Remember Brian Glover in Kes? The teacher imagining he’s Bobby Charlton, United v Spurs? This bloke was something similar. Me and my brother were drinking at the Spanish campsite pool bar. He told us he’d been on the books of Villa and Tranmere. We mentioned our boys on the five a side pitch nearby. Puts […]

Parade of the pony-tails. No wrestling in the box; getting up and getting on with it. Football as it should be played. Showing the men how to entertain, putting them to shame. The spirit of sport. Someone should have a word with them. All those young girls cheering goals, singing Football’s Coming Home. I’m not […]

Never really knew my mother’s father. All I remember: tuft of nostril hair, spied from sitting on his knee; hoard of half-hidden threepenny pieces slipped into a sandpit outside the lido. In pictures he looks a decent man. Worked until death for just one firm, service interrupted by overseas trip lasting several years. Given leave […]

‘Some people think that football is a matter of life and death …’ I was a Chelsea supporter for 40 years before the Roman empire. Fan is short for fanatic. Empires fall. Football’s nowhere near as important as life and death.

The early April afternoon was glorious. The daffs were out, I felt Wordsworthian. You’d come down from York to look at houses. We caroused that evening with old friends in the Railway Tavern – they used to serve a lovely drop there, now apartments handy for the station – talking football as usual, about our […]