In fact, it was terrifying how quickly I became a football bore after such a brief initiation. Many friends simply stopped talking to me, because all my stories seemed to involve either the manager of Wolverhampton Wanderers or balls grazing crossbars in the 89th minute. ‘Come round and watch the Newcastle match,’ I would say, and then wonder why they always had alternative plans. My boyfriend took me on a romantic weekend to a nice hotel in the New Forest which I spoiled by exclaiming, as we passed the bar on the way up to our room, ‘Oh, thank God, they’ve got Sky Sports.’
The thing was, I was now attending football every week, as part of my arrangement with The Times. Possibly acting from a sense of guilt when they saw how much Euro 96 had disturbed my normal equilibrium, my masters gently suggested I go once a week to a football match, sit in the stands with the supporters, and write a column about it. They did publish this column, I hasten to add. It wasn’t a considerate plot to help me through a difficult patch. And in a way, of course, it was a continuation of the experiment. Let’s see if this woman really likes football, then, when she finds out it normally takes place firmly at ground level, out of doors in gritty northern stadiums in the freezing rain, and involves watching everyday league players run around banging into each other (in the absence of such advanced international features as steering, acceleration or brakes).
Thus, one week I might go to watch Division Three Brighton and Hove Albion against Torquay United at the local Goldstone ground; the next I’d be at the Premiership match between Southampton and Middlesbrough at the Dell; then it would be England v Poland (World Cup qualifier) at Wembley. They called the column ‘Kicking and Screaming’ but it was quite clear to anyone reading it that I was having a high old time, and didn’t need to be dragged anywhere against my will. In fact, on weeks when there was no Saturday football (international call-ups being to blame), I would kiss the cats goodbye in the morning and then stand with my coat on at the front door, clutching my car key and rolled-up umbrella, just sort-of refusing to accept that I had no match to go to.
And it was a pretty good season, 1996-97, if you leave aside the fact that Manchester United ultimately won the league for the second year running. To the casual onlooker, this was a season notable mainly for the burgeoning practice of pinning outlandish hopes on foreign players, whose presence not only lent all kinds of new glamour to the game, but finally legitimised the hair band as a masculine fashion accoutrement. I remember a fanzine at Anfield highlighting the difference - in terms of allure - between Liverpool’s own Patrik Berger and United’s Karel Poborský. ‘We’ve got a Czech; they’ve got a Czech,’ it said, alongside unkindly contrasting illustrative photos. ‘Ours has got a hair band; theirs has got a hair band.’ The cruel point was, alas, that Berger resembled a rock star while Poborský - well, Poborský didn’t. Poborský was so old-crone-like in appearance that he evoked childhood terrors of the witch Baba Yaga in her house built on chicken legs.
Reaction to foreign players was bound to be mixed, given the proud xenophobic traditions of the game. But mainly, supporters needed a lot of reassurance that managers had not been out squandering their club’s precious Eurocheque facility on the footballing equivalent of pigs in pokes. At a Rangers-Hibernian match at Ibrox, the man sitting next to me indicated the tall blond figure of Erik Bo Andersen (a Dane, as the name suggests), and said, wearily, ‘See that man? Number 16? Really a heating engineer. Not many people know that. Can’t play football at all, just a mix-up.’ Andersen promptly made the worst unforced error I had ever seen. Standing a few yards in front of an open goal, he knocked the ball wide, to a general gasp of horror. ‘That was terrible,’ I said. ‘Uh-huh,’ said the Rangers supporter, taking his head from his hands. ‘But he’s a very good plumber.’
To a neophyte, however, the foreign players were extremely attractive and evoked no mixed feelings at all. Put simply, I was always on their side. This was the year Kevin Keegan deserted Newcastle without explanation, and left his dazzling foreign players David Ginola and Tino Asprilla in the hands of Kenny Dalglish, which was a bit like hiring Cruella de Vil as your puppy-walker. The consistent wronging of David Ginola (which continued when he moved to Spurs) became quite a theme of my weekly pieces, and I staunchly voted for him as man of the match week after week, even on occasions when he wasn’t playing. But the more the xenophobic crowds hooted the fancy dans, the more I personally rooted for them. When Chelsea’s handsome all-star international team took the pitch at Blackburn (it was one of Gianfranco Zola’s first outings), I heard shouts of ‘Go back to Spain!’ which annoyed me so much that I got out my notebook and wrote it down. When I was sent to see Middlesbrough at Southampton at the beginning of the season, it was principally to report back on the expensive foreigners that Middlesbrough’s manager Bryan Robson had just recruited: the Brazilians Emerson and Juninho, and the Italian Fabrizio Ravanelli. On that memorably golden autumn afternoon, Middlesbrough were roundly beaten 4-0 by the red-and-white British foot soldiers of Southampton FC, which was absolutely hilarious, of course. ‘What - a waste - amunny!’ was the gleeful chorus from the stands.
For me, 1996-97 was a time of all sorts of assimilation. I’d never bothered to find out before how football was organised, with leagues and so on. Was the Premiership a legitimate division, or was it just made up of clubs with TV contracts? As far as fixtures were concerned, I’d always assumed, given how much football there appeared to be every week, that the question of who-played-who was probably just everyone plays absolutely everyone else as many times as possible until the whole torrid business has to start all over again. Cup-wise, I didn’t know there was more than one cup. Meanwhile, I’d never wondered where the notorious Hillsborough stadium was, or whether it was attached to any particular club; and I had no idea about the system of promotion and relegation, either: I assumed that, if a team was in the Second Division (say), that was where it had always been, and always would be. Finally, I didn’t know that teams had nicknames like ‘The Crazy Gang’ or ‘The Owls’, or suspected that you only had to know:
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