Falling Into Football

It’s fair to say that my two main hobbies / interests are music and football. Plenty of my blogs have delved into my music tastes, so maybe it’s about time to talk football.

I didn’t really grow up having a direct football influence in my house. My parents have never been into football so by default it was never on TV, save a handful of times as I recall my Dad watching the occasional England Vs Scotland clash, probably due to a sense of patriotic duty.

Nor did I ever really play much football as a child, as I just wasn’t that good, and liable to break into a fit of nervous giggles whenever I actually got passed the ball… though I did get better as I got older and proudly even scored one solitary goal for the school team in a mini tournament when I was about 13. In fact it was a bit like Lineker's first in this clip!
No really!

The only occasions I got anywhere near close to football exposure was via my grandparents – both of whom loved the game. My paternal Grandad was a Tottenham fan (even though he came from south of the River), and his father before him had been a dyed in the wool Fulham fan. My maternal Grandad was a Brighton & Hove Albion season ticket holder, but nothing really drew my attention too much to the sport whilst I was young. Not even the 1983 FA Cup final when my local team Brighton, in unlikely circumstances, actually took Manchester United to a replay before succumbing to defeat. I do recall watching both games, but really I was just a seven year old boy supporting Brighton for geographical reasons rather than actually knowing much about it.

So the tide didn’t turn until I was ten and a half years old, and around about May 1986.

We had a school project running about a month before the Mexico ’86 World Cup and we were allocated teams to write about in ‘news bulletins’.
As I wasn’t particularly fussed about football I just went with the flow, and along with a couple of other girls in the class, I was asked to adopt Scotland. 

Were Scotland any good? I really didn’t know!

I do remember hearing that England had beaten West Germany in a pre-tournament friendly (whatever that meant) so maybe this was a good thing?

As the tournament started I remember learning that England had lost their first game, and then drew the next and was on the verge of going out of the tournament early. ‘So what!?’ I thought. I hadn't watched either England game, or any of the other matches so far – I was just so totally nonchalant about it all.

And then a strange thing happened which I still can’t fathom out to this day. On June 11^th I went to bed as normal – probably around 9pm, but got woken up by my Dad at about 1030pm. My Dad – generally a loather of football and all that was associated with it – woke me up and said:

“Come downstairs and watch the football, England are two nil up!”

I really only went down because it was an excuse to be up late, but as I got downstairs, some guy called Lineker banged in his third goal and England – or we the nation as I instantly now felt – were three nil up! 

Why my Dad brought me downstairs I just don’t know, and I’m sure he doesn't know either, but watching that goal and the second half of the game got me solidly involved with football hook, line and sinker, and I never looked back. It really was just like a switch that someone had turned on. 

England had two more games at that tournament before being knocked out in the cruellest of fashions. The Maradona ‘Hand of God’ goal was hard to take for a young child naïve to the ways of fair play (or lack of it) in football.

Diego Maradona made me cry about football for the first time (though not the last) and I couldn’t understand how such a thing could have been allowed to happen. I’m sure it wasn’t corruption on behalf of the officials, though it was highly incompetent officiating for them ALL to miss such a blatant aspect of cheating.
Maradona was the classic flawed genius whose misdemeanours caught up with him in time; other such talents followed suit in the years to come as England were denied a greater impact on the world stage without the fully realised potential of (for example) Paul Gascoigne, largely due to injuries.

One thing I learnt very early on though in my football education is that there’s one thing you can guarantee from the beautiful game: Football will continuously let you down.

Anyway, I digress.

The tricky thing about getting into football during a World Cup is that I had to learn quickly who these England players actually played for and I quickly wanted a club to support. Whilst I knew very soon that Brighton & Hove Albion was to be my team, it wasn’t out of favouritism for one of my Grandads’ over the other – in fact I still hold a soft spot for Tottenham in memory of my Spurs supporting Grandad – plus my son’s great great Grandfather had actually been a Spurs player.
Add into this I really admired Glenn Hoddle and Chris Waddle during the World Cup, and they were / are absolute Spurs legends.

Mullet-tastic

My Dad’s Mum was from Islington, which likely explains why his only soft spot for any club football team was Arsenal. Regardless, I was born in Brighton, so I proudly opted to support my local team.

The football season couldn’t start soon enough and my brain soon started soaking up stats like they were going out of fashion. In fact I would suspect this is where my OCD started. I was playing catch up with my friends who had been into football for years and I just had to get my knowledge factually correct or they’d cut me down in a second – because let’s face it, kids can be cruel that way!

During that first full season, I became deeply immersed with it all, culminating in attending my first proper football match ever with my Grandad on April 10^th 1987.

The Goldstone Ground

Brighton and Hove Albion Vs Crystal Palace was a local derby with deadly historic rivalry and I sat in the West Stand at the well loved, but run down Goldstone Ground on the Old Shoreham Road / Newtown Road to see us win 2-0. It was a terrific day and set the grounding for my desire to follow ‘The Albion’ forever, even though we were relegated that season!

That aside, it was largely good experiences in my football journey in those early years, but it wasn’t always wonderful.
Yes, I’d been upset about how Maradona cheated England out of the 1986 World Cup, but that feeling was nothing when compared to watching fellow football fans die on the television. Merely watching the Hillsborough tragedy unfold in 1989 was devastatingly awful, so it's impossible to comprehend how those directly involved must have felt - and still feel. I remember watching the presenter of Grandstand (Bob Wilson) trying desperately to keep it together. He was getting so choked up and I was on the verge of doing the same.

You can’t really go and research to see what it was like through recorded video footage (not that I’d recommend it anyway), because huge amounts of coverage were never broadcast on television or elsewhere again, such were the graphic images being shown. At the time, British football fans had a reputation (rightly or wrongly) of hooliganism, but this wasn’t the same scenario. The outpouring of emotion and grief at this tragedy was heart wrenching and it literally made people ill. I had absolutely no connection with Liverpool Football Club, but I had every connection with the fans as I was one of them. I could have been one of them; a football fan dying on a terrace. This is why the plight of the families directly involved was so enduring in the years that followed.

Tremendously, campaigns were fought and eventually won in helping justice prevail over the circumstances of that particular event, but in the initial aftermath, all fans could do was to pray for common sense and changes so that it might never happen again. It started the slow but sure alteration of how football was perceived and run in this country, which was has been good in many, many ways. It’s fair though to say that in 2015 football has nearly become as elitist sport in the eyes of many, but if part of those changes mean that lives are never lost again at a football match, then maybe that's the right way to go.

I try to detach from the financial side of what football has become, as at the end of the day, I just want to go and watch my local team with my family, whether they are successful or not - but possibly over time football has changed to the degree that the peoples' game has been taken away from many of the people for better or for worse.

I appreciate the highs in football so much because I know that the lows are more frequent, and being a Brighton fan maybe highlights this more than some other clubs! Football for me over the years has gone from being fun and frivolous, to being tense and escapist. That’s fine, because you keep going for the handful of moments that are frankly beyond emotive description.

Even now, aged 39, I still get asked “Why!? Why do you love football – what is it about it that is so good?”

Well I’ll leave the final comment on that, to the broadcaster (and Millwall fan) Danny Baker, who whilst commenting on Manchester City winning the league in literally the last couple of SECONDS of the 2011/12 season, captured the overriding and all too infrequent feeling of all football fans everywhere in one short sound bite :

“Football! F****** football! Imagine not being into it. Those poor, poor half-alive b*******!”