It was not until quite recently that I lost all but a passing interest in football. Larkin says that 'man hands on misery to man' and father hands on football to son which in my case meant being informed that I supported Notts County but I had amended that to Fulham, via a few weeks of saying I supported Forest, before we left Nottingham for Gloucester in early 1967.
Being keen and always ready to practice with the leather ball stitched up with laces, I was soon being noticed in games lessons at Dinglewell Junior School and not many will have played for a Primary school for two and a half seasons but I and another promising 9 year old were brought into their team by a coach with an eye to the future. I began at right half in an old 2-3-5 W formation but moved to inside forward via right wing by the end of that year, scoring two goals in 11 appearances. We were awarded football badges, the Dinglewell equivalent of an Oxbridge Blue, but I lost my badge and lived in terror of being dropped from the team and being asked to return my badge. I had a very tense time at one team meeting ahead of a match where Mr. Bewlay announced the team and I was not playing inside right. But thankfully the panic subsided when it turned out I was playing inside left.
Every player did their bit in their position and once, saying to my striking partner that he should stay up front while I went back to help out the pressurised defence, the
My mother was most offended in one match where we won by the only goal when I popped up and saw the chance to stick it across the goal inside the far stick and another spectator compared it to Jimmy Greaves, who was not her favourite player; once, in the crepuscular, gathering evening, away at Tredworth, the ball bounced towards me on the outskirts of the centre circle, it somehow occured to me to throw a leg at it and it became one of the six we scored that night but my favourite was away at Holbrook School, Coventry, a 1-0 away win, where all four of the forward line claimed the goal. The left winger curled it in towards the far post right footed and said nobody else had touched it, the left-side centre forward said he'd touched it but noboby else had afterwards; of course, I knew I'd got a toe to it which took those two out of the equation and I reckon it must have been over the line before the outside right made late ground to make sure. But it was my birthday, 17/10/1970, and so Mr. Wensley ruled that I was the goalscorer. We displayed the same unity and team spirit as any modern day Premiership side when, after seeing Coventry beat Forest 2-0 at Highfield Road in the afternoon, the outside right was winding me up about Forest getting beat and so I punched him in the face and gave him a nosebleed.
It wasn't until a few years ago that I resolved the discrepancy between my own record of the 70/71 season which had me as top scorer with 36 goals but the official list had not. Looking at that list again, which I still have, I dubiously included an 8-0 win over our own Reserves when our intended opposition pulled out, in which I scored 4. Like any born goal grabber, I wanted all I could get and was most put out in a 10-2 win when the teacher moved us all into unaccustomed positions and I was put back to midfield. Never mind playing thoughtful balls forward to those temporarily usurping my glamorous position, I still tried to score from midfield. And another unhappy match was the first of the 70/71 season in which I didn't score, away at Innsworth, which was also the first that the lugubrious headmaster showed up to watch the football club rather than his beloved aviary. Increasingly desperate to make sure I scored, I became more selfish and abandoned any sense of team spirit. Afterwards the headmaster said I was rubbish and I suppose he had a point that day but we and him never did get on.
Ever the maverick, there I am in the picture, wandering into free space, back stick, at a corner in the home match v. Theodore Pritchett's School from Birmingham, that ended 0-0, socks round my ankles. I treasured my George Best Stylo Matchmaker boots which felt like slippers compared to the hobnail boots with toecaps that some were expected to play in. And they allowed me to do whatever George had done on telly the previous week, like, one on one with the goalie, take it round him and pass into an empty goal or face up to a goalie trying to drop kick it out but kick it out of his possession when he did so (which, just for the record, results in a free kick to them for foul play).But the highlight of those golden years was the Gloucester Junior Schools Cup Quarter Final, away at Grange, a school for hard knocks compared to us stylish pretty boys from leafy Hucclecote. A sloping pich, mudbath, pouring rain on a Saturday morning with a busload of the Netball team and parents providing support. I don't think we were ever ahead. We got back level at 2-2 when the ball came in from the left, bounced in front of me, controlled it with the right foot, set it up with the left and, bang, over the goalie's right shoulder into the onion bag. Sadly, watched from the halfway line by me, our goalie fumbled one like Peter Mellor did for Fulham later in the 1975 Cup Final and we were out of the cup, 3-2, after what seemed like inordinate heroics that still fell short.
My career ambitions extended to no more than being a footballer in winter and a cricketer in summer but Gloucester was not a place to live if one wanted to do that. It is a Rugby Union heartland and football as such was proscribed at senior school, the idea being that football allowed too much individual flair and rugby was a team game in which no individual (apart from the one who was to play for England Under 19's) could run the game. Mr. W.G.F. Bradford did a very convincing impression of a bloodthirsty sadist in making games afternoons into a brutal misery which had no place for my immense talent for kicking a round ball but concentrated on brawling over an odd-shaped one. To this day, I can hardly watch rugby union without some horror, resentment or mystified enquiry into where any beauty might reside in such heavyweight machismo. There was a five a side football tournament run by a more enlightened Science teacher but it was like the French Resistance- subversive in a culture of madness but, as I approached the age of 15, I realized that time was running out if I was going to break Billy Bremner's record of being the youngest ever to appear in a First Division match. I needed a team to play for in order to give the talent scouts from the big clubs, or any club, a chance to spot me. and then it happened.
My dad came home from work one Friday night and told me I was playing on Sunday. The Sunday League team that a few blokes from his office played for were one short and, one of the many great things he ever did for me, he had got me in. They were, as it happened, bottom of Division 5 of the Gloucester Sunday League, winless, and pointless, I think, but it was a start. They were called FC Spartak, a disparate bunch of absolutely heroic renegades, and played in green and black stripes and whatever shorts and socks you happened to have until finding enough cash to buy an all green kit.
It was an education, playing left side of a front three, lightweight and wide-eyed in what was effectively a completely different sport to the lunchtime kickabouts at school in which I could dominate. The Gloucester Sunday League Division 5 is not a football academy. But after a debut in which I only remember one incident of possession at an acute angle in the penalty box when I thought it was then or never, apart from first touches and knocking it off to burlier team mates, it was a bit embarrassing to find that I was picked the following week and the good-hearted but profoundly ungifted bloke who had got me into the team was made substitute. We finished bottom of the Gloucester Sunday League that season, probably 1975/76, but won a trophy. An ex-player who had taken up refereeing tipped us off in the closing weeks of the season that he had seen the tables for the Sportmanship Trophy and that if we played nicely, didn't get booked or sent off for the rest of the season, we could win it. So, for the last few matches, we went and fetched the ball for the oppsition for throw-ins, never complained, usually got beat about 3-0 and somewhere upstairs, I still have my Football Sportsmanship Trophy.
Halfway through the next season, we were doing a bit better. Players had come and gone, the goalie had got injured and become manager (more about him in a minute) and in the pub after a match, just before Christmas, while I was nursing a (presumably terrible) light ale, it was asked who was our top scorer. I said I had six and so that pretty much settled it.
We had been headline makers in November 1975 when the report in the local paper proclaimed FIRST LEAGUE WIN FOR FC SPARTAK, when it says, because I have it here, we were 2-0 down vs. Trophy Taverners after 16 minutes but retrieved the situation to win 4-3. My other archive piece is from Feb 1976, reporting our second win, against G.P.O. Reserves 3-2, in which we 'took an early lead through David Green', but it was my misfortune that the England manager of the time was probably not a reader of the Gloucester Citizen. I've looked up who it was, it was Don Revie. And that, I think, is where it all went wrong. He was not my sort of manager. Either side of him, Joe Mercer or Ron Greenwood, I could have had a chance but not with Don Revie. To this day, I still abhor his Leeds United team from the early 70's that got him that job when everybody knows it would have been far more interesting to appoint Brian Clough who, quite possibly didn't read the local paper from Gloucester either.
They talk about players who make it look as if they have 'time on the ball', people like Tony Currie or Paul Gascoigne. I remember one goal where I made it look as if I had hours. I would have had hours if I hadn't decided to belt it hopefully from 40 yards out.
We got beat 5-2 that day but were probably 4-1 down at the time. I was in possession in centre midfield, looked up and wondered what to do, looked out to my left where one ex-Dinglewell colleague said he didn't want it. So I looked out to my right where another one said he didn't either but advised that I could score from there. It was a timeless moment, like when Edward Thomas's train stopped at Adlestrop and 'no-one left and no-one came', certainly nobody from the other team came to tackle me. I perhaps gave some thought to the essay on Shakespeare I was going to do for Linden Huddleston that afternoon and then I took one of my trademark, textbook swings of that golden right leg of mine, put it over the goalie who was either off his line or watching the match on the next pitch and then I turned round and went back to line up for the restart.
That goal took hours, it seemed, but the best I scored for Spartak was pure instinct, class and very few others could have snapped it up. Corner, or cross, from the left. Busy penalty area. I'm to the right of the penalty spot. Our talented but vain, self-regarding Italian waiter of a midfielder thinks it's all his goal but it comes spinning off the outside of his right foot. I've got less than no time to re-adjust, make the shape to play a difficult ball coming to me at waist height and plant it in the back of the net and then pretend that he'd provided the chance rather than screwed it up himself and made it much harder for me.
I think we got promoted that season, having finished seventh, but teams packed up and new ones were formed and 7th was considered good enough to play at the next level. But, having been brought to Spartak by one who I displaced in the side, I had brought in other old muckers from the Dinglewell days and when we ended up with more forward players than we needed, it was me was who moved eventually through midfield, which I enjoyed enormously, to full back. I had one pre-season friendly playing in the middle of a back three, which should have been terrifying but passed off without undue alarm and so I might claim to have played in every position in competitive matches except goalkeeper but only madmen and Albert Camus do that.
In one match towards the end of my career, at the age of 17, playing right back, the manager (as mentioned from above) brought on a sub in the second half and put him upfront. Stevie had never played upfront in his life, didn't know what to do and didn't like it. He came to me and asked if I wanted to swap. Of course I did. Five minutes later, back in the old routine, edge of the box, me, back of the net. Afterwards the manager says, good goal, Dave, but what were you doing there. I said I swapped with Stevie.
Can you imagine what control freaks like Ferguson or Mourinho would do if their players had done that but our manager hadn't even noticed, or even realized that he had put two players out of position and we had corrected it for ourselves.
But that would have been the last goal I scored. I wasn't interested enough in football to play full back when I'd been addicted to that happy drug of scoring goals. I belatedly turned my attention to A levels but it was too late, I had been squandering my weekends working in a shop on Saturdays (which was to come in very useful later), playing football on Sundays and not doing the required work on History, French or even the books on the Eng Lit courses that I didn't like.
And so I spent decades wondering, like George Best, where it all went wrong. And it was partly due to football, and partly due to work, and partly due to all the other circumstances, that although I went to what is now rated a Top Ten Grammar School and also what is now a Top Ten University (although it was more like Bottom Ten in 1978-81), that I arrived here like this, happy enough, having not really imagined any more than this and not even knowing what it should have been.
And football continues, with all its controversies and wunderkind, without me.
