Until that moment in the sunlight, my only sporting interest had been motor racing: at Oulton Park and Aintree and Silverstone I'd seen Graham Hill and Jack Brabham, Roy Salvadori and Stirling Moss, Bruce McLaren and Innes Ireland battle it out in Formula One races; at home with Dinky toys, I'd recreate these races in the back yard or round the legs of my father's billiard table. It wasn't much of a participation sport for a boy, and it's hard to imagine a child of the 1980s or 1990s finding anything exciting about a noisy, polluting, past-you-in-a-flash car race. But these were the years when the British dominated the sport, drivers as well as manufacturers, and the 1959 championship - with Jack Brabham pushing his car over the line in the final race to wrest victory from Stirling Moss and Tony Brooks - had all the las-gasp enthrallment of the 1988-89 soccer season.

Then on that day in 1961 I picked up the family paper and, looking for motor racing news, saw instead a muddy goalmouth, a bulging net, and what the poet Vernon Scannel once called 'the blurred anguish of goalkeepers'. I pored over the match reports and league tables like someone trying to get to grips with a foreign language. And straight away, the grip was on me. Only once since, after that European Cup Final in the Heysel Stadium, when I thought I could never bear to play or watch the game again, has it promised to set me free.

My son, a child of 1980s, got the soccer virus at seven. Surely I must have known about football before I was eleven? But there were just eighteen children at our village primary school, and football was not played their at all, not even in the playground.

At home it was no better. My father had never played football, only rugby, and as the local GP in an under-resourced practice was confined to home, on call, most weekends; when he wasn't, it was Oulton Park we'd go to, not a football ground. My cousins from Manchester, the only children I saw outside school, were all mad about car racing, too. Isolated as I was, the rich kid in the rectory, it wasn't so surprising that football hadn't impinged on my world. Like sex later, it was something my parents probably preferred me not to know about.

Yet eighteen miles away was the town of Burnley, not only my birthplace (in the district hospital) but home to one of the two great football teams of the day. By now, the point of my initiation, their greatest moment, when they won the 1959-60 championship, had already passed. But I was not to know that, and nor were any of the sports journalists who covered their games that autumn. Burnley were riding high, and even if they hadn't been, it would never have occured to me to support Leeds United, though the place we lived in was right on the Yorkshire-Lancashire border, almost as close to Elland Road as to Turf Moor. Who were Leeds United? Just some team languishing in a lower division. Whereas Burnley, as the autumn of 1961 gave way to the spring of 1962, looked on target for the double, and could boast a team of English, Irish and Scottish internationals: Blacklaw, Angus, Elder, Adamson, Cummings, Miller, Connelly, McIlroy, Pointer, Harris.

It was an exciting season, but a sad one. The scrapbook I began, when I look at it more closely, reveals some odd gaps, and stops abruptly on 3rd March, at which point Burnley were four points clear of Ipswich and five clear of Tottenham, with games in hand over both of them. (In the Second Division Liverpool made the pace ahead of Leyton Orient and Plymouth Argyle.) Thereafter, Burnley's progress was too agonising to record, and I have suppressed all memory of it apart from a rare win over lowly Blackpool: inexorably, Ipswich caught us and the games in hand were blown away.

But there was still the F.A.Cup, the very reason, some commentators said (as they always do), for the team's faltering in the league. Here my scrapbook details are much fuller: 6-1 over QPR; then Leyton Orient, 1-0 in a replay; Everton, 3-1; Sheffield United, 1-0; and finally in the semi-finals a 2-1 win over Fulham, again after a replay. This left the final against Spurs, the Old Enemy, who came to Turf Moor for a League match just fourteen days before and drew 2-2. There were four goals again at Wembley, but this time it all turned to dust. Jimmy Greaves scored after 3 minutes; Burnley's equaliser early in the second half came from Robson, who somehow squeezed it in the narrow gap that Brown was guarding at one post - anything but a classic. This goal was cancelled out by the burly Smith just one minute later.

Then came a disputed penalty 10 minutes from time: Blacklaw lost the ball to two challenging Spurs players (surely a foul), Cummings stepped in to breast away a shot by Merwin (never handball, ref) and the referee pointed to the spot. The decision was agony enough, but nothing compared to the slow-motion trauma of the penalty itself: tubby Adam Blacklaw dropping on one knee to his right as Danny Blanchflower stepped up and rolled the ball gently to his left. At the final whistle, I did the only thing a boy could do in the circumstances: took my ball out on the front lawn and re-enacted the entire game, with certain crucial adjustments to the scoreline. This was the principle I'd learnt with the Dinky toys round the billiard table: a world of isolated make-believe, where the action-replay, yet to be invented on television, ensured that your favourites could never lose. But to a growing boy, there were shades of the prison house about these fantasy games: I wanted to play football myself, and that seemed to mean having somebody to play it with.

For the moment, this possibility was remote. My younger sister soon tired of being put in goal and my long-suffering Aunt Sheila, who came to stay every school holiday and who one summer allowed me to amass a century against her on the back lawn, would not extend her tolerance of cricket to football. As for the three boys of my age at primary school - Simon, Stephen and Jeffrey - they were so uninterested in football they used to satirise my obsession with it. In desperation, I started going to a youth club in Kelbrook, three miles away, where there was a five-a-side every Friday evening and where the intention was to form a fully-fledged eleven-a-side village boys' team. My grave offence to tribal loyalties somehow got back to Simon, Stephen and Jeffrey, who took the piss relentlessly and eventually stopped talking to me altogether. Their persecution programme only strengthened my faith: I was now a martyr to football, a sufferer in the cause.

Forced to play alone, I began the process of transforming some rough and gale-swept ground in the paddock behind our house into a stadium of dreams. My father helped me clear the ground of stones, weeds, broken glass. We constructed goal posts from rusty old metal tubing, and put some strawberry nets behind them. The touchlines were ribbon-scatters of sawdust, standard local league practice in those days. But one afternoon I discovered an old line-marker and some lime bags in an outhouse, from the days when the house had a tennis court. Clearing the cobwebs, I slowly grasped how the contraption worked: you poured lime into the heavy metal base, added water, stirred the sloppy mass with a stick until you had the right consistency, dropped the wheel into the metal slots that held it, and then went squeaking off down the side of the pitch.

In Kevin Costner's 1989 film Field of Dreams, an American on a farm hears the corn telling him to construct a baseball field at the back of his house. I had the same sense of mystery and religious calling myself, though for this Yorkshire field of dreams it was that line marker which provided all the magic. The touchlines and penalty areas and centre circle would be a pale, indistinguishable yellow when I marked them out on the wet grass in the morning; by lunchtime, as the day dried out, they'd come up a brilliant white. I surveyed them from the main stand - a large earth mound running down one side of the field, separating it from our garden. It was a shoert pitch, thirty yards at most, and a bumpy one, narrower at one end than the other and with a ridge running across the edge of the penalty areas. But as far as I was concerned - little Lord Fauntleroy on his earth mound, chairman, groundsman, manager, and twenty-two players rolled into one - these were the green expanses of Turf Moor, or even Wembley.

I lacked only opponents, but these weren't hard to imagine, anymore than it was hard to provide Ken Wolstenholme's commentary as I raced up and down. My favourite move was to pass back to myself in goal, then punt the ball high in the air and sprint up to the centre circle to head forward; a further rush, a volley on the edge of the area and with luck the ball might hit the roof of the net without bringing down the wonky crossbar as well. A line of elms and chestnuts ran down the side of the pitch opposite the grandstand, a kop that roared and swayed in the wind: if I timed it right, there'd be a gust of wind just at the moment the strawberry net was bulging - the ecstatic crowd, or even Ken Wolstenholme moved to excitement by what had happened.

It was all very well, but I'd have to put in some proper games of football - with real opponents - if I was ever going to be signed up by Burnley. Then one spring evening, as I was dashing about the pitch and muttering Wolstenholmeisms to myself, Simon and Stephen were suddenly there at the field gate. I slunk over to them, shamefaced, caught in the act, only to find that they'd decided they liked football, and, more to the point, had resolved to persecute Jeffrey instead. Things looked up after that, for me if not for Jeffrey; we started to play football at break and even mnaged to con the soppy new teacher at the primary school into letting us have a match during lesson time.

The Kelbrook team got off the ground, too, if only for two matches, one of which exposed me for the first time to violence (unthinkable in our school for a boy to be beaten up by another boy) and the other to the four letter word '----': it was in the bath afterwards, I remember, that I half-innocently asked my mother what the word meant and knew from her fumbling evasiveness that it possessed a power I would want to try out again. Football and ------- (whatever that was) were, I intuitively grasped, a long way from my mother's aspirations for me, which among other things included learning to play the piano. I dutifully went to piano lessons at the house of Mrs Brown, in Earby, until I arrived one Wednesday afternoon in the middle of live television coverage (rare in those days) of an England World Cup qualifying match. To have the football on television turned off and to be forced to practice the piano instead put paid to my faltering interest in that instrument. I have never been musical since.

Later, in September 1962, I moved on to a grammar school in Skipton and at least found boys even more manacled to football than myself. Undeterred that rugby, not soccer, was the official school sport, we would get to the playing fields early on games afternoons so we could use the oval ball as a round one (even heading in) before the games master arrived. And though soccer was in theory banned from the playground, the staff were happy to turn a blind eye to our breaktime mauling outside the art room: there was a chalked goal on one wall, but to score at the other end, you had to get the ball between the drainpipe and the ventilation gate. Mostly we played with a tennis ball but if there wasn't one to be had we'd make do with a small stone instead. (Out walking at thirty-nine, I still find myself trying to steer small stones through gateposts or other imaginary goals.) For a time, we even got away with using a Frido. It all ended the morning I sent a wayward shot towards the doorway at exactly the moment that Harry Evans, the notoriously fierce physics master, came whistling through it on his way to assembly. Like the Blanchflower penalty, I see it all now in horrible slow motion: his unexpected emergence; the Frido smacking him on his bald patch and leaving a neat imprint of mud dots across his forehead; his terrifyingly loud demand 'Who kicked that?'; me shuffling over in terror and contrition as he began to wipe the muddy prints off with his handkerchief; an almost audible general sigh of releif that punishement went no further than confiscation of the ball and detention for all those of us who'd been playing. For half a term, there was no playground football at all. Then the tennis ball games resumed.

Playing regular rugby for the school would have made it difficult to pursue a soccer career, of course, but whether through design or lack of skill I rose no higher than captaincy of the third XV. This left nearly all my Saturdays free to go to Burnley and, later, to play for a team in Colne; only once was I caught out, when I had to bunk off from a third XV game in order to play in a crucial cup match in Lancaster, which we won 5-3 in a swirling wind that allowed me, for the only time in my career, to score direct from a corner.

Sundays were reserved for the phenomenally successful Barnoldswick Park Rovers Minor Side, which I joined at fifteen, just after the start of a season which ended with a long unbeaten run and the league title. I didn't think of myself as much of a player but both schoolyard practice and the solitary hours I spent at home modelling myself on Burnley midfield genius Gordon Harris did mean that I was highly trained and motivated. And there was one spectacular goal which helped me make my mark, at least as far as the local paper was concerned. ('Left-winger Laurence Stocker raced away down the right wing before putting across a bullet-like centre. Blake Morrison, who had followed upfield, came running in to head the ball into the corner of the net with the entire Hellifield defence left stranded': I still don't know if I meant it or just could not get out of the way.)

The team went on winning the following season, and soon there were rumours of scouts coming to Barlick in order to watch us: Liverpool, Leeds United, Burnley, Bury and Blackburn were all said to be 'taking an interest' and Preston manager Jimmy Milne himself turned up for one game. Finally an invitation came for six of us to go to Preston for trials. The local paper made much of the fact that I was among them, a grammar-school boy and doctor's son, but we all knew that it was the other grammar-school boy among the six, Seehan Grace, three years younger than most of us and a star sprinter, whom Preston must be after. Nonetheless, after two lots of trials, three of us were offered schoolboy forms.

It seems amazing now that we were so blase as to refuse, but we were taking the advice of our mentors - Park Rovers stalwarts like Neville Thwaites and Teddy Bamber as well as Seehan Grace's dad, who ran the Barlick carpet shop and knew the score better than we did. Their view was that schoolboy forms wouldn't mean much - no more than a couple of games a season for the B-team. And though I was tempted to give it a go just to see what the level of competition was like, I didn't want to break ranks. Preston, in any case, were not Burnley. O-levels were looming, I'd begun to get interested in girls and poetry, and deep down I knew I'd neither the skill nor bottle to make a soccer career.

Still, I went on playing. Langroyd, the Colne adult side I played for on Saturdays, had a lousy sloping pitch and were no great shakes, but I was enough of a fantasist to persuade myself that the stocky young apprentice engineers and flabby, middle-aged mill workers who made up the rest of the team were in the same league as Gordon Harris and Ray Pointer.

We had a fantasist for a manager, too. Ernie, who had been a good player in his day and still sometimes turned out if we were one short, lived in a grim terrace in Earby with an outsized wife and mentally-disabled teenage daughter. Football was his escape from the pressures at home, and he was even more obsessed with it than I was. Unfortunately, he was also a cheat, and had a habit of drafting in star players for one-off appearances in cup matches, even if this meant forging their signing-on forms. He got away with it most of the time but there were two notable occasions when his cheating caught up with us. The first was a summer five-a-side tournament, when the Langroyd A-team were progressing steadily towards the final until, in the semi, 1-0 up with 5 minutes to go, one of our players went down injured. We didn't have a substitute and didn't reckon we needed one either, but Ernie, taking no risks, illegally sent on someone from our B-team, an offence immediately spotted by a rival team manager, who reported it and had us disqualified.

Easier to forgive, in some ways, was Ernie's ploy when we found ourselves 1-0 down at half-time in a crucial quarter-final cup match in Skelmersdale: Langroyd had been beaten in the final the previous year, and we were determined to triumph this time. The game should never have started on the waterlogged pitch, and the rain continued to bucket down. Skelmersdale got a squelchy early goal and there was worse to come when our centre-half was sent off after 20 minutes for taking a wild kick at a niggly opposition forward. In the dressing-room at the interval, Ernie told us - and none of us disputed it - that since we'd hardly got out of our own penalty area, there was no chance of our winning; the best thing would be for a succession of players to go down injured and be taken off, forcing the referee to recognise the error of his ways in not having called the game off. I couldn't bring myself to be one of the imposters, but there were a couple of players who made a brilliant job of shamming serious injury and when the second of these had been helped off, after 72 minutes, leaving us with eight men, the referee decided to abandon the match - the pitch, he said, with no exaggeration, was now unplayable. Judging by the whistling from the Skelmersdale stand, the crowd had clearly got Ernie's number: we were even booed as we left the ground for the team coach at the end. But Skelmersdale had the last laugh, invoking some arcane Lancashire League rule that if a game had been abandoned after 70 minutes the authorities had the right to allow the result to stand. Ernie was phoneless and it fell to me to ring the appeals committee to learn the result of their hearing, and to drive down to Ernie to break the bad news. I remember him, in his cramped front room full of ironing and football trophies, his nylon shirt covered in sweat, indignantly planning his next move. But there was none we could make: Langroyd were out of the cup, and my last season with them before I left for University was all but over.

My interest in Burnley was all but over, too. I had gone on watching them throughout the 1960s, but they were in steady decline and my memories of the period are random and fragmented. I saw newly-promoted Liverpool come up to Turf Moor and win 3-0 with Ian St John thumping one goal straight up into the roof of the net from about 2 yards; I remember an Aston Villa defender squaring up to Willie Irvine (or was it another of Burnley's flash-in-the-pan forwards of that era?) then nutting him full in the face: we howled for his blood, a linesman had spotted it, and off he went. Clearest of all - I remember it as yesterday - there was the most spectacular own goal ever seen at Turf Moor, scored for Leeds United (just up from the Second Division) by Alex Elder, who won the ball near his own corner flag, brought it forward a yard or two then, without looking, lofted it back to Adam Blacklaw. But Blacklaw had advanced towards the edge of the penalty area, and would have had no chance anyway with Elder's overhit lob, which swung into the far top corner. The only goal in a 1-0 defeat by Leeds: things were never the same after that.

There were still the odd moments of glory, but not many. The last programme I have is against Arsenal - from 13th September 1969, two weeks before I left for university. Arsenal that day had Bob Wilson in goal, plus Frank McLintock, Bobby Gould and George Graham; the Burnley team was Peter Mellor, John Angus, Les Latcham, Brian O'Neil, Dave Merrington, Sammy Todd, Dave Thomas, Ralph Coates, Frank Casper, Martin Dobson and Steve Kindon. It was still a classy outfit - or should have been with Dobson, Kindon and Coates there - but only Angus was left from the Cup Final side seven seasons earlier and the inexorable slide had begun. Two seasons later, in 1971, Burnley were relegated. They quickly climbed back up again, but only for two seasons, and then cascaded down until they reached the Fourth Division in 1985. In 1987 they escaped plummeting out of the Football League altogether by winning their last match: I heard it on the radio from a Suffolk garden, urging them on as if I were back on the terraces and this were a Cup Final, not a battle for survival.

Already by the end of the 1960s the crowds at Turf Moor had begun to peter out. In those days I went with Les, a manager at the Barlick Rolls Royce factory, and we'd park his warm. purring saloon a couple of streets away, before taking our place on the empty terraces or in the stand. But in the early 1960s I had travelled to matches with a carpenter named Geoff, in his battered old van, and we'd have to park miles away from the ground and walk; once inside, we'd stand behind the goal where the crowd were sometimes big enough for me to experience that feeling of being carried helplessly downwards, feet off the ground, after some particularly exciting goalmouth incident.

Intimidation, violence and vandalism we took for granted. Whenever I'm tempted to look back on that decade as some innocent age of pre-hooliganism, I remember my brush with a Stoke City fan when I was about thirteen. He was walking ahead of me as (in those unsegregated days) I looked for a place behind the goal. Catching sight of my claret and blue scarf, he abruptly stopped and wouldn't budge, so that when I gingerly tried to make my way past his looming bulk he could turn and snarl: "Who the f - - - do you think you're pushing?" He grabbed hold of me, dangled me in the air in front of him, drew his fist back and was about to belt me when a mate of his called him off: "Leave 'im Mick, it's not worth it, he's nobbut a little 'un." He put me down: "Just f - - - - - - watch it next time."

Violence had its own momentum and needed no excuses. I remember the story of a friend beaten up in Skipton bus station. "Hey, you're t' c - - - what's been cleverin' roun' town all evenin'."
"Nay, ah've been in Keighley - ah've just got off t'bus."
"That's nowt to wi' it." Thump.

At the Heysel stadium, and again after Hillsborough last year, I wondered whether the violence and tragedy that attend football might not kill off the pleasure I've always taken in it. But there's no sign of that. On the contrary, with my young son's fantasies to look after as well as my own, I've renewed my interest. That interest began as a kind of vicarious dream, and it still operates on that level. Listening to Burnley's great escape act the other season, I wasn't thinking how fortunate I was not to be there, squalidly ending my playing days at the bottom of the Fourth Division. I was wondering why the call from the Burnley manager hadn't come yet, and staying fairly close to the phone in case it did.

Back to Index page	Forward to next article

Hosted by www.Geocities.ws