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*******!”

Not So Sweet 16

This coming springtime my step daughter turns 16 and recently we had the inevitable request put to us:

“Can I have a party please!?”

Oh how the memories came flooding back about my own 16^th birthday party…

There will likely be a few people reading this who were present and will also remember that Saturday night back in October 1991.

I was on a swing in Easthill Park, Portslade late one summer’s evening, when I first thought that having a party would be the greatest idea ever. This of course was back in the days when mid teens actually went to the park to speak to their friends and hang out rather than have a relationship with them via their phone. In fact I don’t think I knew anyone who owned a mobile phone in 1991 apart from Derek Trotter.

So I sat there swinging away (in my shellsuit), mulling it over with a few mates at dusk and mentally working out a guest list. I recall one of the girls present stating that the main ‘rules’ ought to be a ‘ban on jelly and ice-cream’ and ‘no parents allowed’, because after all, we didn’t want it to be a kids party. So I slept on it before asking my parents the next day about what my chances were.

Amazingly they agreed to it! The only proviso being that the maximum amount of guests didn’t exceed 40 people.

I genuinely couldn’t believe my luck and knocked up my invite list, which was actually quite hard to do as I ended up having to omit some decent people, but I didn’t want to push my luck with the numbers, so out of fairness I stuck with the 40 allowed.

Ahead of the event, my Dad made the calligraphic invites, and as I was working on the day of the party, my Mum decorated the house with photos of the younger me and banners etc as well as laying out a brilliant spread of party food (no jelly and ice cream)

And true to their word, my parents and younger brother left me to it at about 630pm and toodled round to my grandparents on the other side of the Valley in Portslade and said they’d be back at approximately 1am.

I waited in great anticipation, in my new one-size-too-small red panel Chipie jeans… 

 …naively thinking that if 30 people showed up it would be pretty good going.

When I did a head count at 10pm, there were well over one hundred people!

In my genuine ignorance, I clearly hadn’t considered at all that there would be ANY gate crashers, let alone literally dozens of extra people turning up. Thankfully I knew most of them, but there were plenty of new faces too – including a Brighton & Hove Albion youth team footballer briefly.

Basically I got scared. I couldn’t control any of it and spent the night praying that the house didn’t get destroyed or set fire to! As it happened I suppose it wasn’t TOO bad really, but it felt terrifying right in the middle of it, and I guess in the era now of ‘Armageddon Facebook parties’ it could have been a lot, lot worse. Some events of note that caused me angst on the night stick in the memory though:

• The downstairs toilet getting blocked – so a neighbours pathway was used as an alternative
• The garden got flattened
• The vacuum cleaner being hurled down the stairs (and skilfully caught)
• The settee being completely caved in
• Various spots of blood
• Cigarette butts embedded in the carpets
• Dozens of beer bottles hurled into the neighbouring school field, and neighbours gardens
• Various videos and cassettes stolen 
• ...and of course, the next door neighbour’s derelict untaxed Volkswagen Beetle having its roof caved in:

I’m well aware of various other shenanigans that took place but it’s fair to say that there’s intentionally no names mentioned at all in this ‘before the watershed’ blog for many good reasons!

Back to the party (yes there was still a party going on), and there were, on occasion, quite a few minutes when I wasn’t actually hiding. Bless her, the same girl who had suggested a ban on jelly and ice cream offered to dance with me at one point as she could see I was suffering and not really having a good time! Just beforehand, one of the less bright attendees had suggested we put his cassette on to change the music. He said “you won’t need to turn the volume up Bez, as it’s automatically loud”. Okay then.

To my sadness, the majority of my best friends left relatively early for one reason or another. I really couldn’t blame them though, and I suspect I would have done the same as it felt the whole event was increasingly getting out of hand at times, especially when someone asked if there was a rear exit to the house because he thought he was about to be beaten up. Unluckily for him, the only exit was the entrance as we lived at the far end of a cul-de-sac. The poor lad legged it for his life as three other guys tore through the house, trying to attack him. Thankfully he got away safely.

And to put a cherry on top of my night, my parents came home an hour early at around midnight and surveyed the mess. The majority of people had gone by then, but a few wisely started to leave as my Dad was being told about the redesigned VW car roof by the understandably disgruntled neighbour.

The police were called, but so far as I recall they didn’t pursue any complaints made by the neighbours. My Dad promptly issued a warning/threat to all the remaining people that he would never allow any of them across his ‘threshold’ again. It took all the strength in me to stifle a chuckle when a soft lone voice replied on behalf of the group shuffling off: “Sorry mister!”

The next day though, Dad kindly offered invites to come back to half a dozen of my mates who had copped that rollocking at the end of the night. He graciously said sorry to them as I explained to him that they hadn’t deserved it.

Oddly enough I never got told off for it. I suppose my parents felt I’d learned my lesson by the shock and enormity of what had gone on. I spent most of the next morning tidying up, and a couple of friends very kindly came by to check on my welfare.

My brother returned home from my grandparents and claimed he had heard the party from the other side of the hill. And “what was that lingering smell everywhere in the house?”

He was also annoyed that people had been in his bedroom, which had rightfully been out of bounds.

*refer to earlier mention of shenanigans…

Pretty soon my parents were quite relaxed about it all – though Mum was peeved that most of the food she’d made had barely been eaten as someone had poured booze over it all... chicken vodka-vents are not nice!

It was probably no coincidence that the entire downstairs was redecorated within three months.

In truth barely a handful of people had really caused any aggro – it just so happened that too many people came, and I couldn’t be omnipresent in protecting the house. Even the majority of people I hadn’t invited were actually good as gold and gave me no problems. In fact the hardest thing I personally had to keep on doing was to persuade the smokers to smoke outside.

Overall it was a peculiar event. As a result of the mess and damage, my poor brother wasn’t allowed a 16^th party himself, but for me personally the most annoying thing was that I simply wasn’t able to enjoy the night at all.

Additionally, my confidence took its own little dance too. I guess amongst my school friends, I was always thought of as being quiet and unlikely to indulge in such an event that had just taken place, so my confidence rose slightly as it became quite a talked about event at school, and as a strange consequence my credibility also improved a touch. However I felt in other ways my confidence was absolutely shot as I knew I had ultimately lost all control of what was going on. Bizarrely I think it affected me for years as some aspects of my shyness came back with a vengeance.

I think I am able to laugh about it now though thankfully!

“Ha ha! *cough*”

So dare we answer in the affirmative to “Can I have a party please!?”…

Would you?