This is just a little ramble through the realms of silliness.
A Christmas Wish
Bobby looked around him at the tables of smiling faces, many slightly blurred with drink after more than three hours of the Chronicle’s Sports Review of the Year dinner. Bobby himself was still stone-cold sober having been tipped the wink in advance that he was the recipient of the evening’s final and most prestigious award. Waiters were going around with champagne, a sure sign that another toast was about to be drunk and another award given. Mentally Bobby girded his loins and waited for his name to be called.
A well-known sports journalist, himself a former footballer, came to the platform and began to speak. He started with quite a lot of guff about the Chronicle’s championship of sport in Britain, before descending to a series of commercials disguised as thanks as he mentioned a series of commercial sponsors “without whom none of this would be possible”. At last he arrived at the crux of the matter - “We are here to honour a man known both for his modesty and his quiet consistency in ‘the beautiful game’; a man who exemplifies all that is best in British sport . . .”
After three minutes of acclamation and adulation as a montage of moving pictures flitted across the screen behind him he reached Bobby’s name and gestured to him to join him on to the platform, and while Bobby skirted numerous tables, a royal Duchess made her more sedate way from a conveniently placed table where she had been sitting with the afore mentioned sponsors to the other side of the platform. They met in the middle and a leggy blonde brought on the misshapen lump of metal which constituted the Chronicle Sportsman of the Year Award and handed it to the royal personage.
She made a few formal remarks before saying that on a personal note how much her son (briefly an England Schoolboy) admired and modelled himself upon Bobby. She graciously presented the award to him and at last it was Bobby’s turn to speak.
“Tonight,” he said, “fittingly for the time of year, we have dined on turkey and Christmas pudding, and it was after just such another meal at my Gran’s on Christmas day 1979 that my footballing career took off.
“Now, you may well ask what a turkey dinner has to do with football, and I have often asked myself the same question, but I shall come to that later.
“I was born in 1966 - a great year for English football; in fact I was named Robert Geoffrey after Bobbies Moore and Charlton and Geoff Hurst. My mother even claims I took my first breath as Kenneth Wolstenholme uttered those memorable words ‘They think it’s all over: it is now.’ Before I could even walk I was kitted out in the green and yellow of Hardcastle Rovers each Saturday to accompany my parents to the match. My first shoes were miniature football boots and my first words ‘Up the Rovers!’ I was born to be a footballer, and my only surprise is that I haven’t got ten younger brothers to make up the rest of the team.
“At primary school all my dad’s hard training paid off and at the age of seven I was selected to play for the school team. The fact that there were only twenty three children - just ten of them boys - in the whole of the juniors so that we had to have Big Tracy in goal may have had something to do with this decision, but at the time I liked to believe that I had been selected on merit. At ten-and-a-half I was School Football Captain - Steve, the other boy in my year was a demon bowler and thus captain of the cricket team.
“My rude awakening came when I moved to Hardcastle Comprehensive, and did not make the under 12 team - not even the second eleven - the general consensus of opinion being that I was too weedy and slow. I did eventually get to play a few games as injuries, twelfth birthdays, homework and lack of interest overtook those deemed more talented than I, but I have to confess that I did not distinguish myself.
“My school reports at the time commend me for my enthusiasm and hard work, but the games master makes no mention of talent which seems at that stage to have been singularly lacking. By the time I was thirteen my self-esteem was at a low ebb; I had hardly had a proper game in more than a year and was reduced to lugging nets and balls about in order even to be included on the bench. Even my dad couldn’t help me as I was too old for the Cubs’ team of which he was manager, although he did appoint me assistant coach.
“And now we reach the turkey. Not the turkey I was when it came to playing football, but my Gran’s Christmas turkey. That Christmas dinner was my Christmas dinner; not only was it my turn for the wish bone, but I also got the silver sixpence in the pudding. And I wished! I wished so hard on both of them that I might be selected for the team for the next game and score a goal in every match I played.
“Now, the first match of the new term happened to coincide with a nasty fluey cold which was doing the rounds in school, so for the first time since I had advanced to the Under 14 age-group I was selected for the team. Imagine my disappointment when the position for which I was chosen turned out to be goal-keeper! How was I to score a goal from there?
“By half-time I was quite pleased with myself as I had managed to keep a clean sheet. Mind you, so had the guy at the other end, and we went into the second half at nil-nil, and it stayed that way as the rest of the players wallowed around in mud in the middle of the field, mis-passing the ball from one team to the other. It was not a good game. In the eighty-third minute a mis-kick sent the ball skittering into the outside of my side netting, and I at last had something to do - a goal kick. I thwacked that ball as hard as I could, and it went sailing over the heads of both teams and rolled straight into the opposition goal where their keeper had been standing picking his nose and was taken completely by surprise.
“We finished one-nil and I was the hero, the man of the match.
“Of course it was a fluke - everyone said so, and I didn’t disagree; but with the flu epidemic still raging I found myself selected for the team three more times - each time as a last-minute substitute for a stricken player. And I scored three more goals - twice as a mid-fielder and once as a winger.
“By the end of the season I was a regular fixture in the team, usually brought on as a substitute in the second half, and generally regarded as no better than a moderate footballer, but a tryer. Nobody was more surprised than the games-master when he added up the season’s results and found that I was the top scorer having scored a goal in every single game in which I had played.
“By the end of the next season my goal-scoring record was unblemished, and I was featured in the Hardcastle Evening Times as something of a footballing phenomenon. Various scouts came to look at me, but most - despite my goal-scoring record - remained unimpressed by my general level of play. Only the Hardcastle coach thought it worth giving me a trial, and I started to train with their youth team.
“At this time Hardcastle was languishing low in the fourth division - above the relegation zone, but not far enough for comfort. To make matters worse any player with a modicum of talent was quickly acquired by another and better team, and we youngsters had a better chance of being selected at least for the reserves if not for the first team than in most league clubs where the Chairman wasn’t working on a deliberate policy of cut your losses and run.
“At sixteen I was signed properly for a failing club - my beloved Hardcastle Rovers; and when our new chairman was elected bringing in cash and a clean sweep policy I was one of the few players kept on to take part in our meteoric five season rise from fourth to first division. I’ve seen our new stadium built. I was there at the dawn of the Premiership. I’ve been capped twenty-eight times for my country, and I’ve scored in every single one of those twenty-eight games. Not bad for a man described on They Think It’s All Over as ‘playing with all the panache of a hippopotamus in a tutu’.
“And do you know the funniest thing of all? I sort of agree. I’m not a great footballer. I’m not stylish. I’m not fast. I’m not even particularly accurate. But I’m a very lucky goal-scorer, and I put that down to my Gran’s Christmas turkey back in 1979. I don’t know whether I believe in magic, but I do know that the boost that lucky goal in January 1980 gave to my self-confidence and self-esteem as a player set me on the road to success which even my parents - football fanatics that they are - never dared to imagine.
“So, as I accept this magnificent award, I would like to thank my parents, and my Gran, and her turkey for setting me on the path which led to this wonderful day. And I should like to thank Tracy, my wife, for all her support too.
“Which leads me to one last little point. In 1988 I had just split with my then girlfriend and was spending Christmas with my Gran again. I won the wishbone and the found the silver sixpence. I wished that I might meet a girl who really cared about football and understood it the way that Big Tracy had way back at primary school. Two weeks later I was asked to open a new sports shop in Hardcastle town centre, and who should the manageress be but Big Tracy, now slim, svelte, beautiful Tracy. The rest, as they say, is history.
“But if somebody would like to send out to the kitchen and ask them to collect up all the wishbones they can find left over from this superb meal we have just finished, I should like to sort out England’s winning the next World Cup, after which I shall retire a happy, happy man.”
