the occasional diary entry of an opportunist football fan

It’s 15 years since I’ve been to a football match, but I’m standing here with my dad’s 1974/5 season ticket close to my heart, in my breast pocket, which, along with phone and 2 packets (well one and a half now) of nicotine gum, goes flying in the air as Blackpool equalize for the first time and I’m having more fun than I’ve had for years. I remember the games he and I faithfully watched in the early 70’s sitting next to his cousin Dorothy and other members of the extended Bennett clan (probably one of the old ladies pictured leaving the ground in the national press photos, if she’s still around, she won’t have missed this game for sure). He was sandgrown, as the old people say in the Pool – Victorian city air and double pneumonia curtailing Elijah Bennett & son’s two generational contribution to the Manchester rag trade, a railway engineer’s accident and a widows whip round on the other side (no compensation in those days) bringing both grand parents together in the relative calm of the newish seaside town early in the 20th century. Born in ’25 he was at the ’53 cup final and was proudly Stan Mortensen’s milkman for years. I was brought up on the legend of that game as were many Blackpool folk and as much as the rollercoasters, piers, flashing lights and bizarre seaside tat (yes, and the Tower) gives a grimy day-glow tinge to our humour, that momentous event instills a very, very, stubborn attitude to a lot of our endeavours. So although it would be churlish, almost a crime against my family not to attend today, I’m not claiming to be a hard core BFC fan. I know plenty of them, some of whom I will hook up with later in the day, who stubbornly attended most of the desultory outings of the once mighty in the lower leagues. Like the match against Leyton Orient to which I took a pestering German girlfriend to “It wass so borring” she said, ‘well fuck off and watch Jurgan Whatsisname at Spurs then’ I felt like saying, but didn’t – cos she was right: a dour draw ending a snails pace game attended by a few hundred watching a blue away-clad (I’d built up the tangerine barmy army myth to her) team. I’m not even a big football fan, many have tried to convert me to a suitable local club. The die-hard Chelsea fan who took me to see them play Crystal Palace for my (?) birthday around the same time (another lousy game by his own admission) who, incidentally, has been messaging excitedly all day and has just texted me at half time to say the radio commentators have lost their voices as the game goes 3-2 to Blackpool, tried hard enough. But maybe it was the memory of the Anglo Italian cup matches, to a child seemingly all played at night on a luminous green pitch, watched safe in the halo of dad’s Hamlet smoke and Old Spice aftershave – and an excuse to stay up and out late – or that stubborn 3 goals down comeback spirit, that made me never adopt any other. Or, the death of a Preston fan at the hands of Blackpool ‘supporters’ at a punk gig, in Preston, in 1978, that made me reject football completely. You see I was idealistic about punk rock, it was the first music I got into at the tender age of 11 – perfect start to ruining any parental dreams of child genius by flunking O-levels at secondary school – and football and the tribal violence that seemed to accompany the local club’s slide down the league tables didn’t seem to fit the ethos that I imagined every revolutionary punk rocker had or should have. I briefly flirted with t’dark side myself for a few games in my leaving school months, but the sight of old ladies looking frightened as a bin was kicked over in the Hound’s Hill Centre or the absurdity of a 5 foot kid running from burly Sheffield fans (cos all the Blackpool ‘hardnuts’ had run first and left us) didn’t float my boat. Some of them were NF too, really unpleasant. And I wasn’t. And the nicer ones called me big nose, kike and yid and I wasn’t (even Jewish). So, in my own cooked books you were Punk (clever (with apologies), into good music, pacifist (scared), made your own clothes) or Casual (thick, into terrible music, good at fighting, bought designer clothes). During those suburbia-on-sea teens, I made my choice to deny any liking of the game (“…third-division-foot-ball”… er, lets just say, it wasn’t that hard) and bought a skateboard, Dead Kennedy’s and Crass albums. But now, as I’m swept up in this game of games – and without much melodrama that’s what luckily I am watching, ‘cos there is something so perfectly romantic about this tiny club’s rise up and the way (in this weeks News Of The World, at least), it has renewed that very British romance with the underdog V.S., and to me, I’m not ashamed to admit, it feels like a very natural release of a very, very, familiar, albeit neglected, emotion. I started taking more than a passing interest in our (see how I’ve adopted the familiar) fortunes as we started to beat teams like Middlesbrough last year and turning on late night TV, half drunk and delaying Monday morning, noticing orange, nay, tangerine shirts becoming suddenly prominent actually on ‘proper BBC’ (at first I thought there was a weird bias towards Holland at the station, such was my disbelief). Weekly excitement building, whilst a clearly freaked out (but strangely relieved) girlfriend asked me if I was alright…Alright? ALRIGHT? (the sound, it comes from far away when this amount of concentration is being exerted), as we did the Blackpool comeback again and again. Resulting in a 2 hour wait on the phone for a ticket (they called me back, bless ’em) – I lucked out and was down by the pitch next to Ian Evatt’s wife, to see him jump over the barrier when we won, into the ecstatic, jumping, singing, cheering, tangerine crowd to hug or rather collapse on his family, oblivious with heat exhaustion to the fans trying to grab his attention. It was so hot on the pitch and, as I said in consolation to the lovely Cardiff couple trudging home, who hugging me wished “congratulations and the best of luck, you deserved it” at Victoria Station, ‘they’ really deserved an equaliser in the second half and ‘we’ were lucky not to concede a couple more goals. And I guess in a way, that’s the crux of it, I’m not really a togger fan. I don’t follow the world cup. Anything with a flag or a corporate ID stamped on it gets the knee jerk. I don’t get happy when someone tells me our bitter rivals, Preston North End – home of the Association Football Museum, elder statesmen of the League – are in receivership to the tune of 38 million, I think it’s criminally sad. When Cardiff lose the match of our lives, I feel pretty sorry for them – they’ve been out of the top league for a good few years longer than our thirty-nine. I didn’t arrive at the painstakingly arranged schoolboy meeting with Kevin Keegan in a bright red Liverpool strip (I can name most of the 70’s dream team though) at my Aunty’s house in Wales. It was a home made ‘England’ strip – home made from a handed down Everton strip, ouch, (and he noticed). I was rubbish at football, Gary Baker and Steven Burrows used to thrash me at school and rightly, nobody picked me. And when they did and made me centre forward, I broke my arm in two places and never played again. Although, as you may have noticed, one plays football with one’s feet. When I did meet the great man, the stuff of my rhetorical questioning of dad’s many legends- “what’s the fastest motorbike in the world, dad, “Triumph Bonneville” (I chose to ride a BSA), “who’s the greatest footballer”: George Best. As a six year old in the sauna of the Imperial Hotel swimming club, that my mum and dad must have near re mortgaged our house to get me into, I had no pen or book to take the autograph of the scantily clad, long haired, muscular Byzantine Jesus standing in front of me. “Hoy did ye get them broises on ye legs? Playin’ futball? Never give up son. Never give up” He probably just had. My mum went out and bought me some shin pads. But today – jumping in the air, being congratulated by complete strangers all the way back on the tube, meeting old mates at a BFC supporters pub and not caring that they are all probably Thatcherite property owners, going to the game with friends from my own street, receiving genuine, moving, phone calls of congratulations from a Nott’s fan, shaking hands with a gracious PNE fan, buying a scarf from a tout for a fiver (after the game – cheaper) – I am, and will always be, A BLACKPOOL FAN. And, given their pathetic budget, the unfinished ground, the early season jokes about the mad-clown manager and his ‘reject’ team, the obscene money that changes hands in the world they are about to enter (we don’t care if we get beat, it’s gonna be fun); to me, there’s a little bit of family and a little bit of attitude finally coming together. So up The Seasiders: progress indeed, I’m in my forties, I took my dad to see Blackpool Football Club, in the tangerine jerseys, play the game of their lives at Wembley stadium – and he would have absolutely loved it.