Get Her Off the Pitch!: How Sport Took Over My Life - Lynne Truss

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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 small 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

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