Recalling those seminal moments when you just knew you
were hooked on sport
“My wife drove me to drink,”
the old joke goes, “and I never thanked her.”
I owe a similar debt of gratitude to Moscow Flyer. This wonderful
two-mile chaser from Ireland is the reason I fell in love with racing.
It was 2003. I’d gone along to The Cheltenham Festival
with a group of mates. At the time, I
wasn’t particularly interested in the sport (football and cricket were my first
loves) but was keen to explore this most convivial event, and maybe pick up a
few quid along the way. However, after a
barren first afternoon’s punting, I was looking at the second day’s card to
recoup my losses.
One of the chaps sidled up to
me and, with a conspiratorial nose-tap, told me that Moscow Flyer was a
certainty to win the Queen Mother Champion Chase. With little knowledge of my own to draw on, I
latched onto this tip. I called Paddy
Power and placed the largest bet of my life at odds of 9/4.
“Hills are going 11/4, sir,”
reported the tipster as I put the phone down.
Typical. There was only one thing for it. I called William Hill and doubled my bet.
Come race time the following
day, I was as nervous as a kitten. So
nervous, in fact, that I chose to watch the race on a tiny screen in the Arkle
Bar, a comforting Guinness in hand, rather than on the course. A couple of the chaps gave me back-slaps and
words of encouragement; I put a brave face on but inside I was churning. When Moscow Flyer’s two nearest pursuers fell
at the second last, my mate grabbed my arm and said something like, “Done it,
son!” I hate early celebrations. But, as it turned out, he was right. Moscow safely negotiated the last fence and
scooted up the famous Cheltenham hill to score comfortably.
Exhilaration and relief in
equal measure, Champagne in even greater quantities. There’s no such thing as a sporting
certainty. But I knew for sure, there
and then in the Arkle, that I’d be attending the Festival every year till the
day I die.
So, yes, the recently-retired
Kauto Star and Frankel are once-in-a-lifetime horses (we’ll allow them both
that accolade since one represents national hunt, while the other is from the
flat code). I salute them, as do all
racing fans. But there’s only one horse
I’m ever likely to get tattooed on my shoulder and I fell for him one dank
afternoon nearly a decade ago in the shadow of Cleeve Hill. Thanks again, Moscow.
--
Ipswich Town 0 West Bromwich Albion 0, October 1980
Not a fixture or a score-line
to set the pulse racing. But that’s just
the point, isn’t it? Being a football
fan is all about the misery, the hard-done-by-ship, the blind love in the face
of countless wet slaps in the face.
As such this, my first live
game, was the perfect apprenticeship. To
think, I could’ve seen the Town demolish Manchester United 6-0 had we decided
to make that fixture the previous March my cherry-popper. And that might have been the ruining of
me. Imagine an 8-year-old boy, wide-eyed
and suggestible, seeing his heroes romping all over footballing royalty (let’s
not dwell on the fact that Ashley Grimes was on the park for United). Easy, this game. Just tip up and score at will. The comedown from that would’ve been bigger
than Keith Allen’s Tuesday hangover.
No, no. Far better to witness a contest of truly
gargantuan attritional proportions. I
think it’s Nick Hornby who writes about the improbability of a goal being
scored. This, he argues, goes some way
to explaining the football fan’s euphoria when the ball actually does hit the
back of the net. Well, that
improbability was embodied in exemplary fashion that afternoon at Portman
Road. Thereafter, and forever more, I’d appreciate
a goal as would a starving man the sight of a frying pan-toting Nigella Lawson. Hell, I’d even salivate over a fizzed cross
or an ankle-crunching tackle. Anything.
My two abiding memories of
the game were as follows. Firstly, Cyril
Regis hit the bar for Albion. By a
country mile the closest either side came to scoring. Secondly, the sheer size of Terry
Butcher. I’d stopped reading fairy tales
by then but had my dad told me this was the giant from Jack And The Beanstalk,
I’d have believed him. When my hero Eric
Gates stood next to him, I feared for the little snaggle-toothed genius, lest
Butcher should come over all peckish.
--
Botham’s Ashes
“What a glorious way to go to
a six,” malaprop-ed dear old Jim Laker.
An eccentric piece of commentary to greet the completion of Ian Botham’s
century at Old Trafford against Australia in that series in 1981.
One can only imagine that
Laker, like the rest of us that summer, was stupefied by Botham’s violent
brilliance. The shot that brought his
ton up in Manchester was actually a rather cultured sweep off Ray Bright that
sailed over the long leg boundary. Prior
to that, though, the Somerset all-rounder had hooked Dennis Lillee off his nose
for a couple of maximums, often without looking at the ball as he did so.
For all its physicality and
power, this was a more cultured cricket innings than the more celebrated 149
not out at Headingley (not just my opinion but one held by Mr D K Lillee
himself). But sport’s all about
moments. And it was when Beefy ‘went to
his six’ at Old Trafford that a life-long love of Test cricket was cemented in
my nine-year-old heart.
On the downside, the 1981
Ashes was responsible for much of my mis-placed cricket optimism over the next
couple of decades or so. When your
formative memories are of a fairy tale, it’s natural to expect a happy ending
every time. Sadly, Derek Pringle, David
Capel, Chris Lewis et al were never likely to write the scripts that Botham
did.
