John Ashdown offers his recollections of the first football match that he ever attended. Now post your own below the line
Before Christmas Steve Busfield wrote a blog on these pages on persuading children of the joys of the Football League, and it was suggested that a piece on first-match memories might be an interesting companion piece to both that and this Joy of Six: childhood football memories article. Here are mine ? feel free share yours below the line.
Monday 4 April 1988, 3pm. Sheffield United v Bradford City at beautiful downtown Bramall Lane. It occurs to me now, for the first time, that the day of the week was significant ? my dad played football himself on Saturdays, so this was a rare chance. (We'd also just moved down the M1 to Derby, so I wonder now if it was a paternal pre-emptive strike against any risk of me becoming a Ram.)
You're supposed to remember the sights, the sounds, the smells, the roar of the crowd, but those things are all hazy beyond recall. Peter Beagrie scored United's goal in a 2-1 defeat, but I've no idea how it went in, how poorly we played, or whether the spectre of relegation cast any shadow over the day. The only recollection of the game itself still with me is Wally Downes's red card for chinning a Bradford player at some point in the second half, his second red in three games. Wally, indeed.
So a 2-1 defeat, en route to relegation and blurry memories of nothing in particular ? hardly auspicious stuff. But something got its hooks in, and for me it was the programme. Blades Review. 60p. A smiling Dave Bassett on the cover holding a little Bertie Bassett doll, arms draped round a seven-foot version of the same.
It's astonishing how, 22 years on, the template has barely changed. There's the manager's message on page three ("There's a show called The Professionals on TV and I like it ?"), Supporters Club news on page four ("Today sees our new Miss Sheffield United make the Blades revival draw. She is Noreen Cassidy of Sheffield 5"), news of an amazing five new signings on page five (Graham Benstead, Darren Carr, Cliff Powell, Simon Webster and Paul Williams), a spread of info on Bradford, pages of puzzles and a player profile (Andy Leaning ? Favourite Film Star: Jamie Lee Curtis; Favourite drink: blackcurrant and lemonade), Captain's Corner with Paul Stancliffe looking like the man you wanted to grow up to be, reserve and youth-team news (with a couple of youngsters called Dane Whitehouse and Mitchum Ward prominent), photographs from previous fixtures ? it's essentially the format that clubs stick to today (this weekend, for example, I learned that Reading full-back Andy Griffin's least favourite kind of weather is wind).
There were the colours and graphics, bold red and white on the front, a big yellow panel on the back with the team line-ups (how did they know who was playing days before the game?). Pages and pages of statistics ? United were fifth in the reserve league and third in the youth league and I wonder now if I really differentiated between those tables and that of the Second Division, which told a very different story.
There were those long lines of line-ups, scorers picked out in bold, and the mystery of the names not in the day's starting line-up ? what had happened to Kuhl, Eckhardt and Marsden? Most United supporters older than me recognise Richard Cadette as a striking disaster at Bramall Lane ? the little Cadette� on the inside cover of the programme, indicating the two goals he'd scored in the last game against Ipswich, means his name still invokes the hope and expectation of my seven-year old self.
Perhaps most importantly it was something that was mine to keep. Every programme from every match I went to as a child sits carefully packed away. Finding this particular one on a trip home over Christmas took an age ? two minutes to find it, the best part of an hour scouring over some of the others. The cover is falling off now, but its still a deeply treasured possession.
Anyway, those are my first-match memories. Let's have plenty more below the line.
No comments:
Post a Comment