Nearly Reach the Sky (18 page)

My fondest memory of a televised West Ham game overseas is the 2005 play-off final against Preston North End. This time we’d taken the family to America. France, we felt, had been given every chance to impress by then and had failed to deliver. It was time to give someone else a shot.

After the events of the previous year I really wanted to avoid the play-offs. In the 2004 final, West Ham froze at the Millennium Stadium and blew the chance of an instant return to the Premier League by losing 1–0 to Crystal Palace. I’d had the sniff of a ticket in the Palace end, but I didn’t fancy it that much. So, as we couldn’t get tickets for all the family, we watched the game on television. That’s how I know witnessing a crushing defeat on TV can hurt just as much as if you were there in person. That particular loss
cast a massive shadow over my entire summer – and I know every West Ham supporter felt exactly the same way no matter whether they were in the ground or saw it on the box.

In the event, I was glad to make the 2005 play-offs. Hopes of automatic promotion had vanished long before the final fixture of the season at Upton Park. In fact it was our opponents, Sunderland, who secured the Coca-Cola Football League title that night after coming from behind to win 2–1 in front of the biggest home crowd of the campaign. As Geoff and I trudged back to the car and the inevitable first-gear crawl to escape the back streets of East Ham it looked as if the chance to haul ourselves out of the quicksand of second-tier football had gone for another year.

That was a Friday night. The following day, Wolves did us a massive favour by surprising everyone and beating Reading, our rivals for sixth place. On the final Sunday of the regular season we capitalised on that by winning at Watford while Reading lost to Wigan – enabling us to sneak into the play-offs. It was through the back door admittedly – but we were there.

Our opponents in the semi-finals, as they had been the previous year, were Ipswich. This time we were at home in the first game, but we couldn’t get to Upton Park because friends were getting married and we had been invited to their wedding. We couldn’t watch it live on TV either – the game, which kicked off at the ridiculously early hour of 12.15, coincided with the ceremony. So thank you, Guglielmo Marconi, for taking the time and trouble to invent radio all those years ago. There can’t be a football supporter in the world who hasn’t had cause to be grateful to you over the years, just as we were that day.

Along with the rest of the congregation, we witnessed our friends declare their undying love for one another and shared their joy. But tucked towards the back of the register office my son and I also managed to share a set of headphones and experience some private joy of our own as Marlon Harewood and Bobby Zamora put us 2–0 up in the first quarter of an hour. A Jimmy Walker own goal and a late equaliser rather took the gloss off things, but by then I had handed my half of the earpiece back to Geoff and was enjoying the reception.

On balance, I wouldn’t recommend listening to a football match while you are at a wedding. It takes a good deal of self-control to restrain yourself to a silent fist-pump when your team scores. It would be all too easy to forget where you are and jump to your feet with a celebratory ‘Yes!’ at news of a goal. As my son pointed out at the time – showing, if you’ll forgive a certain amount of parental pride here, a remarkably well developed sense of humour for a thirteen-year-old – that would be most unfortunate if it coincided with the traditional question of whether anyone knows of a good reason why this man and woman should not be joined together in the holy state of matrimony.

Zamora scored twice in the second leg at Portman Road to ensure West Ham were going back to Cardiff. The Williams family, however, were going to the Gulf Coast of Florida. But before we went my brilliant wife had tracked down a bar in the sleepy little resort where we were due to stay which was promising to show the game live. You can see why I married this woman: ask yourself, would your wife go to all the trouble of ensuring the holiday itinerary included a televised football match? It took some doing as well. The internet was in its infancy then – we didn’t have
broadband in 2005 – and it really was no mean feat to locate somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic that was accessible from our beach-side apartment which was going to televise a game of English soccerball.

We stayed in a place called Clearwater Beach which, it turns out, is something of a favourite with Tom Cruise. A lifetime of working in journalism has made me cautious about grandiose claims, so I was sceptical when the nearby diner showed me a written testimonial from Top Gun Tom claiming the establishment served the best pizza he had ever eaten. It seemed a long way for him to have gone for a quattro stagioni – Hollywood is well over 2,000 miles from Florida. Later we discovered that the adjacent town of Clearwater is home to Scientology, which explained Tom’s trip east. It is tempting to be rather scathing about a wacky religious cult that reckons the galactic ruler Xenu visited Earth in a spaceship 75 million years ago, but you’ll hear no word of criticism from me. Who am I to judge others’ beliefs? I believe West Ham will reach a European final again one day.

The bar Di had pinpointed was called The Big Ben British Pub and it has a special place in our family history. For us it was a 10 a.m. kickoff – but for once nobody was complaining about getting up early. We were in front of the telly with time to spare.

Geoff recalls much of the day better than I do. ‘It was probably the first time I got a sense that West Ham really was a big club,’ he told me.

And the opposition? ‘There was a little table with two Preston fans on it and, obviously, they were pretty quiet throughout the whole thing.’

My son, of course, is some years older now than he was then. ‘As a computer scientist I tend to pride myself on my logical reasoning,’ he says. So?

Looking back, Geoff thinks the early start was a good thing.

Personally, I’m not so sure. Defeat would have been disastrous for West Ham. The parachute payments that come with relegation from the Prem were about to run out and financial ruin beckoned. A drink would have settled my nerves, but 10 a.m. is a bit early – even for a journalist. As I sipped my orange juice I tried to put
the thought from my mind: lose this game and we are looking at years in the wilderness of lower-league football.

My extremely sober friend and erstwhile colleague Matt Scott reckoned my disquiet was unfounded. In his match report for
The
Guardian
he wrote:

One of those set-plays nearly brought Preston a goal at the start of the second half; Newton had to clear off the line to prevent us going behind. We hit back immediately – Zamora should have
scored from the rebound after Nash could only parry a Harewood shot. Then came the moment we had all been dreaming of.

Over to you, Matt: ‘With a looping ball, Zamora put Etherington down the left wing. His pace took him past Mawene and, as Claude Davis slipped, his cross allowed Zamora to hook in his fourth goal in three play-off games.’
When the ball hits the net like a fucking rocket, that’s Zamora!
(For the avoidance of doubt I should point out the italicised bit is mine, not Matt’s.) The bastardised version of ‘That’s Amore’ – admittedly more popular with Zamora’s adoring Brighton fans than us – flashed into my mind, but I didn’t sing it. There were children present. But it’s fair to say that we West Ham fans gathered in a quiet corner of the Sunshine State did our bit to celebrate that oh-so-precious goal in the manner befitting.

Matt’s report makes it sound as if West Ham played out the rest of the game in relative ease, but it didn’t appear that way from where we were sitting. Especially when Walker handled outside the area, twisting his knee so badly in the process he had to be carried off and replaced by substitute keeper Stephen Bywater – whose first job was to deal with the resultant free kick.

I think the way Geoff felt at the time reflected the way many Hammers saw things: ‘It was a real heart-in-the-mouth moment. I thought that if he saves this we’ll be all right – if it goes in, we’ll lose. They’ll go on and get another one.’

Bywater did save it. But Walker’s injury meant seven minutes of added-on time. Seven minutes! No one should have to endure that in a play-off final – there ought to be something in the Geneva Convention to prevent torture of that kind.

One minute gone: We’re still winning.

Two minutes: They’re pressing, but we’re holding on.

Three minutes: I really can’t take much more of this.

Four minutes: The bloody transmission has gone down!

There was a collective groan, but no one spoke after that. All we could do was look at one another in dumbfounded silence. How could this have happened at such a crucial point in our lives? This was unbearable!

The screen seemed to be blank for an eternity. Then, just as most of us were reaching breaking point, the picture came back. ‘There was a close-up of Nigel Reo-Coker and he was looking around as if everything had gone pear-shaped,’ Geoff recalls. I remember a shot of white-shirted Preston players running towards one another as if to celebrate a goal. They’d clearly equalised – I felt sick to the stomach. ‘Then they panned out and it turned out it was only a throw-in,’ Geoff reminds me before I have another fit of the cold sweats over what might have been.

Then the final whistle went, and that was that. Throughout the bar the West Ham fans celebrated in their different ways – some jubilantly; others, like me, sat quietly for a moment or two, savouring the ecstasy of the moment. Geoff jumped off his barstool, punching the air. ‘There was a low ceiling and I got a fistful of lightbulb,’ he says.

It was early afternoon when we left the dimly lit, air-conditioned pub. The Florida warmth and dazzling sunshine came as a real shock as we stepped outside. It seemed so incongruous after being totally immersed in a football match all morning.

‘After the game we went back to the apartment,’ says Geoff. ‘There was nothing else to do but relive the goal over and over again. I remember sitting by the pool in thirty degrees of heat and asking myself, could this day get any better?’

The answer, my son, is no, it can’t. Tuck that one away in the memory bank and don’t lose it. Supporting West Ham, you’ll need to remind yourself of the sunny days from time to time.

A
FTER THE BULLDOZERS
have razed Upton Park to the ground the builders will move in and start work on what has been dubbed the East End ‘village’ – a development of 700 homes, shops, underground parking and a landscaped garden dedicated to the memory of Bobby Moore.

Clearly no memorial park worthy of the name would be complete without a statue of the person being remembered, which is why sculptor-to-the-stars Frances Segelman has been commissioned to create an effigy of Moore, which – if she stays true to form – will be cast in bronze. While she’s at it she’s been asked to knock up various other bits of artwork celebrating the heritage of the club to be scattered around the new ‘village’. Chances are, there’ll be statues of a few other famous players for residents to admire as well.

There was a time when, rather than gazing at sculptures of West Ham heroes in E13, you could rub shoulders with the people themselves.

Bobby Moore once held open the door of a shop in the Barking Road for the girl I would one day marry. It was the stationer’s Davidson Back, and Di had barely started secondary school. But the captain of West Ham and England, probably the most recognisable man in the country, still found time to smile and confess that it was his pleasure when she thanked him for the courtesy.

It’s hard to imagine a living god buying his own stationery, and my wife admits to being somewhat taken aback at the time. But it’s not as if she only ever saw West Ham players on match days. When she was growing up in East Ham she lived two streets away from the fabulous Ronnie Boyce, whose family ran the local corner grocery store.

It is Boyce who has had more to do with me supporting West Ham than anyone else alive or dead. He scored twice in the 1964 FA Cup semi-final against Manchester United, which set the ball rolling for me. It was after this game, which West Ham won 3–1, that the kids at school started talking about who they wanted to win the final itself – and I found myself in a minority of one in leaning towards the Hammers.

It turned out that Sid had gone to Hillsborough for this momentous match. He had supported West Ham since he was a boy but, apparently, this was his first away game. Curiously, his final away game was to be an FA Cup semi-final as well – twenty-seven years later at Villa Park.

Although Sid was more than happy to take Di to Upton Park he felt that, being only eight, she was too young for the rigours of
a trip to Sheffield and the hassle that goes with being in a crowd of 65,000 people. But he did take Rosie, the eldest of his three daughters.

Days like that are engraved on the memory for a lifetime. Rosie, aged just fourteen at the time, recalls getting up in the dark to catch the Lacey’s coach that took them to the game, the ham sandwiches on the way, her first impressions of Sheffield (‘I had never been north of London’), the optimism on the journey there, the ecstasy of the goals, the joy on the way home, the singing, the incessant rain, and the fish and chips when they got back to East Ham.

Of course you never forget moments like those: ‘I had spent a wonderful day with the man I loved most in the world, my dad, watching the triumph,’ says Rosie. It doesn’t get much better than that.

As a father myself I can see why Sid decided not to take his younger daughters. It would have meant carting around with him all the paraphernalia that is involved in travelling with small children. And, in my father-in-law’s case, the equipment would have included a four-legged claret and blue stool he had made for his girls to stand on so they could see what was going on whenever he took them to a game. Di, Rosie and Linda – the middle sister – all used it at one time or another. Sid bequeathed that stool to Geoff when he was a lad. Being 6 ft 3 he doesn’t use it much these days – but he wouldn’t swap it for the town hall clock. Not even if the council begged him.

Boyce justified my initial faith in West Ham United by scoring the winner at Wembley. I have occasionally asked myself if my life would have turned out differently had he not nodded home Peter Brabrook’s cross in the dying seconds. If West Ham had lost
against Preston North End, would I still have supported them for the rest of my days?

I hate the thought that I might have been tempted by another club; the best outcome would have been for me to have turned my back on football completely and shown more of an interest in my dad’s mechanical tinkerings under the family’s Vauxhall Victor on a Saturday afternoon. That way I would have certainly saved myself a lifetime of mental torment. And I could well have also saved myself a small fortune in garage bills every time a car of mine developed the slightest fault. Ah well,
que sera, sera.

The FA Cup team that Boyce was part of was a real oddity by today’s standards. The player born furthest from Upton Park was Geoff Hurst, who took his first breath in the Lancashire town of Ashton-under-Lyne – which is not to be confused with Staffordshire’s Newcastle-under-Lyme nor, crucially, the Northumbrian conurbation of Newcastle upon Tyne where, if you can master the language, you will find it far easier to get a bottle of brown ale, a ferry to Stavanger and chlamydia.

But be warned. Should you find yourself in a pub quiz and you’re asked the question, ‘In which year did West Ham become the last team to win an FA Cup final with a team comprised entirely of players born in England?’, do not jump in with 1964. The correct answer is 1975, when we did it again.

The idea of players living among the fans who support them is one that still appeals to me. I love the thought of walking into the original Cassetaris café in the Barking Road and seeing the likes of Bobby Moore, Malcolm Allison and Ken Brown sitting unostentatiously in the corner sipping mugs of tea and devising new strategies using the nippy salt and pepper pots to outwit a
lumbering Sarson’s vinegar bottle. These days you feel there is more chance of bumping into a Premier League player outside a glitzy nightclub, where the only contact will be either him lighting your cigarette with a £50 note or sticking one on you for making an inappropriate remark about his girlfriend, who is wearing only slightly more than the last time you saw her on Page 3 of a tabloid newspaper.

It’s hard to see how players can truly understand the values of their supporters when, rather than live next door to them, they prefer a luxury flat in the fashionable part of town or a gated mansion in the wealthy suburbs where the security personnel will set the guard dogs on you given half a chance.

I can’t envisage many of today’s squad shopping for their one-pound fish in Queens Market. There are exceptions, of course. Mark Noble, I understand, is no stranger to Goodmayes furniture shop in the Barking Road, run by my wife’s cousin’s ex-husband (while I don’t know Mark personally, I feel a connection through my wife’s cousin’s ex-husband means he’s almost family). And, to be fair, many of the players do get involved in community work and visit local schools from time to time – but that’s not quite the same as finding yourself in a neighbourhood pub surrounded by four large dockers who wish to point out that your performance was a tad below par on Saturday and you need to pull your socks up. (OK, I know there are no dockers any more, but you get my point.)

The one place a supporter can communicate with the players directly is at the ground during a game. At least it is if you can get close enough to the idle layabouts to let them know what you really think as, yet again, they fail to track back and give the man they are supposed to be marking a clear run on goal. That’s one of
the many things that worries me about going to the Olympic Stadium. I may have to buy a megaphone.

Communication is not always easy inside a football stadium. The Stadio San Paolo in Naples is one of those grounds where you and the players are separated by a running track – at least it was when Di and I went there shortly after Italia ’90 to watch Maradona and his mates take on Pisa. Our problem was not so much my difficulty in letting the cheating Argentine know exactly what I thought of him (I reconsidered that course of action when I realised precisely how much he was worshipped by the Neapolitan crowd that surrounded us); the trouble was explaining to those in the neighbouring seats what we were doing there in the first place.

As a spectator you go to a football match to watch others, not be watched yourself. But that was what was happening to us. It was most unnerving.

Visit somewhere like the Nou Camp in Barcelona and no one bats an eyelid that an out-of-towner such as yourself fancies taking in a game while they are there. But Naples isn’t Barcelona. They don’t get passers-by dropping in very often. And when they do, people are curious about why you’d want to watch their unfashionable football team.

The bloke sitting to my left clearly decided early in the piece that, as I obviously wasn’t from Naples, I must be there to support Pisa. Actually, he had a point. I love the small, sophisticated city of Pisa with its Leaning Tower and Piazza dei Miracoli – Di and I once had the best meal we’ve ever eaten there – and my original thought was to cheer for the away side. That went the same way as my planned critique of Maradona when I gauged the nature of the home crowd. Naples is to Italy what the East End is to the rest of
London – and it turns out both sets of poor relations are equally intense when it comes to football.

The fella sitting next to Di was considerably more welcoming than the guy occupying the seat adjacent to me. He spoke no English and Di’s Italian didn’t quite run to explaining that, for us, being on holiday meant taking in as much of an area as is possible in the time available and, as supporters ourselves, a football match is just as much part of the cultural experience as marvelling at the breath-taking views over the Bay of Naples or visiting the astonishing ruins of Pompeii. So he got his ten-year-old son who’d just started learning English at school to interpret.

I’m not convinced we got our message across in its entirety. But we learned he was a baker. And he’d heard of Bobby Moore.

My man, who was considerably younger and looked a good deal meaner than Signor Bunn the Panettiere, clearly wasn’t convinced that my reasons for being there were thoroughly legitimate. In fact, I got the distinct impression he wanted to arrange for me to slip on a pair of cement shoes and take a nap with the fishes.

I tried to put his mind at rest by applauding Napoli at all the appropriate moments, and cheered like a local when Maradona put them ahead from the penalty spot shortly before the interval. He relaxed somewhat and half time was a good deal less tense than it might have been otherwise.

The tension returned in the second half when Pisa equalised just after the hour. Napoli were reigning champions – the previous year Maradona had practically single-handedly won them their first title in ages – but they had started the new season badly. They needed to beat lowly Pisa.

Napoli really went for it, creating chance after chance – missing
them all. We were all standing on our seats. The support was fantastic. But my neighbour was not a happy man. Then the brilliant Brazilian Careca received the ball with his back to goal, shimmied, turned, and unleashed an unstoppable shot that had goal written all over it. The bar was still vibrating when we instinctively turned to one another, both equally astonished that the ball had hit the woodwork and not flown into the back of the net. We couldn’t speak a word of one another’s language, but the expression on his face needed no translation. It was the universal look of the supporter who knows the fates are maliciously conspiring against him. I felt his pain – and he knew that I understood. In that moment we communicated silently as if we were twin brothers with a telepathic link.

The stadium erupted when Careca grabbed the winner in the final minute. Me and my new best friend hugged each other as if we had known each other for years. Again the language barrier came between us and I may have misunderstood what he said, but I think I might have been made an honorary member of the Cosa Nostra as the final whistle sounded.

Alongside Maradona and Careca in the Napoli squad was a young man called Gianfranco Zola. Little did I know at the time that, some eighteen years later, he would become the manager at Upton Park.

Despite his Chelsea connections, I had high hopes of Zola at the beginning – and it was all smiles in his debut game in charge as we had our wicked way with Newcastle and turned them over 3–1. Everyone remembers their first game but not many remember their last. I don’t suppose my daughter Katie does either, but this was it. She was thirteen and decided football wasn’t for her.
Knowing my daughter as I do, I can’t see her changing her mind now it’s made up.

The first couple of goals came from Zola’s fellow Italian David Di Michele and there were memories of Naples as the chant went up: ‘2–0 to the Mafia.’ I’m guessing the Bobby Moore Lower didn’t know I was a Man of Honour.

It was a different story eighteen months later when we put in one of the worst performances I have ever seen at Upton Park – and that really is saying something. It was a relegation battle against Wolves, and we were shockingly awful as we lost by the same score we had won Zola’s first game at the helm. All the flair and promise of the previous season had gone – we were a shambles with no heart, no pride and no idea how to combat a side which, like us, was struggling to maintain its Premier League status.

There was no shortage of communication between the crowd, the players and the manager that night – mainly on the lines of ‘You’re not fit to wear the shirt,’ and: ‘Sacked in the morning – you’re getting sacked in the morning.’ In the event, Zola hung on to his job until two days after the end of the season, and West Ham hung on to a place in the top flight … just. (It took the tactical genius of another Chelsea legend, Avram Grant, to get us relegated the following year.)

That night, Geoff and I got a lift back to Brighton with our friend and neighbour Mike, a true romantic who many years ago chose the Denmark Arms to propose marriage to the lovely Jacqui over a packet of salt ’n’ vinegar crisps. As anyone who has ever tried it can testify, getting away from Upton Park by car after a game is never easy – although it’s rather less anarchic than leaving the Stadio San Paolo, which is akin to stock car racing on the public highway. The mood in Mike’s car was grim on the journey
home – made more so by the fact we’d had to cross the river at Blackfriars and then endure a slow crawl in the south London traffic because the Blackwall Tunnel was closed. (Tate & Lyle’s riverside plant near the southern end of the tunnel was demolished the following year, but I swear I can still detect a hint of the once all-pervasive stench of industrial sugar whenever I drive past.)