The second article from Spot51 as he looks back over how he came to follow Saints
When Nick asked for more Uglies to write stuff for this site I broke the habit of a lifetime and volunteered. I’ve since been asking myself why?
The only thing I can come up with is that I love football. It has played a hugely important role in my life and, despite the all too frequent disappointment it brings, I am still excited by the game. I feel the need to share the passion I feel for football and I hope to entertain you with my recollections from 50 years of watching the game. I’m sure you’ll let me know if I don’t.
Having been an Ugly for over a decade I understand there are posters on this board who view football in very different ways. Some of you are Southampton through and through. Southampton is your city. Cut you, you bleed red and white stripes - well, until this season you did!
Others are just followers of football who, through some accident of time and geography, found Southampton and attached themselves to the football club. This was my experience. The stuff I’ll be writing about therefore will be mostly but not exclusively about Saints. I apologise in advance if this offends anyone.
Apart from a couple of years in my late teens I’ve always been overweight. I am no natural athlete so never expected to be much good at sports. When I first played the game I was put in goal. I became a half decent keeper at junior school but only got to play in the first team when our first choice keeper was ill - or away playing for the Isle of Wight. Yes, he was that good.
My first boots were second-hand, brown with huge toe caps and positively lethal leather studs. You had to rub dubbin (whatever that was) into the leather or the boots would go so hard you’d never get your feet inside them. Footballs were equally dangerous. They were strung with bits of rawhide which left nasty welts on your skin if they hit you. On a dry day they weighed several pounds. If it was wet they weighed a stone and a half.
At senior school I never let on I’d been a keeper and soon carved out a niche as a goal-hanging forward. I was never good enough to play for the school but did OK in the inter-house competitions, which we usually won.
Can’t remember when I first started following professional football but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was because of the League Wallcharts given away in comics like Valiant. My mum worked in a newsagent so I always got the best freebies. You’d avidly collect all the little tabs for each club and move them religiously up and down the wallchart until at least the end of September by which time you’d lost interest.
Burnley won the League in 1960 and they were my first love. Other kids supported Wolves and even more liked Spurs. When Spurs beat Burnley in the 1962 Cup Final my lifelong hatred of Tottenham Hotspur began. Nothing happened in the intervening years to suggest I was wrong to loathe the Spurs.
I became aware of world football in 1962. I remember sitting with my Grandad watching grainy B+W pictures from the World Cup in Chile. The fact the players were kicking each other rather than the ball confused me to begin with but this was my introduction to both Italian and South American soccer.
I can remember going to Wembley with my dad to watch Schoolboy Internationals. We went on a coach from the IOW and some of my earliest memories of the mainland were those journeys up the A3. Seem to recall watching England play Germany and Scotland but even a trawl of the internet does not disclose when these fixtures were played or indeed who won.
My first league game was in the third tier; what goes around comes around?
Dad took me to watch Portsmouth play Crystal Palace in 1963. I remember very little apart from the Brylcreemed hair, the smell of cigarette smoke - and the crowds coming back down Ryde Pier on the tram. Pompey scored first but the young centre-forward for Palace was a bit tasty. He scored twice to win the game for the away side and within months he’d been transferred to West Ham in the 1st Division. His name was Johnny Byrne.
Next time: How I stopped being a football tart and became a Saint.