in Oxford for rehab and to then return home, and am now setting off again to support the lads. My wife is ‘up north’ with the children, so I am borrowing my mate’s Renault Clio to bomb about in. I am like a cross between Jeremy Clarkson, Mr Bean, and Victor Meldrew as I drive. I swear, sweat, and swerve my way up and down the motorway, ranting at the speed limits, the traffic jams, and the other drivers. The one highlight of yesterday’s trip was seeing a van with some writing scrawled into the dirt on the back doors. Instead of the usual statement about his, or someone else’s wife, it simply said ‘GET OUT OF THE FUCKING MIDDLE LANE’. You can’t beat that British sense of humour. My licence points are racking up like a Tesco till receipt with all that driving, my knee is still sore, my back is like glass, and my groin is shredded, otherwise I feel pretty damn good.
So, some days have passed since I was last able to continue with this book. In that time I have been given a few days off to ‘heal’, so I shot up to Cleethorpes with my family for my mum’s birthday (an important one. but one that is not allowed to be revealed!). It was great to get back home and coincidentally, while we were back there, Torquay United played Grimsby Town, both clubs that have played an important part in my life. Torquay United won and survived the drop, but it looks like Grimsby Town will go down. A sad day for Grimsby Town fans, but that is football for you. They had been a decent Championship side for a few years and now find themselves in the Conference. How long it will take them to get out of that league, only time will tell.
While in Grimsby and Cleethorpes I took in a few interesting sights, most notably a trip around the heritage museum including a tour of an old fishing trawler (hell, was it hard work for those guys), and a visit to Martin Hargreaves Motorcycles (hard work for that man too!). It is like a big, bike jigsaw in there, how he gets sixty bikes back into a workshop that only holds fifty is beyond me and most of his customers. Whenever I go to see my dad at work, and whatever I am up to at the time, he always manages to rope me into a bike pick up or drop off. It’s similar to being given a job by the Sicilian mafia, you just can’t say no. I truly believe that if David Beckham rolled up at Martin Hargreaves Motorcycles, ‘Mart’ would have him popping over to ‘Dave’s Spares’ for a new battery and spark plug for a Yamaha 125. This time, I had to pick up a big Honda CBR in Grimsby. I had a nice clean shirt on as it was my mum’s birthday and we were due for coffee and cake. An hour later, after some hazy directions and a wobbly bike on board, I returned, covered in oil, to the reply, ‘Where have you been son, I need a couple more parts.’
Suffice to say that when I eventually returned home I was black with grease, the cakes had been eaten, and all that was left was a slice of humble pie!
Still it could have been worse, a few years ago now, again during a routine visit, I was asked to pick up a bike. This time I was using my dad’s car and trailer combo, with me wheeling the bike up onto the trailer and then gently pulling it back to base. The location of the pick up was very close to that of the village where my wife’s parents lived, so Fiona and I thought that we would kill the bird and throw the stones, or whatever the saying is, and visit her parents.
I picked the bike up, which was, predictably, huge, and we detoured off towards the village. The journey was fine but as we entered the village I checked the rear-view mirror and, to my horror, saw that the trailer was heading off in a different direction. It was like a sketch from Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em. Somehow the trailer had sheared off and was now independent of its master. It gathered momentum with the weight of the bike on board and veered off and started cartwheeling towards a garden. To my even greater horror in said garden there was a man tending to his prized perennials, and a woman directing him from the front door. I jumped out of the car and was screaming, ‘Move, there’s a trailer coming.’
Looking back, it was a bizarre warning, but having never witnessed a runaway trailer before, I had no idea what to say. Anyway at the last minute this poor bloke looked up and literally dived full-length to avert certain mutilation. The trailer and its contents totally obliterated the fence (new), most of the garden (just planted), and came to rest just in front of the bay window. It would probably constitute decent art nowadays, but for this couple it was a narrowly avoided death, and a garden replanted with metal.
I was, at this point, beating the World and Olympic village green sprinting record to get to the man, trailer, bike and garden, while Fiona was busy having a coronary in the car. The scene on arrival was one of devastation. Man down, bike and trailer wedged in a bush, wife shaking uncontrollably. I then uttered the immortal words …
‘Alright?’
They say that you sometimes find superhuman strength in emergency situations, I certainly did. It was like a scene from World’s Strongest Man. Somehow I managed to drag the wreckage out of the garden while constantly saying how sorry I was to the man who had just dived like an international goalkeeper. After a quick dash to the shops to get some apologetic flowers and wine for the couple in question, and then some major grovelling (phone details for compensation etc.), I left the scene of the disaster. On later inspection of the trailer I discovered that the connector had been welded more times than a car on Scrap Heap Challenge. I phoned my dad to explain why I had been so long, about the wrecked garden, the cartwheeling trailer, the man who had survived with his life, and the superhuman trailer pull. I was about to get to the fact that the trailer was a death trap and that I could have really hurt someone, when my dad butted in. The matter of crucial importance?
‘How’s the bike?!’
So, I returned to Oxford to watch the lads win against Cambridge yesterday – I have been having a blinder up in the stands, my passing has been superb, I haven’t given a ball away, and I feel great. The saying ‘it’s easy up there’, mostly referring to people who having never played the game, watch the game from above and hammer those on the pitch, is used very often, but it is true, it does look easy from high up in a stand. Believe me, it is very different at pitch level, particularly as space seems to be at a premium. It’s probably why the top players make it look easy, because they do what you can see up in that stand.
Injury wise, my knee is much better, but with the hammering that I have been putting my body through to get fit for the imminent playoff games, I now have a groin that feels as if it is about to tear right open. It is actually difficult to even kick the ball, which is a major problem in my line of work, and crushingly frustrating. I am thoroughly pissed off that I may miss next week’s play-off games, and am, at present, sat in a golf club (I don’t play golf but it is quiet and has free Wi-Fi) drinking coffee and randomly swearing out loud. As well as the mild to major OCD, I’m beginning to think I also have Tourette’s; on top of the swearing, I must punch the car steering wheel about thirty times a day, and that is not even when in bad traffic. It’s all due to football related annoyance, of course.
Back to my pre-game ritual. It was 15th July 1989, the morning of my first senior game of football, in a match against Barnsley. My boots were polished and ready at the end of my bed; I had drawn a picture on my dartboard scoreboard of me scoring a goal (me as a matchstick beating a matchstick goalkeeper complete with matchstick fans!). I then went for a pre-match walk (something I still do now) and then did one of the most bizarre pre-match routines ever seen. I went to the bakery I often visited and bought a gingerbread man. It was initially to eat (odd choice, I accept), but as I passed St Peter’s Church, the scene of many a family wedding, funeral, and christening, I walked into the grounds and carried out a strange act. I made a sacrifice to the ‘big man’ by biting off the gingerbread man’s head and ‘leaving’ it to the ‘gods’. Madly bizarre, I accept, but it also came with a massive chunk of humour attached – it was my ‘offering’ to hopefully give me a bit of luck.
It seemed to work, for the events of the following match changed my young life for ever.
‘Watson gets the ball, beats his man and crosses, up jumps Chris Hargreaves and scores. 1–0.’
‘Gary Childs runs down
