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

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The picture that eventually appeared with my piece, incidentally, was one of the first taken that night - about an hour before the match even started. It was in black and white, and showed the stadium half-full. The novelty was that the photographer was sending his pictures digitally from the airship via his computer and mobile phone, which was pioneer technology in 1996. The battery on his computer allowed him to send about three pictures before it ran down. It was such a shame. The picture did nothing to capture the thrill of being in a small but very airy room with a view of that glowing arena surrounded by eerily deserted - and ever-darkening - parks and gardens and streets.

      The three England goals in the second half were all as fabulous from an aerial perspective as I’m sure they were from the ground. The first came from a corner: Gascoigne (it turned out) delivering a high, high ball into the thick of the English heads in front of goal, and then - bang! It was in the net. Having no access to replays, we didn’t quite believe what we’d seen; it was so very quick and efficient. But we heard the cheers, and then the pager told us it was Teddy Sheringham who’d scored, and it was now 2-0, and I explained to Susan why it was a nice thing that Sheringham had done it, as this was his first goal in the competition, and she patiently put up with this bizarre instant-expertise stuff because she could tell I was excited. By this time Corky was on borrowed time, and we knew it, but we kept very quiet as we didn’t want to jog him out of the circling - which I ought to mention had momentously reversed direction at half time.

      What of the third goal? Well, it was marvellous in, again, a different way. This one was all about (yes!) getting the ball from one end of the field to the other using only white players and resisting the temptation to just knock it a long way forward and hope the right chap got to it first. It was a glorious bit of dynamic teamwork, magical to see, and it culminated in three attackers ranged in a line across the goal, with Gascoigne (as I now know) passing it immediately right to Sheringham; and then Sheringham tricking everyone by neatly side-footing it right again to Shearer, who had a clear shot at goal. Even the photographer started to get excited at this point. England had never beaten the Netherlands in any European Championships before, or in any World Cup either, apparently. The score now stood at 3-0, and we couldn’t help wondering, if you dropped a piece of chocky cake onto the pitch from this height by way of celebration, what would happen? How soon would it reach terminal velocity? Would it disintegrate? Or maybe form itself into a perfect sphere, on the same physical principle used in the manufacture of lead-shot? Or, if it landed - whump! - on Dennis Bergkamp’s head, could it possibly knock him out? After all, by the time the police could work out what had happened, we could be miles away, possibly over the Channel.

      I will always be grateful to Corky that we saw the fourth England goal before we had to tear ourselves away that night. Again it was different; again it was beautiful, and somehow pre-ordained. A great surge from England culminated in the somewhat useless Darren Anderton taking a running shot at goal, which was deflected by the hapless Dutch keeper (Edwin van der Sar, whose name, at the time, meant nothing). The loose ball was picked up with lightning speed by Sheringham and there it was again - bam - back of the net, 4-0, glorious. Now we could hear the cheering, all right. But we really needed to get going, as there is a quite sensible law about flying airships over London after dark, and we had to get back to Surrey rather sharpish. Corky put on an astonishing lick of speed, shooting us back across London, across the river, over Putney Heath and Richmond Park, down the A3. We were all exhausted but extremely happy as we watched the darkening - and somewhat misty - landscape pass beneath us, and realised with a certain alarm that we were keeping pace with cars on the A3 travelling at 50 miles an hour. But it had been magical. I found myself humming ‘Lift Up Your Hearts’ for the first time since school, and waiting for the inevitable show of emotion from the pager, to see if it matched my own.

      We landed back at Woking and were greeted by the chaps in boiler suits. When the engine was finally switched off, it was like having someone take a nail out of your head: for the next few days I was so sensitive to motor noise that I jumped in the air whenever the fridge started up. But what a great night to be converted - finally - to football. Three weeks earlier, I hadn’t heard of Alan Shearer. Now I wanted to have his babies. Three weeks earlier, the mind-altering experiment had seemed quite harmless and (at worst) reversible. Now the damage was done. I had learned to cheer and grumble, love and loathe. During the England-Spain quarter-final a couple of days later, I stood there at Wembley wringing my hands in misery at how badly England played. ‘Why are you passing it to Gascoigne?’ I yelled (he was on terrible, dozy form that day). ‘You might as well pass it to the cat, son! You might as well dig your own grave and jump in it!’ England survived that quarter-final, although we all knew they didn’t deserve to. But the following Wednesday, when England lost on penalties to Germany in the semi-final, I was all the more blank with grief, all the more inconsolable. I felt that I had been with our boys, in some sort of spiritual, eternal way, through the extremes of thick and thin.

      It was impossible to imagine how Euro 96 might have passed entirely over my head, had I never had that lunch with Keith and David. Might I have heard the news of England’s defeat with complete unconcern? God knows. Plenty of my friends certainly took no notice of Euro 96 and were blithely unaffected by its outcome. All I know is that, on the morning after England-Germany, I slung the food into the cat bowls and went back to bed to stare at the ceiling. No light-hearted songs today, kitties. No bath-running or kettle-boiling during the sports bits at twenty-five past the hour, either. On the contrary: I turned up the volume for Garry Richardson and cried softly onto the pillow, while desperately figuring whether - if I rigged it up to the mains and stood in a bucket of water - I could use the pager to kill myself.

       THE MATCH

      Less than a year later, by the time of the FA Cup semi-final at Old Trafford between Chesterfield and Middlesbrough in April 1997, I had come on a bit, footie-wise. In fact, it was terrifying how quickly I became a football bore after such a brief initiation. Many friends simply stopped talking to me, because all my stories seemed to involve either the manager of Wolverhampton Wanderers or balls grazing crossbars in the 89th minute. ‘Come round and watch the Newcastle match,’ I would say, and then wonder why they always had alternative plans. My boyfriend took me on a romantic weekend to a nice hotel in the New Forest which I spoiled by exclaiming, as we passed the bar on the way up to our room, ‘Oh, thank God, they’ve got Sky Sports.’

      The thing was, I was now attending football every week, as part of my arrangement with The Times. Possibly acting from a sense of guilt when they saw how much Euro 96 had disturbed my normal equilibrium, my masters gently suggested I go once a week to a football match, sit in the stands with the supporters, and write a column about it. They did publish this column, I hasten to add. It wasn’t a considerate plot to help me through a difficult patch. And in a way, of course, it was a continuation of the experiment. Let’s see if this woman really likes football, then, when she finds out it normally takes place firmly at ground level, out of doors in gritty northern stadiums in the freezing rain, and involves watching everyday league players run around banging into each other (in the absence of such advanced international features as steering, acceleration or brakes).

      Thus, one week I might go to watch Division Three Brighton and Hove Albion against Torquay United at the local Goldstone ground; the next I’d be at the Premiership match between Southampton and Middlesbrough at the Dell; then it would be England v Poland (World Cup qualifier) at Wembley. They called the column ‘Kicking and Screaming’ but it was quite clear to anyone reading it that I was having a high old time, and didn’t need to be dragged anywhere against my will. In fact, on weeks when there was no Saturday football (international call-ups being to blame), I would kiss the cats goodbye in the morning and then stand with my coat on at the front door, clutching my car key and rolled-up umbrella, just sort-of refusing to accept that I had no match to go to.

      And it was a pretty good season, 1996-97, if you leave aside the fact that Manchester United ultimately won the league for the second year running. To the casual onlooker, this was a season notable mainly for the burgeoning practice of pinning outlandish hopes on foreign players, whose presence not only lent all kinds of new glamour to the game, but finally legitimised

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