I am 8. It is 6 May 1972. Allan Clarke just headed the only goal of the match to hand Leeds United the FA Cup against Arsenal. I run around the living room in celebration. My parents are unmoved – dad puts his paper down briefly. Then he put it back up again. Extravagant displays of emotion were reserved for Wimbledon. When Wimbledon was on the curtains would be drawn from 2pm as play commenced and our white, pedestal, Ferguson colour TV became the Holy Altar where tennis Heaven was served up for a full fortnight. But that wasn’t for another 7 weeks. In the meantime, Don Revie’s Leeds United lifted the only cup that mattered to me.
Clearly, this enthusiasm for Association Football needed an outlet. So four months later I am dropped at a boys’ preparatory boarding school for my first term – most of which will be spent outside on the wind lashed playing fields. This, it is felt, will fix my football fixation. The centre piece of my obsession is my Soccer Stars album, which I keep in a grey cardboard box in my tuck box. The grey cardboard box is my most secret place – where all the most precious things (a small Paddington Bear, a yellow and aquamarine felt pen case made by my mum, two Cadbury’s Aztec bars) in my world are kept. But the Crown Jewel was my complete page of the entire team of Leeds United stuck into my album. Every break, I went to the cardboard box, opened my Soccer Stars album and inhaled.
The glue you used to stick each player card into the album, well, you can’t get it now. It was probably banned because it was magical and addictive. In my 8 year old nostrils it smelt the same way as napalm did to Colonel Kilgore, the air cav commander played by Robert Duval in the film ‘Apocalypse Now’. It smelled of victory. Leeds’ glorious victory in that Wembley final. Sniffing glue at break time was recompense for being ripped from the family bosom and sent to Yorkshire’s juvenile Colditz. You have to grab comfort somewhere. The cold cure of Aysgarth school worked. A combination of damp scratchy, hooped woollen soccer jerseys and navy blue, knee length coarse woollen shorts four times a week put paid to my football addiction and turned my attention to bullying, fagging, being beaten and escape to fantasy as alternative recreations. Football died for me for nearly half a century.
Last weekend my son took me to the pub up the road to watch Leeds United’s debut back in the Premier League against Liverpool. It was 3-4 to Liverpool but Leeds came back from behind three times and gave notice (as they say in footballing circles) to the other teams that there was a dangerous old player back in town. An inventive, fearless, quick, fit, opportunistic player (with a lousy defence). It was lovely to savour the feeling of having white jerseys back on a first class pitch playing first class opposition. When I was young and we listened to the football results being read out on the radio, it was always Liverpool that did for Leeds – then in their pomp under the captaincy of Billy Bremner. It was always: “Leeds United 1…Liverpool (after what seemed an age),2.”All other teams fell to the Mighty Whites. But rarely, very rarely, did the reds from Anfield. These memories go deep and this match awakened them.
My son would not describe me as a die hard Leeds fan. In fact, I have pretty much gone to the same jaundiced perspective as my father (who also went to a harsh northern boarding school in Scarborough). But with one crucial difference. My dad never took me to a game. To my son’s regret, I did take him a few times. Josh was born at a hospital within spitting distance of Stamford Bridge. This makes him an avid Chelsea fan. I prevailed on various kind-hearted friends – not that kind hearted, it turns out, as I always had to fork out for the privilege – to proffer their season tickets for the odd game. I think we visited the Chelsea ground together three times. But this was never going to end well.
The first time, Josh was eight. We had tickets at the Matthew Harding end. That is the hardcore end. The end where you can measure the loyalty of the supporters by the number and size of CFC tattoos emblazoned on every inch of exposed flesh multiplied by 10,844 fans. We found our seats. They were rarely used. Everyone was always on their feet and towered over Josh. He had to stand on his seat. There wasn’t any form of verbal communication other than swearing. Before the match, the announcer said over the tannoy that Chelsea FC supported fully the FA’s No Room For Racism In Football programme and screens lit up with the words and logo of that laudable cause. As soon as Arsenal came out, the Togolese player Emmanuel Adebayor was targeted. He was greeted by our neighbours with a stentorian-sized chorus of: “Adebayor, Adebayor, his father washes elephants and ‘is muvver’s an ‘ore”. Choruses of laughter. I am sure that Emmanuel felt protected by the pre-match announcement about zero tolerance for racism at this ground.
The match started. Around us, every time an Arsenal player got the ball, the entire Harding stand army raised their arms to 90 degrees, pointed the index finger at the offending opposition player and chanted in unison: “He’s a cunt, he’s a cunt…”. I looked down at the angelic, smiling face of Josh. His pleading eyes said it all. “It’s your day out, Josh”, I said, resignedly. ” His arm went up, he pointed his finger and… I am a terrible father.
Our next trip to Stamford Bridge was, from Josh’s point of view, a disaster. Not the result, which I cannot even remember. It was my total un-suitedness to the partisanship of football. We were about 10 rows back, four fifths up the length of the pitch. Almost perpendicular to the penalty box at the opposition’s end. A Chelsea attacker went down just in front of the goal – everyone was up on their feet “PENALTY!” I was the only person not on my feet. Audibly, I uttered my verdict: that was never a penalty. Two hundred eyes rounded on me. And on Josh. Heads shook. Contempt filled the air. Sympathetic glances shot in my son’s direction. To have such a, such a dad…beyond help. I felt a flash of recognition. The Fast Show had a character who was a rugger type and caused constant fury around him by agreeing with the ref, shouting ‘good decision!’ and tucking into his wicker food hamper.
That was me, that was. And my son just shook his head in disgust along with the others and wished for the ground to open up and swallow him. This clearly wasn’t like rugby (that’s another thing you learn at cold Yorkshire boarding schools – fair play).
It was a long while before Josh trusted me to go back to Stamford Bridge. Eventually, he did. Well. I say that. It was more a pragmatic turning the other cheek out of the expedient need to go see his beloved team play Inter Milan for a place in the quarter finals of the European Cup. Inter were managed by Chelsea’s old manager, Jose Mourhino. It was a must see game. By then – 2010 – we lived in Penzance. Josh and I set off up to London on the morning of the match. That’s a six hour journey. As the train pulled out, my now teenage son took the earphones out of his ears, leaned over the table towards me and said: ‘Just so you know, pretty much anything you say at the moment annoys me”. With that, he re-plugged his ears and tuned out, staring out of the window for good measure. That was me told.
Chelsea lost. Josh was inconsolable. A day of promise – if silent companionship – had ended in defeat, low mood and vulnerability. We left the ground and headed straight to Paddington station to get the sleeper train all the way back to Cornwall. It leaves at 1050pm. As we pulled out of the station, rattling slowly through the west London suburbs, Josh silently climbed into my bunk and cuddled up, exhausted and hopeless. The bolshie truculence of my son’s nervous morning confidence gave way to the sorrowful fatigue of the bereft. Sometimes, disaster can only be consoled by the familial comfort of a father’s ever-ready arms. However ignorant, embarrassing and annoying he might be.
Clearly, I am a sucker for punishment or else there must be a residual football gene that keeps surfacing because every Sunday, from summer 2006 to the same season in 2013, I turned out to play ‘dads and lads’ with my boys, initially mid-morning on a pitch above the village of Mousehole and in the later years, at the Penzance sports centre. I am terrible at football. Occasionally, I get lucky and my left foot reaches moments of glory that would have the Matthew Harding stand on its feet in triumph. This is rare. Usually, I prowl up and down unthreateningly and as the lads got bigger and bigger, more and more skilled, they left me behind and ran rings around me. In the end, the ritual was more important than the skill. But it was our Sunday best.
Josh taking me to see Leeds’ comeback from the oblivion of the lower divisions the other day woke up my footballing gene again. My first words on entering a pub and greeting a friend will never be ‘see the game last night?’ I will never share that bond of men. I am known by male mates for the sarcasm I employ to ask such a question and the boredom I exhibit when they begin to answer it sincerely. But now that the Mighty Whites are back, well, maybe, just maybe, that eight year old, glue sniffing, Soccer Star sticking boy from the North, who ran around the room when Clarke headed the ball behind Geoff Barnett in the fifty-third minute of that match at Wembley all those years ago, lives on inside me. Hidden from view most of the time, but there, Lazarus-like, waiting to rise up. But my real joy is the joy Josh gets from the game I will always see through the slats of a wicker picnic hamper. And that’s good enough for me.