Cottage kids
Kim Fletcher
JUST when you think you've had it with football, had it with cheating and whining, hyperbole and money, philandering players and replica kits; just when you see your 25year love affair for what it is, football reaches out and drags you back.
Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United are going full tilt for the finishing line, a genuine drama created without the aid of television, and you can't help watching. It's fascinating at the other end too, where Fulham are making a late dash for relegation. Seven defeats in their last eight games have sent the team spinning towards a fearful fight. If the fans are worried, imagine how Mohamed Al Fayed is feeling. He spent £30 million on players selected to conquer Europe, not take on Rotherham United. I'd laugh too, if only I weren't holding a season ticket.
I know, I know. I've no business getting involved. I never saw Johnny Haynes, never heard a Tommy Trinder gag, wasn't around west London in the days when Rodney Marsh, George Best and Bobby Moore played out their twilight years in Fulham shirts. But if no one has any business following a team without family or geographical connection, I do at least live up the road.
Those who migrate to London divide in two: they pick Arsenal, Chelsea or Spurs, or they gravitate towards Queen's Park Rangers, West Ham or Fulham. It is the second group that has a sense of romance — or humour.
Nowadays, of course, there is no inherent moral superiority in choosing Fulham. Their success — last season they played the most beautifully fluent football I have ever seen — has been bought by Mr Fayed. Bodyguards at his side, he struts across the pitch, enjoying from the crowd a welcome that he gets nowhere else. We know he is a bad man. Is it moral to watch his team?
Perhaps not. But to stroll the mile and a half down the Thames to Fulham is to escape into the past. Fans meet peacefully at the Crabtree pub. The voice of Andy Williams drifts over neighbouring terraced houses, spun — surely it is still vinyl — for the gathering crowd by that sometime voice of Radio One, Diddy Dave Hamilton. Better still, you can stand to watch, as if Hillsborough had never happened. Was it really Easter Monday 2002, with a breeze coming off the spring tide and only the crows from Bishops Park to disturb the minute's silence for the Queen Mother? Listen to those God Bless 'Er West Ham fans from the East End, picking up the National Anthem so lustily (and no, don't tell me that it was just National Front sympathies at play).
To any sports fan prone to nostalgia — is there any other kind? — this is wonderful. I thought perhaps it was just me, but when I lent my ticket the other week to a Spurs fan it turned him and his brother into boys again. At the end they loitered outside the Cottage changing rooms, scent of the showers on the evening air, regretting only that they no longer carried autograph albums.
Catch it while you can. Mr Fayed hasn't bought the club to run a museum. He is knocking down Craven Cottage this summer. The team is to spend next season at Queen's Park Rangers before returning to a 30,000 all-seater ground constructed of gleaming stainless steel. Let us give his dubious morality the benefit of the doubt. Let us hope they are still a Premier League team when they return.
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