TAKE A LONG, HARD LOOK AT THE portrait of myself and the Baker boy that accompanies this column. I know what you are thinking. It speaks, unless I’m very much mistaken, of powerful media figures, men right at the heart of international football. Of fingers on the pulse, ears to the ground and friends in altitudinal locations. Of private jets careering between Fifa HQ in Geneva, the Glazers’ ranch and sumptuous dinners aboard Roman Abramovich’s diamond-encrusted yacht.
Sadly, in my case at least, the facts are far more mundane. I hardly ever meet the great and the good, never get summoned to cosy tête-à-têtes and, on the rare occasions I’m invited to a starry bash, have to scan the guest list with a jeweller’s eyepiece to make sure the event is devoid of people liable to take violent exception to something I’ve said or written. The monkey suit gathers dust.
All of which is fine by me. What my (cough, cough) work does do is put me in touch with people who, in their very different ways, continue to remind me why football — for all the flaws so often, and jauntily, aired on this very page — continues to be the official Greatest Game On Earth. Of course, it’s end-of-year-round-up o’clock, so what follows is a list of a few folk who, in the past 12 months, have lit up my life, brought a smile to my fizzog or caused my eyebrows to shoot north of my hairline in amazement.
IN SEPTEMBER, I interviewed Mick Jones, the legendary guitarist with the Clash. Over several days he spoke with emotional frankness about his extraordinary life. And his love of football. Mick has a season ticket at Queens Park Rangers, an apparent magnet for musical mavericks, attracting the regular devotion of the Cure’s Robert Smith, notorious socialiser Pete Doherty and highbrow minimalist Michael Nyman. But the real eye-popper was Mick’s revelation that, before his stint at the white-hot forefront of punk rock revolution, the pubescent Jones had brought just as much passion to the activity of collecting footballers’ autographs.
“My weekend started on Friday evenings,” he told me. “In those days a lot of teams used to come down on the Friday and stay in hotels around Russell Square and so we used to go there first. Then other teams would arrive in the morning at the stations and we would meet them there. Then we’d go to the game, and we’d see them before the game when they were coming in, and then we’d watch the game, and then afterwards we’d try to get them just after the game when they came out to get on the coach. And then you’d rush to the station to catch a few teams there. I’ve got this fantastic book, which was the year after the World Cup, where I’ve got the whole World Cup-winning team in it. I’ve still got the book . . . George Best, Denis Law . . . Tommy Steele.”
WHEN CHELSEA PLAYED Barcelona in the Champions League, the secretary of the Barça Supporters Club (London branch) came to visit my BBC London radio show. Anna Revall is her name and she was preceded into the studio by a couple of fellow fans whose very ordinariness left me woefully underprepared for the fantasia that followed. Anna, you see, is simply the most beautiful human being with whom I have shared a space. It wasn’t just me; as she passed by, hard-working radio folk of every age and gender were swooning like Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Raven-tressed and aristocratically Hispanic, she looked like Ava Gardner’s more glamorous little sister. She smelt like the Chelsea Flower Show.
So stunned was I by this apparition that I proceeded to conduct one of the most disgracefully fawning radio interrogations in living memory. Even when I finally worked up the professional pride required to question her assertion — her soft, brown-eyed, limpid assertion — that the Catalan giants would win the tournament, the best I could do was to put my head slightly to one side, open my eyes puppy-wide and titter, “Do you really think so?” Last week’s Champions League draw, which means that Barcelona will again visit the capital, has filled me with dread. I’m honestly not sure that I, or what remains of my reputation, could survive another visitation from the divine Señorita Revall.
HY MONEY IS ANOTHER extraordinary woman. Thirty-five years ago, the South London housewife was let down at the last minute by her husband and was forced to take her three young sons to see Crystal Palace. A keen amateur photographer, she took along her trusty Nikon SLR. Hy (it’s short for Hyacinth) had never been to a match before and cared nothing for football. Within minutes, though, she realised that the game was physical poetry and began snapping away.
The rest is like a film script. She wrote to the club and asked if she could have one of those yellow bibs and go behind the goal. The club said no. She wrote again. The club said seriously, no. Finally she wrote to Bert Head, the manager. Bert said, “Go on, why not?” And so, for three decades, Hy has been in and around the Palace pitch, training ground and dressing-room. Her massive new book, Hy On Palace (www.hymoney.co.uk), is simply the most intimate portrait of a football club ever made. Highlights include Palace players wincing as famous 1970s “light comedy actress” Fiona Richmond bares her breasts at a training session (it’s a long story) and the delightful sight of Ian Wright, Mark Bright and Bruce Dyer wearing nothing but soap suds. Such a project could never happen again — football ain’t like that any more (Palace, of course, have taken slight umbrage at the tome) and there aren’t too many Hy Moneys around.
IN APRIL, 17-YEAR-OLD Ryan Smith scored an incredible 16 goals for his Grimsby-based club, Expression Colts, against Holton-le-Clay Grasshoppers. When I interviewed him on the phone, Uefa was busy ratifying it as an individual record. Ryan was busy proving that the good folk of northeast Lincolnshire are not as easily excited as the giddy gits of the London media. There were some reasonable interchanges between us, but mostly Ryan was just keeping his excitement, as he said, “inside”. He certainly wasn’t letting it “outside” and I mean him absolutely no disrespect when I repeat here a selection of exchanges from what may have been the longest four minutes of my transistorised life.
Me (bushy-tailed): “Sixteen goals! Sixteen! Is that unusual for you?”
Ryan (tail determinedly supine): “Yeah . . .”
Me: “I understand you’re playing at quite a high standard of football.”
Ryan: “Mmm . . .”
Me: “Why are other teams so poor?”
Ryan: “Dunno.”
Me: “You really are very excited about this record, aren’t you?”
Ryan: “Er, yeah.”
By the end of the season, Ryan had scored an incredible 60 of his club’s 90 goals. Neither I, nor presumably the stout yeomen of Holton-le-Clay Grasshoppers, will ever forget him.
AND FINALLY THERE’S José Mourinho. I recently spent 20 minutes with him at Stamford Bridge. He was polite, smart and engaging. When I asked him what he hoped for in 2006, he said without a trace of phoniness: “Peace . . . and love. Love for my family. Love for every family.” It’s hard to dislike a bloke with his priorities so obviously right. And it’s very easy to warm to someone who, if I have it correct, likes a bit of mischief.
I asked him if he missed playing. With his usual honesty, he replied that, no, he didn’t miss it and that, anyway, he hadn’t been a very good player. Nor, I went on, were Arsène Wenger (José nodded in agreement) or Sir Alex Ferguson. “Oh?” he chimed in, now suddenly meercat-alert, “but he played for Glasgow Rangers.”
“Yes,” I replied, “but from what some Rangers supporters have told me, he was the very worst player ever to pull on that blue jersey.” There was a long silence. Then the Mourinho eyebrows slowly rose into a perfect “is that a fact?” arch. He let out a little strangulated giggle, like that of a child watching their father fall over while trying to demonstrate how to rollerskate. And finally, I swear, I saw him mentally filing this new gobbet of information away, to be pulled up and dusted off the next time he and Sir Fergie are getting outside a bottle of Casa Ferreirinha 1992.
A happy and healthy Christmas to Mick, Anna, Hy, Ryan, José and the rest of you.
NEXT WEEK: DANNY BAKER
What do you think?
E-MAIL: dannyanddanny@hotmail.co.uk
