Fantasy football
Jeremy Clarke
A rc we playing the Hun?' said Uncle Jack for about the 50th time. (He's 93 and has a short memory.) We are, Uncle,' I said. Then, exactly at the moment when Steve Gerrard scored our second goal, he turned to me and said, 'What's that written on your T-shirt?' I leapt up and sprinted twice around the room, shouting 'Yes! Yes!' and waving my clenched fist at him. It's very annoying, this habit of him inaugurating conversations about unrelated subjects when there's football on telly.
When I sat down again I told him that the T-shirt said CCCP, then fixed my eyes on the telly, hoping to nip this one in the bud. But he wasn't going to let this one go. 'And what does CCCP signify?' he said, intent on getting to the bottom of the matter. (The succession of large whiskies had slackened his jaw and two diverging gobs of spittle flew out of his mouth when he got to the `P'.) 1 showed him the hammer and sickle on the sleeve. It's Russian for Soviet Union, Uncle,' I said. They were flogging them off cheap down the market this morning.' He opened his mouth to say something, thought better of it, closed it again, and returned his attention to the screen, where young Stevie Gerrard was being buried under a growing mound of jubilant team-mates.
'Absolutely disgraceful!' said Rex, the other member of the family present on that incredible evening. Rex is a rugger-bugger and strongly disapproves of men kissing each other. He's just had his knee rebuilt with chromium and titanium and is staying at our place for a month to recover from the operation. He was watching the match with his leg on a pouffe, nursing a goldfish bowl-sized gin and tonic. Much as he hates men kissing each other, though, ex-army officer Rex is a staunch patriot. When it became clear that we had the Hun on the run, rugger-bugger or no, he was as jubilant as the rest of us.
During the second half, when you couldn't take your eyes off the screen for a second in case you missed something, Uncle Jack wanted to talk about the desert campaign in north Africa during the second world war. It was as if playing the Germans had provoked him into thinking about his experiences there for the first time in years. He was an officer in an antiaircraft battery, he said, but he remembered having to fire his gun at German tanks. 'I was up and down that desert like a bloody yo-yo,' he said. Then he burst into tears.
In the second half, when Owen had put us three up, the commentator mentioned that before the game the bookmakers had been offering odds of 100-1 against a 3-1 win for England. 'I wouldn't have minded having £100 on that if I'd known they were offering those sort of odds,' said Rex. 'What's a hundred £100s?' I said, unwinding a bit now we were two goals ahead. Rex tugged at his military moustache but his mental arithmetic failed him. So we batted the mathematical problem over to Uncle Jack, who, when he wasn't fighting Germans, was a stockbrocker in the City. Ten thousand,' he sobbed. Most of the time Uncle Jack doesn't know where he is. But ask him a question about money and he's all there, even when he's crying.
By the time England's fourth goal had gone in, Uncle Jack had recovered his composure somewhat. 'My God!' he exclaimed. '4-1! The concentration camps will be full up tonight!' Then Rex said he was on the metro in Munich once and was surprised to see that Dachau was one of the stops. I said I'd been to Auschwitz. Uncle Jack told us he'd visited Belsen soon after it was liberated.
In the 74th minute, Mum came in with the supper trays. Pilchard salad. 'What's the score?' she said. Dear Mum loves her country, the Lord Jesus Christ, and any televised sport with a significant element of violence in it. The last she'd heard, England were a goal down and struggling. She was prepared for the worst. So when we said it was 4-1 to England, she clasped her hand to her mouth and had to support herself with a hand on the mantlepiece. Then, amazingly, before our very eyes, Heskey rifled in the fifth. Forgetting the tray on my lap. I jumped to my feet. A pilchard in tomato sauce and a spring onion hit Rex on the leg and shoulder. Flinching to avoid the incoming salad, his leg slipped off the pouffe. As it hit the floor, jarring the new titanium and chromium knee, Rex cried out in agony. 'How wonderful!' said Mum. Uncle Jack burst into tears again.
After the final whistle we opened the bottle of champagne that we keep at the back of the pantry for special occasions. 'We beat the Hun 5-1, did you say?' said Uncle Jack, incredulously, as he raised his glass.
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