Get Her Off the Pitch! (8 page)

At this stage of my professional sports writing, I never questioned my instructions. My editors would say, ‘We think you should see Wolverhampton v Port Vale at Molineux next Saturday.' And I'd say, ‘Okey dokey. That sounds like an old-established ground.' And they'd say, ‘Yes, it does, doesn't it? But in fact it's quite big and new, and it's even got big screens, and we think you'll have a field day.' It seemed to me that it was all experience, you see. I had no way of knowing whether a game would be good or not, so I didn't try. And, until you've actually been to Molineux (say), you can't possibly know that a game at Wolverhampton on a wet Saturday against Port Vale operates precisely like the Dementors in the
Harry Potter
books, sucking all the hope out of you by means of a stringy black cyclone coming out of your face, and leaving you afterwards a mere crumpled husk of gibbering despair. So I always said ‘Okey dokey': to trips to Blackburn Rovers, Nottingham Forest, Liverpool, Bristol City, Coventry, Leicester, Aston Villa and so on. I would set off at dawn from Brighton, to allow plenty of time for getting lost (stadiums are rarely signposted), and for figuring out a way to leave the car somewhere unpleasant, unlit and dangerous
in the surrounding streets, guarded by enterprising junior extortionists who charged you £5 to let you walk away alive. Such logistical issues loom large in the life of sports writers, I'm afraid. By the end of my first season, someone might tell me innocently that they saw the game of the bloody century at White Hart Lane, and I wouldn't enquire about match details: instead, I'd say, hysterically, ‘White Hart Lane? On Tottenham High Road? Where did you park? Where the
fuck
did you park?'

Anyway, I mention all this naïve okey-dokeyness because, on my way to Old Trafford for the semi-final of the
FA
Cup between Chesterfield and Middlesbrough, it suddenly occurred to me, somewhere on the M6, that I might have drawn the short straw. Hang on, I thought. Two hundred miles back down the road, at Highbury, the other semi-final was taking place between Wimbledon and Chelsea. Damn. That could be a great match! True, I'd seen Middlesbrough a couple of times in the season (once in March at their magnificent Riverside Stadium, where they beat Derby in a Premiership match by a spectacular 6-1), but I'd formed all sorts of attachments to both the London teams which would surely make their semi-final the right one for me to see. For the first time in my sports writer career (but not the last), I actually felt quite hard done by. Why was I driving all the way to Manchester to see Middlesbrough demolish itsy-bitsy Chesterfield, a Second-Division Derbyshire side who should never, by rights, have got this far in the competition? I knew only three things about Chesterfield: Tony Benn was its mp for a very long time; it had a church with a curiously wonky spire; and it was where the sofas came from. Evidently
25,000 Chesterfield fans were making for Old Trafford today, leaving the town virtually deserted. It occurred to me that a visit to Chesterfield on this semi-final day might be a much more interesting proposition than covering the match. The population is only about 70,000 at the best of times. Imagine those empty streets. Imagine the poor lame lonely Derbyshire-accented child left behind because he couldn't keep up with the fans racing for the buses (I was thinking of
The Pied Piper
here). And above all, imagine the enormous opportunity for criminal chesterfield-rustling while the entire populace was elsewhere: out-of-town desperadoes herding thousands of deeply-studded, highbacked leather sofas, mooing and slipping, into the backs of vans.

What I hadn't really noticed, despite reading nothing but footie journalism for the past six months, was that Chesterfield's Cup run had been one of the most romantic Roy-of-the-Rovers affairs. The Spireites (nickname of Chesterfield) had conceded only two goals along the way to this semi-final, and had beaten Bury, Scarborough, Bristol City, Bolton Wanderers, Nottingham Forest and Wrexham. The fifth-round 1-0 victory over Forest had been a particularly glorious and notable occasion, at Chesterfield's small home ground, Saltergate: referee David Elleray had sent off Forest's goalkeeper for rugby-tackling a Chesterfield player. Blimey. There had been a red card, a burst of protest, and a firmly pointed arm. Unsurprisingly, passions ran very high indeed. In particular, Stuart Pearce (player-manager of Forest) was seriously peeved, despite the clear justice involved. Tom Curtis then scored elegantly with the ensuing penalty - for which there was a substitute
goalkeeper, you will be relieved to hear, but only a rather dazed one who probably wished he hadn't got up that morning. I rattle off these names now, don't I? But when I perused the programme before the match, none of the Chesterfield personnel meant anything to me. No, no, never heard of any of them. There was a Jamie Hewitt listed, which briefly piqued my interest. Was this the notorious love rat who broke the heart of Princess Diana? On balance, given that he played in defence for Chesterfield, probably not.

One thing I had learned over the course of the season was that you can never trust a programme, in any case. I still always bought them, but I was wary. The team listed on the back is never the team that plays, which is fair enough, since selection tends to take place quite late in the day. But there is an additional sod's law applying to football programmes, called The Curse of the Programme Overtaken by Events, by which the player featured on the cover will almost certainly be crying with pain on a treatment table on the day of the match; if he gets a double-page feature, moreover, he will probably have either already left the club under a terrible cloud, or died. The programme for England's appalling World Cup qualifier against Italy in February had illustrated the point pretty well: the cover showed David Seaman diving for a save (this was the night weedy Ian Walker, as next-choice goalkeeper, became one of the most reviled men in England); inside were features on Paul Gascoigne and Gianluca Vialli (neither of whom played) and on that overoptimistic World Cup bid ‘England 2006' (which was never going to happen). The only time I experienced an exception
to The Curse of the Programme Overtaken by Events was at a twice-postponed third-round Cup tie between Brentford and Manchester City at Griffin Park. True, by the time the match was played, only five of Man City's original line-up were playing (and most had changed numbers). But a wonderful thing had happened. Players who got personal write-ups for the original date (but hadn't played) were actually fit again when the day finally arrived. One of them had even recovered from a broken leg. I found that incredibly cheering. Wait long enough in life, you see, and it all comes right. It reminded me of Lewis Carroll's excellent philosophical point about a stopped clock being better than a slow one, because twice in every 24 hours, it tells the right time.

Back at Old Trafford, though, I am neglecting the prematch atmosphere, which was sensational. This was my first time inside this stadium (at that date it held over 55,000), and I loved it. My immediate surroundings I wasn't too keen on, as they were dominated by a small, violently fanatical Middlesbrough child supporter determined to poke me in the eye with his red flag; but the ‘Blue army! Blue army!' chanting from the Chesterfield supporters was very uplifting. Blue-and-white face paint, blue-and-white curly wigs, blue-and-white shirts, loads and loads of blue-and-white balloons: gosh, someone in the Spireites' club shop had really risen to the occasion kitting this lot out. It did occur to me that the whole contingent of 25,000 could not really call themselves hardcore regulars, incidentally, since Saltergate holds fewer than 9,000 - but then I realised that this was what made them all so happy: these were johnny-come-lately, fancy-free,
over-excited fans (a bit like me supporting England at Euro 96) who had known only glory, success, and the fluke-ish sending-off of other people's goalkeepers. They were programmed for joyous victory, because it was all they had known. Any other result was beyond their comprehension.

Compare the grim, tense and punch-drunk emotions of the Middlesbrough fans who had seen their team get to the late stages of both the
FA
Cup and the Coca-Cola Cup this year, but were at the same time facing relegation from the Premiership. ‘If you love Boro, stand up!' was significantly the chant of the day, because it exhorted the fans not to lie down on the ground in a foetal position, moaning and sobbing. The previous Sunday, a last-minute equaliser from Leicester's Emile Heskey in the Coca-Cola Cup final had meant there would have to be a replay - which was, in itself, pretty demoralising. However, much worse was the fact that Middlesbrough had been penalised earlier in the year for not turning up for a match against Blackburn. Evidently, manager Bryan Robson hadn't given sufficient warning, or adequate reason (or something), and the upshot was, three points had been taken away. Now, having been to Blackburn myself, I personally didn't blame Robson for not wanting to go, but the Football Association saw it differently, and never reconsidered its position, despite a lot of pleading, sulking and threatening. Fans had been seething for months about the deduction of the three points, which would prove to seal their fate. When the time came for a line to be drawn under the 17th team in the table, three clubs would wave a reluctant goodbye and drop through the trapdoor down to Division One - and Middlesbrough was at No. 19.

As for Middlesbrough's high-profile fancy-dan players, the honeymoon period had long been over, on both sides. More foreign players had been brought in - the Italian Gianluca Festa, and the Slovakian Vladimir Kinder - but the policy had started to look a bit desperate. Ravanelli's problems with scoring were beginning to grate with any number of people (‘Why can't Ravanelli find the goal?' I harrumphed, one week. ‘No one moves it, do they?'). Meanwhile the saga of Emerson's repeated attempts at escape from Middlesbrough was a more-or-less constant source of hilarity to anyone unconnected to his employers. The twinkle-toed, raven-ringletted midfielder had the lightness and grace of a Gene Kelly, and there was a lovely shot of him in the
Match of the Day
opening titles doing a fond kissy-kissy at the camera - but this warm-blooded young black man kept flying down to Rio and neglecting to come back.

His preference for Brazil probably had something to do with the contrasting number of sunshine hours of Teesside and South America, but no one knew for sure. Anyway, ‘Emerson goes awol' seemed to be the story every couple of weeks, especially in the grey depths of the winter. His fellow Brazilian Juninho was another matter, however. Totally committed, totally tireless, he flogged his heart out for Middlesbrough - and the more he did, the more tragic his situation appeared. The great Marc Overmars (who would join Arsenal just a couple of months later) had the same keen, doggy quality, I always thought. Throw a ball whatever distance and he would apparently really enjoy tearing off after it on all fours with his ears flapping behind him.

What a build-up. What an occasion. Both sides had so much to win, so much to lose. ‘Blue army, blue army, blue army!' chanted the ecstatic Spireite supporters. Or, to be more precise, ‘Blwami, blwami, blwami.' It occurred to me that, should Chesterfield meet Chelsea in the final, the meeting would have to be called a ‘blwamiad', and the two sets of fans would have to agree in advance not to chant the same thing. But at this stage, the idea of Chesterfield winning this match was absurdly far-fetched. Great occasions do not generally go with great football games, unfortunately; usually the reverse. This was so fabulous and uplifting an occasion that I braced myself for the inevitable let-down once play commenced. Middlesbrough would probably score two in the first half, then kill the game. The Chesterfield balloons would gradually deflate. The tackling would get desperate and nasty. The boy with the flag would either successfully take my eye out or get the clip round the ear he was asking for. Tempers would fray. And I would pass out through lack of anything to eat since breakfast and also through fretting about the safety of the car, which was doubtless already wheel-less, before kickoff, resting on bricks with its engine removed.

But it was the highlight of my year, that semi-final. I had not drawn the short straw. If football does not obey the laws of entertainment, the point is that sometimes, gloriously, a great story writes itself right there in front of you on a piece of historic turf with an enormous number of interested people present - and you really know it when you see it.

The first half was notable at the outset mainly for its gusto, and for the pleasant surprise of Chesterfield's
classiness in defence and downright nerve in attack. This was clearly going to be a free-flowing and dynamic game, with accurate long balls and intelligent strategies on both sides (as opposed to most football, on most days). Annoyingly, Chesterfield's shirts didn't have the players' names on, but apart from that, it was easy to see what was going on. A clear shot from Middlesbrough's Craig Hignett was blocked and caught by goalkeeper Billy Mercer (big groans; big cheers); another shot by Steve Vickers went wide. Meanwhile, Chesterfield's forwards seemed to make easy work of out-running Middlesbrough's defenders - to the evident frustration of Vladimir Kinder, who got booked for a late tackle, and then, just minutes later, committed a gross act of shirt-pulling in plain view of the entire crowd. The whistle blew, and referee David Elleray raced towards him with his hand in his top pocket. ‘Hasn't Kinder already been booked?' I asked, unable to believe my eyes. ‘Yes, he has,' said the fan beside me - and sure enough, oh blimey, Elleray showed Kinder a second yellow card, then a red one, and sent him off. Middlesbrough quickly reorganised themselves, with the ineffectual Mikkel Beck taken off and a new defender, Clayton Blackmore, brought on as a substitute. But this was a situation. It is not unknown for ten men to outplay eleven, of course; but nobody opts for that ratio voluntarily, especially in the semi-final of the
FA
Cup, unless they are raving mad.