her face for clues as to whether you are about to be delighted or dismayed, but she has learned to remain impassive over the years. Don’t worry – you’ll know when the time is right.

Watching your team with fellow supporters on a television in a foreign bar is one of the great pleasures in life. At least it is if you support West Ham. I never fail to be amazed by the fact that wherever you go in the world the chances are you’ll not be the only one in claret and blue when the Hammers are on telly in some far-flung part of the planet. And, for a couple of hours at least, there’s a bond between otherwise disparate Irons who have been drawn together by the magnetism of our team, which is truly special.