I’m always glad that we had that conversation, those nice sports editors and I, because it fixes a moment for me perfectly: a moment when football was just a kind of noise that came from the television in other people’s houses. I knew that some of my friends were married to men whose passion for football was indulged domestically (or so I believed), but it was something that took place behind closed doors; it was easy to turn a tactful blind eye. In those far-off days, football news was rarely in the headlines, or on the front of newspapers, and mainstream television critics such as I were rarely exposed to the game as a subject on the main channels. Reviewing telly since 1991, I had probably seen three significant pieces about football: the first was a very funny drama by Andy Hamilton called Eleven Men Against Eleven (with Timothy West as a club chairman); then there was a documentary about Diego Maradona, focusing on the ‘hand of God’ incident, the significance of which seemed to me to have been absurdly over-exaggerated, given that football was only a game. The third was the now famous ‘Cutting Edge’ documentary on Channel 4 (An Impossible Job) charting Graham Taylor’s last year as England manager, with its hilarious touchline swearing, ghastly scenes of not-qualifying-for-the-1994-World-Cup, and the buffoonish and frustrated Taylor exclaiming, ‘Do I not like that!’ and ‘Can we not knock it?’
What else? I remember my female boss - the literary editor of an academic weekly - once on a Monday morning in the early 1980s saying that she had watched some foot-ball at the weekend, and that she had generally approved of what she saw. ‘You’re kidding,’ I said. (Her usual leisure activities were playing tennis at a rather exclusive North London club and practising the clarinet.) ‘No, it was quite balletic,’ she said, her eyes wide in self-amazement. Apart from that, the footballing event that had impinged most on my consciousness was the Heysel disaster in 1985 - not because I understood how truly awful it was, but because I didn’t. At this time I had a crush on a chap in the office who made a perversely big show of adoring football, especially Italian football; and for some reason I always felt that he was putting this on. I thought he carried copies of La Gazzetta dello sport around just to annoy me (or possibly - which was worse - to arouse the interest of other men). Either way, I did not respect, understand or believe in his passion for football, and I remember a couple of days after Heysel asking him why he was still depressed.
The Times’s idea of sending an agnostic, literary, 41-year-old female survivor of colonic irrigation who’d always minded her own business to cover a bit of football in 1996 has to be set in context. And it’s quite simple, looking back. In the mid-1990s, football was mounting its bid for total domination of British culture - a domination that it subsequently achieved. Nick Hornby’s 1992 book Fever Pitch was responsible for making football respectably middle-class; Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Sports channels (launched in 1990) for flogging football as a seemingly limitless source of home entertainment. Everyone could see that football was breaking out in unlikely places in the 1990s. In the London Review of Books, for example, Karl Miller (the Northcliffe Professor of English at University College London; not the German footballer) wrote a hyperbolic essay on Paul Gascoigne’s World Cup performances in Italia 90, in which he described the flawed-heroic Gazza as, ‘Fierce and comic, formidable and vulnerable…tense and upright, a priapic monolith in the Mediterranean sun.’ At the other end of the mythologising scale, on Friday nights from 1994 to 1996, David Baddiel and Frank Skinner’s laddish and brilliantly bathetic series Fantasy Football League (BBC2) placed football in the same friendly bracket as alternative comedy. Football’s traditional associations - male, tribal, anti-intellectual, hairy-kneed, working-class, violent, humourless, misogynist, foulmouthed, unfashionable - were being undermined from all directions.
Given all these signs and portents, it was naturally felt - by clever zeitgeist specialists such as Keith and David - that Euro 96 might be a tipping point. Match attendances, which had sunk to terrible lows in the 1980s (Tottenham had been playing to crowds of around 10,000) were already recovering thanks to the formation of the Premier League and the investment from television - but, basically, Après Euro 96, le deluge. In the context of all this, I believe my own small journey into football for The Times was a clever editorial decision: I would be a trundling wooden horse freighting a few new readers into the sports section. It was also, however, a deliberate and rather rash mind-altering experiment, familiar from films such as The Fly and (more recently) The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, and I have sometimes wondered subsequently whether I ought to sue. No one thought about the consequences, least of all me. We merely thought: let’s connect the brain of this apathetic 41-year-old literary woman to a big lot of football, maximise the voltage and then see what happens. If she starts getting up during matches to yell, ‘Can we not knock it?’ then the conclusion is clear: football can appeal to bloody anyone. If she starts describing Gazza as a priapic monolith, however, things have probably gone too far, and it may be necessary to reverse the polarity.
But I agreed to do it, so there you are. And my first act as special know-nothing Euro 96 correspondent for The Times was to go out and get a book. I acted on the advice of a child, which seemed appropriate. ‘How should I prepare for Euro 96?’ I said. And the child said, ‘Get a sticker book.’ So I bought a special Euro 96 sticker book in W.H. Smith’s and the astonishing thing was: it was only a pound. Imagine my disappointment, however, when I took it home, shook it, and no stickers came out. Apparently you have to buy the stickers separately at considerable expense - something the child had neglected to tell me. But never mind. I was now committed to Euro 96. I had invested in it. And in the build-up to the event, I persevered with my research. I bought a magazine-sized glossy bbc guide to the championships, for example, which was packed with pictures of completely unfamiliar long-haired men doing historic things for their countries in very, very brightly coloured football shirts. Evidently, quite a few of these chaps played for English teams while artfully retaining their foreignness for international contests. I wondered how this could possibly work in practice. I also wondered, seriously, whether it ought to be allowed.
I also read every word in the supplement that came with The Times, bored to tears, and spent a long time studying the cover picture of Les Ferdinand with no shirt on, trying to memorise his chiselled features for later identification. (Since the injured Les played no part in England’s Euro 96 games, this turned out to be a waste of time.) Having nothing else to do until the games began, I pored over the results tables waiting to be filled in, speculating on their use. There were columns headed ‘W’, ‘D’ and ‘L’, for example, which I immediately deduced were abbreviations. Win, Draw and Lose was my guess. However, after ‘W’, ‘D’ and ‘L’ came columns for ‘F’ and ‘A’, and here I drew a blank. I searched the page for a key, but there wasn’t one. Damn. I couldn’t work it out. F? A? Even if it was to do with the number of goals scored - which seemed likely - how did that get to be represented as two columns? Dear, oh dear, there was so much to learn.
The good news was that the opening match (to which I would be going) was England v Switzerland. Phew. What a good idea to start things off playing a nation known not only for its keen neutrality and cleanliness, but also for its extreme tardiness in giving women the vote. In all my years of not really listening to sports news, I had never heard of England fans having particular antagonistic feelings towards the Swiss - not even for their disgraceful suffrage record. Moreover, according to my Euro 96 guide, Switzerland were not one of the great teams of the world, either, so they would probably be an utter walkover on the field, thus ensuring a nice successful opening game for the home side. At this stage, it had not occurred to me that the 15 teams competing alongside England in Euro 96 had all needed to qualify for the event - or, indeed, noticed that many, many other European countries were not represented at all. I never asked, ‘Shouldn’t Sweden be playing in this?’ or ‘Where is the Republic of Ireland?’. I just thought it was fitting that sma
ll countries with no chance at all were playing alongside big footballing nations such as Germany, England and Italy. It seemed to have been nicely thought out; someone high up in football had obviously sat down in the winter with a yellow legal pad, a sharp pencil, a cup of coffee and a biscuit, and selected this bunch of interesting countries to play against each other - a bit like planning a really big dinner party, but with less at stake if it went wrong.
Meanwhile, I waited. At the last minute, The Times supplied me with an intriguing electronic device: a special bt pager decorated with the Euro 96 logo which would, they promised, thrillingly vibrate to inform me whenever anything important happened (in case I missed it, I suppose). For the time being, however, this gadget was inert, lifeless - even when prodded. I wrote an introductory piece explaining how I had achieved my pristine ignorance of football over a lifetime of loudly running the bath, boiling kettles and singing tunelessly to the cats (‘La la la, What’s for breakfast today, La la la, Spot of Whiskas, La la la’) during the sports bit on the Today programme at 7.25 a.m. and/or 8.25 a.m. Then I finalised my preparations by asking my friend Robert to come with me to Wembley, knowing that he had an interest in football, and assuming he would snatch my arm off for a ticket. What a let-down, therefore, to discover that, while he would certainly be happy to escort me to England-Switzerland, Robert was a Sheffield Wednesday fan primarily, and not over-keen on international fixtures.
So that was it. On the fine morning of Saturday June 8, 1996, I set off for Wembley from Brighton station clutching a pair of tickets and a dormant pager, wondering whether I’d be able to recognise Les Ferdinand with his clothes on, imagining the tournament mainly in terms of social dining, and with a slightly under-excited friend in tow. Not great clues, any of them, to the fact that my world was about to be turned upside down.
I’ll mainly skip over the England-Switzerland game. All I can say is that I was jolly pleased when Alan Shearer scored the opening goal halfway through the first half, partly because it made my pager go off with a very definite buzz (wow), and partly because everyone said he’d gone 21 months without scoring for his country, which seemed like a pretty good reason for him not to be selected for the team, actually, if you were being ruthlessly practical about it. When Switzerland equalised from a penalty in the second half, it was a bit confusing for spectators in the stadium, because we had no idea what had caused it (evidently a hand-ball from Stuart Pearce was the transgression), but the final 1-1 result - while apparently a great big downer for England fans - did not feel like any sort of injustice. England had been disorganised and had run out of ideas quite quickly; after the long-drawn-out palaver of the loosely-themed opening ceremony, and the excitement of the opening goal, the afternoon sort-of fizzled out, and there were long, yawning patches of pointless play that took place amid virtual silence, as if the whole event had suddenly been submerged under water.
Not that it was restful. I learned not to get settled too comfortably at football, because you were always having to jump up when anything faintly interesting happened. I also learned that, when a corner is taken, you don’t stay standing up, but you don’t sit down either: you assume a halfway position with a lateral twist which manifests the presence of hope, but is quite a strain on the buttocks. As for the England team, on this occasion I enjoyed them most when they had their backs to me - simply because this gave me a chance of identifying them. ‘Turn round, for God’s sake, so I can see who you are,’ was my continual grumble. It was like the old days of watching The Flowerpot Men, with its teasing song, ‘Was it Bill or was it Ben?’ and the ritual infant response of, ‘Don’t know! Don’t know! They’re identical!’
But I remember that some of the players’ individual footballing contributions started to stand out even in that first game of Euro 96: it seemed to me, for example, that there was no point in Steve McManaman running quite so fast with the ball up the sides if nobody else from his team could keep up. Screeching to a halt, he would realise his lonely predicament and then have to entertain the ball all by himself in the corner, where he was in clear danger of having it taken off him by a bunch of bigger boys. I wondered: should he be instructed to look round to check occasionally, or would this put him off his (considerable) stride? Thank goodness I wasn’t in charge of the national team, with decisions like that to make. Meanwhile, I also noticed with interest that the crowd’s high expectations of Paul Gascoigne - they stood up and made approving noises suggestive of ‘This is it!’ or ‘We’re off now!’ or ‘Yes, yes, yes!’ whenever he got possession - were almost always doomed to early disappointment (groans all round, as he expertly passed to a nearby space with no one in it). Oddly, however, they never, ever learned from the experience.
I wrote a piece about the match, and I did not compare it (in any detail) to colonic irrigation, which I think was a relief to all concerned. But I did not start to love football at this moment. Over the following couple of days I watched umpteen group-stage matches on the TV, in fact, and lost the will to live. I found that I started doing other tasks at the same time as the footie - tasks which grew in complexity as the days went by. For example, during Germany v Czech Republic (on the Sunday) I did some dusting; during Romania v France (Monday) I made some curtains, and during Switzerland v The Netherlands (Thursday) I translated Kierkegaard from the Danish. It did not help that this was a particularly low-scoring tournament taking place in weirdly half-empty stadiums. Nor did it help that none of these foreign players was a household name in my particular household. When I now look at old footage of Euro 96, I see Dennis Bergkamp and the teenaged Patrick Kluivert, Luis Figo and Zinedane Zidane (with hair), Fabrizio Ravanelli and Gianfranco Zola, Jürgen Klinsmann and even Ally McCoist. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, and so on. But to me in 1996, all these blokes were just talented exotics, some of them with unexplained Elastoplasts stuck across their noses.
Meanwhile, the commentators said bizarre things like, ‘That was a bread and butter ball,’ and I’d get distracted thinking about types of open sandwich. The sound from my living room had become the sound from millions of other living rooms, of the droning, ‘Here’s Grumpy…to Dopey …back to Grumpy…good run from Sleepy, oh, Bashful’s found some clearance!’ All against the repeated background crowd noise of ‘Ooh’ (indicating a shot off target). I was wondering whether I should give up footie before it was too late. After all, I had a novel coming out in a month’s time; I had a lovely regular job reviewing television; my nice boyfriend liked to see me happy but he really wasn’t interested in football; my best friend actually preferred Sheffield Wednesday to this Euro stuff. Perhaps I should call it off.
So my bosses decided to get me out of the house again. Bizarrely, they sent me to Macclesfield to watch the Germans make peace with the local community - but it was nevertheless a clever move. As a television critic I led a life that rarely required me to put on outdoor shoes: the mere idea of stepping outside my front door and shutting it behind me twice in one week was alone enough to thrill my senses. Good heavens, I would have to catch a train and then reclaim the fare; indeed, I would have to find out where Macclesfield was. It was explained to me that the German team, under coach ‘Bertie’ Vogts, had been billeted to this Cheshire market town, you see (birthplace of the Hovis loaf ), possibly as some sort of punishment for being too good at football. Naturally, they complained. In particular, they caused a local uproar by claiming that their practice pitch at the Moss Rose (nice name) had stones and bits of glass in it. By the time I got there, they had apologised for any distress caused, and the Macclesfield Express Advertiser carried the headline, ‘VOGTS BACKS DOWN IN FACE OF FAN’S FURY’ - the placing of the apostrophe suggesting, unfortunately, that Macclesfield Town FC had just the one fan.
The point of sending me, I think, was that the Germans had decided to do some open training, so the locals could watch, and I could get all excited seeing the charming and popular Klinsmann at close quarters; so it was a shame that I didn’t know what
he looked like - a Macclesfield teenager eating chips on a dismal concrete terrace had to point him out as a blond-headed dot in the distance. As a pr stunt, the whole thing did lack something. ‘Are there going to be any autographs?’ asked the kids. ‘Nein,’ was the reply. As a way of deepening my interest in the tournament, the press conference (in German) wasn’t much better. They gave me a T-shirt with ‘Say no to drugs’ in German on it, but I realised I couldn’t wear it with any conviction. Drugs were starting to seem quite attractive, compared with Euro 96. I liked all this getting out and about, but the football? I watched a bunch of Germans in the distance play another bunch of Germans, with a German referee. I wondered if I was looking at the future. And the experience taught me something else: that the downside to travelling halfway up the country with a bit of footie hope in your heart is that, afterwards, you have to travel halfway down the country back again with nothing to console you for all those wasted hours.
So the only thing keeping me going, at this stage, was the BT pager, which had started off the tournament delivering quite terse and factual reports (‘England 1, Switzerland 0, Shearer 22 mins’), but by midweek was employing interesting value judgements and adjectives. It was fascinating. I loved it. I hung on its every word. It described team performances as ‘spirited’, and so on. ‘Dutch substitution de Kock for Seedorf (lucky not to be sent off )’. The worst thing was, I loved the way it went off at unexpected moments: it made me feel all connected and indispensable. I was at the checkout in Waitrose at 6.30 on the Thursday evening (packing cat food) when the balloon went up, and I had no choice: I stopped everything I was doing, grabbed the pager, and held it in front of my furrowed face, pressing its buttons. The checkout lady was impressed. She probably thought I’d be performing a kidney transplant within the hour. The message read, ‘Please keep posted for tonight’s crunch match between The Netherlands and the Swiss - goals, etc.’ Unable to pass this on, I solemnly pursed my lips and waved a hand over the groceries as if to say, ‘Well, it puts all this in perspective.’ (Which was true.)