Get Her Off the Pitch! How Sport Took Over My Life

by Lynne Truss

  When we got back to the hotel, I slept for two hours, then woke up and wrote my piece - all the time in the worrying knowledge that I probably didn’t have the means of sending it. At around 10.30 a.m., I put some shoes on and carried my open laptop downstairs, with the lead attached, and - having got the attention of the man at reception - mimed the act of plugging it in. His response was to mime a big shrug of indifference, and then to do another, throat-cutting mime to indicate that breakfast was finito,so he hoped I wasn’t expecting any. But I still had reason to be glad I had gone down, because it was while I was standing in despair in reception that I happened to spot a British football journalist outside on the street. Here was a stroke of luck. I went outside and said help, help, what can I do? And it turned out that many members of the proper accredited British media were staying in a quite modern hotel right next door to mine, and that this hotel had a fax machine that would take the lead I had, although I might need to reprogramme the tricky copy-filing software to include some international codes. Well, that all sounded quite acceptable. In fact, it sounded great. My coach was leaving in twenty minutes, and I hadn’t showered or eaten yet, but at last I felt I was winning: kneeling on the floor of a back office in a neighbouring hotel, groping for a universal phone socket behind a photocopier, saying ‘Thank you thank you thank you’ in Italian, and praying that the stuff would go through.

  In these days of universal wi-fi, bluetooth and tri-band mobiles, these transmission problems seem quite primitive and tragic, I suppose. But in 1997 we thought we were up to date just saying the word ‘modem’; we were ahead of the curve having portable computers that weighed a mere three stone and had a battery life of more than 15 minutes. At night I would dream not of ponies or heaps of gold, but of the far-off invention of the lightweight laptop and of a newspaper that would one day accept copy sent by email. As things stood, the software for filing copy from the Times laptops was a laborious one which seemed to send your pieces one word at a time, weighing them for quality in the process, and always reserving the right to reject the whole thing if it found something it didn’t like. ‘It’s going!’ one would gasp, as the correct initial connection message came up - but then the worrying started. An image like a protractor (a semi-circle on a flat base) would indicate the tortuous progress of a file transmission with a dial going slowly through 180 degrees. ‘I think it’s going,’ you whispered, as the dial started to move. What you soon learned was that getting over the hump of the 90 degree mark was no guarantee of success. It just ratcheted up the tension. ‘Halfway!’ you would moan, with head in hands. Many was the time that the dial would get to 137 degrees (or maybe 140) and then pause, stagger, and conk out.

  On this occasion, on the third attempt, I was lucky. It went! ‘Grazie grazie grazie,’ I said to the hotel person who had helped me. At this point, a normal sports writer would have gathered his stuff, whistled a tune, and put the whole thing behind him, but I knew I wouldn’t. I would brood on this. Improvising under pressure gave me no satisfaction. Quite the contrary: it made me seethe. But thankfully there was no time to dwell on anything right now. With ten minutes to go, I ran back to my own hotel, got washed, changed and packed. Mission accomplished, I boarded the bus to the airport, dragging my laptop case, and started thanking those generous Carlsberg people for my lovely-lovely-jubbly weekend.

  * * *

  But would I have missed this match? Not for anything. Not for worlds. The atmosphere in that stadium was phenomenal, for a start. It is traditional for triumphant footballers to thank the supporters for their part in proceedings, but there was no doubt that the non-stop lusty Great Escape stuff from the crowd that night grew out of a quite valid kind of magical thinking: with the team playing so well from the outset, the chanting must never stop, never. As long as the fans were singing, the boys would maintain this amazing football, this enchanted football, which was like watching eleven blokes with a history of poor coordination balance a priceless egg on their combined fingertips and miraculously deliver it intact across a minefield. England’s clear ambition was to keep the ball: to play Italy at their own game. Their performance required skill, and control, and collective intelligence; above all, it required them to take care. And bloody hell, they did! When the English fans sang the taunting variant of ‘Bread of Heaven’ that goes ‘You’re suppo-osed to-o be at home’, it was brilliantly apt. Not only did the Italians appear not to have home advantage, but the English players had apparently just walked in and stolen their tactics. England looked very much at home in the Stadio Olimpico. There were no long balls. There was no putting it in the mixer. There was no Route One. The side of the elegant English foot was employed as never before. And what made matters especially wonderful was that it drove the Italians crazy. As Gazza put it so well afterwards, ‘It was great to see them running after the ball for a change. They were desperate, and it was a really nice feeling to see that.’

  Great matches sometimes reveal themselves rather late in proceedings. Not this one. From the start, you could see qualities in the English game-plan that were so much like answered prayers that it was hard to believe one’s eyes. Here was Gazza consistently outwitting Albertini and Baggio. Here was Paul Ince throwing himself into tackles, but not in a manner to get sent off. Here was the 22-year-old David Beckham keeping cool under provocation. Here was David Batty with a clear linchpin role, acting as a human shield. In defence, Tony Adams was at the height of his remarkable powers (and of course, he should still have been England captain, but we’ll come back to my feelings about Alan Shearer later). The point is that from the start of the match, everywhere one looked on the pitch, one saw not-very-English footballing traits such as guile, subtlety, control, elegance and forward thinking. While the Italians ran around exhausting themselves, our chaps used their energy efficiently, and seemed to be ruled by the idea of not letting each other down. The Italian fans threw bottles and coins onto the pitch, but they ignored them. A banner said, ‘GOOD EVENING BASTARDS’. They ignored that, too. Mentally speaking, throughout the whole 90 minutes, the match was a logically impossible stasis in which one team was always smoothly and consistently going forward and the other was always frantically scrambling back.

  Afterwards, Italian defender Paolo Maldini (son of the coach Cesare Maldini) announced that his team had been ‘psychologically destroyed’ by the match - which was highly gratifying, obviously. Striker Gianfranco Zola said, rather oddly, that he would have given his finger to win the game (which one?), but that Italy had been outnumbered in midfield, so his talents had been wasted, as he’d been obliged to keep pedalling back. ‘I found myself running after Batty like a madman. In such conditions, I burnt up precious energy. Let us tell the truth, I was neither fish nor fowl. I say honestly, to play such a role it would have been better to have had another player than Zola.’ The Italian papers in subsequent days had headlines like ‘Povera Italia’ (poor Italy) and ‘Courage Drowned in a Sea of Incompetence’. An editorial in the Gazzetta dello sport said England had contented themselves with controlling the game against ‘an opponent that managed to explore nothing but its own impotence’. What music to one’s ears.

  On that night, I can honestly say I loved the England team. When Sheringham hugged Beckham for post-match pictures, I was in tears of joy and pride. As the Italian fans quickly left the stadium in disgust - empty-pocketed, presumably, after flinging anything portable at the rival fans, or onto the pitch - it was a fabulous moment of togetherness for us. We didn’t even notice we’d been locked in. England had qualified for the World Cup, and had done it beautifully. David Beckham’s cold had got better. Glenn Hoddle was a genius. Ince had been a hero. Adams would live for ever. It was a fine night in Rome. The carabinieri, despite all their best efforts, hadn’t actually killed anyone. And, just as a sentimental bonus, Gazza had returned to the stadium of his old club Lazio and shown them what he could do when he was trying.

  Too much has already been written by genuine life-long football
fans about the exquisite misery of the long-suffering supporter. The tiny ups and the lengthy downs, the heartbreak, the locking oneself in a shed for five years. So as a way of dealing with my bitter disillusionment with England, I’ll just get Alan Shearer off my chest, because it was such a curious thing, the way I quite quickly grew to loathe that man, and to rant at anyone who dared to stand up for him. Now that Shearer’s England captaincy is in the past, I find I can put the whole thing behind me. On my desk as I write this is a little model of Shearer in Newcastle strip which I look at regularly for inspiration. People with cruelly good memories will gladly remind me that, during Euro 96, I not only offered myself as mother to Alan Shearer’s children, I even had a happy dream about him working in a furniture shop. But in the dark days of 2000, if he was named man of the match, I would say, ‘Oh for Pete’s sake, what’s wrong with you people, don’t you have eyes?’ and heartily spit on the floor.

  I blamed him, you see. He was captain of a consistently under-performing England team. At a time when it was fashionable to refer to certain individual players (such as Eric Cantona) as ‘talismanic’, Shearer’s personality seemed to influence the England team, and in only negative ways. In Shearer’s image, England was mean, dirty, tight-lipped, bullet-headed and pointy-elbowed. It expected to get away with stuff, and huffed when it didn’t. It had all the grace and daintiness of a bulldozer. It was opportunistic instead of inventive. It waddled instead of ran, and always had its arm up in appeal for a penalty. It didn’t deign to look sideways or backwards. Its goal-scoring record in no way justified its arrogantly high opinion of itself. Worst of all, in a world of sexy football, beautiful football, and lanky, nifty football, it was resolutely unattractive. Basically, it had thick white yeoman legs with hairs on the backs of its knees.

  What really got to me about Alan Shearer, however (oh yes, there’s more), was that different rules seemed to apply to him. This was the thing that drove me crazy. He fouled all the time, yet he wasn’t booked or sent off. He played half-heartedly, yet he wasn’t substituted. He seemed to exert a power that wasn’t commensurate with his true value as a footballer. What was going on? Did he know where bodies were buried? Why was everyone scared of him? Famously, when Ruud Gullit dared to leave him out of the Newcastle team, the decision was interpreted as an extreme folly for which Gullit would (and did) rightfully pay with his job. Some might argue that the loyalty shown to Shearer by a succession of England managers is sufficient evidence of his worth. And to be fair, many people told me I was barking up the wrong tree, and that having Shearer leading the England team from the front gave it bulldog qualities of strength and purpose. ‘Alan Shearer knows where the goal is,’ they would say, meaningfully. But at the height of my Shearer obsession, I considered such arguments mere propaganda. It seemed really obvious to me that the non-negotiability of having Shearer in attack was limiting England’s options in disastrous ways. Why did tactics - and team selection - have to be tailored to suit this bloke? Why was he exempt from criticism? Why was he untouchable? Why did no blame attach to him after St Etienne, when it was his foul on the Argentinian goalkeeper that lost the match for England (when Sol Campbell’s goal was disallowed, and Argentina ran off and scored while England were still celebrating)? I remember a Football Writers’ Dinner where I was lucky enough to sit next to Ted Beckham (David’s dad), and instead of asking him to marry me (what a wasted opportunity), I just moaned on and on to him about Bloody Alan Shearer.

  The last match I attended for The Times was in October 2000, a few days after my sister’s funeral. And the good news is: Alan Shearer wasn’t in it. However, the bad news is: it was still unwatchably awful, so he might just as well have been. His mean little spirit still hovered above it. It was a 2002 World Cup qualifier against Germany at Wembley (the first of our campaign), and even on first sight it seemed to contain every ingredient for a paradigmatically miserable afternoon of English football. Somebody had decided to make this a celebratory occasion by entitling the match ‘The Final Whistle’, but this was never going to be a party, no matter how many Cross of St George flags were sold to unsuspecting children down on Wembley Way, and no matter how many times the aggravatingly upbeat stadium announcer played ‘Three Lions’ over the PA and yelled, ‘The world will be watching! It’s a family occasion! It’s a World Cup qualifier! Don’t run off at the end of the match, we’ve got a show that’s fantastic!’ This was, you see, to be the last match played at the old Wembley before demolition, and equivocal feelings abounded. It was, on the one hand, rather melancholy to reflect that the ghostly echoes from 1966 of ‘They think it’s all over’ would be silenced for ever by the wrecking ball; on the other hand, the place was dank, stinky and uncomfortable and deserved to be struck by lightning. When the Red Arrows failed to show up (pleading weather conditions), one could only applaud their good taste. Nothing to celebrate here, mate. Nothing to celebrate here. You mark my words, the England fans will soon be singing, ‘Stand up if you won the war,’ because it will be the only pathetic little straw they can grasp at.

  Why anyone thought an England-Germany game with important points attached to it would make a suitable last fixture for the old place, I couldn’t imagine. True, they couldn’t have predicted it would be cold and raining, but they must surely have known we would lose. England’s performance in Euro 2000 had been pretty terrible, and it was clear by now that, as manager, Kevin Keegan had only ever had one idea: build the team around Alan Shearer and see what happens. By this point, sadly, Keegan’s supposed motivational skills were no longer a source of wonder. His talent for tactical idiocy, however, was universally acknowledged; in fact it was reckoned to be unsurpassed at this level of the game. On this occasion, for a World Cup qualifier against the Germans, Keegan put out a midfield of three - Beckham, Scholes and Barmby - and set Southgate the task of patrolling behind them. In the press box, some of the blokes looked at this lineup and put their heads in their hands. It was the work of a madman. It was insane.

  Personally, I cried. I never stopped crying, in fact. This being a few days after my sister’s funeral, I started crying because of personal circumstances, obviously - but there seemed to be no practical reason to cheer up once I’d started, so I didn’t. On arrival, I realised that I’d been allocated a seat next to Brian Glanville, a veteran football writer of high renown, tangled ascetic appearance and haughty intellectual condescension, who had never made a secret of his dislike for me (sometimes he even did it in Italian). A couple of years before, at a Charlton game, he’d been given my ticket by mistake, and when a steward asked him for it he’d said, rather shockingly, ‘If I’d known it was for her, I’d have torn it up.’ Now, for four years fortune had spared me the necessity of sitting next to Brian Glanville, but naturally I had kept myself keenly prepared for the eventuality. By way of practice, for example, I had recently dealt quite successfully with one of his like-minded woman-hostile colleagues, by saying as I sat down, ‘Look, I’ll only say this once. But if there’s anything you don’t understand, just ask.’ It would have given me considerable satisfaction to say something similar to Brian Glanville. One day the opportunity would arise, I was sure of it. I was ready for him. I had nothing to lose.

  But today, when I saw him sitting there in the next seat - damn it, I just welled up and cried. And since he steadfastly ignored me (possibly in Italian), I felt I had full permission to give vent to all my feelings. In this noisy stadium, no one would notice, after all. So I cried throughout the pre-match stuff, which included a playing of ‘Jerusalem’ (which had been sung at my sister’s funeral). I cried during the fireworks, which we couldn’t see because it was daylight, and in any case, they were on the roof. I cried with everyone else when I saw the team sheet. I cried when I spotted the Wembley groundsman, with whom I’d once spent a really pleasant day learning about sports turf management; I cried when the England fans booed the German national anthem; I cried right through the match and the half-time sandwich, cup of tea and orange
-flavoured Club biscuit. And after the defeat, when Kevin Keegan announced his resignation as England coach, I cried at that as well, not because it was such a shock but because it was the opposite: it was so miserably inevitable. When you are in a state combining personal grief with despair for England, nothing is a surprise, you see; bad things just confirm your worst fears. So of course Keegan would choose this moment to quit the England job. Hadn’t he abandoned clubs and jobs all his life? Hadn’t I been saying he would do this at the worst moment, when we had another vital qualifying match in just a few days’ time? Wasn’t that just typical of him to slink off but dress it up as the honourable thing?

  In a way, though, I reckon it was fitting that I should spend the whole of my last ever football match openly piping the eye and wringing out tissues. Sport doesn’t permit a really good cry, and I had begun to think that this was one of the main things wrong with it. Although it’s a widely acknowledged fact that watching sport is an emotionally gruelling business, isn’t there an unsatisfactory gap where the catharsis ought to be? You get all worked up - and then, because no one dies, you gradually calm down again and nurse a curious sense of emptiness. People sometimes say that sport educates the emotions, but the range of feelings it promotes is pathetically small, when you think about it. Anxiety, frustration, unbearable misery and almighty relief - that’s about it. Whenever the subject of ‘Is sport the new religion?’ came up in my day, I’d say no, or at least it’s no substitute, because sport is designed to make people anxious whereas religion is supposed to do the opposite. Watching sport is about placing your temporary emotional well-being in the hands of a bunch of fallible athletes; religion makes you put faith in an infallible God for the sake of your own ultimate spiritual security. The fact that people make ‘gods’ out of footballers is merely a symptom of paltry understanding and bad taste. When Kevin Keegan had made his flit from Newcastle in January 1997, the quasi-religious grieving was quite shocking. Fans with fresh ‘RIP’ tattoos on their stomachs hung around outside St James’ Park, hoping to see him rise again. One fan pledged to explain about Keegan to his toddlers ‘when they were old enough’. ‘He Never Forgot Ordinary People’, ran the headline in a local Newcastle paper. At the time, Keegan was advertising Sugar Puffs on the telly, and in this climate of religiosity I remember thinking it would have been quite a simple matter to change the Sugar Puffs slogan to ‘Eat these and think of me’.