Football, In Lieu of a Father

I never had a father growing up, but I did have football.

It’s strange: never before have I thought to juxtapose those two truths. As clear to me as they have always been, I’ve never before attempted to build a tangible link between them. But, now that we’re here, I suppose the truth is that football, whether I was watching it, playing it, or being totally willingly consumed by it, inadvertently provided me with a father I never had, in ways I likely never would have understood at the time.

Growing up I had a complicated relationship with my mother — that is to provide as laughably succinct a summary of my occasionally tempestuous childhood as possible — and a completely non-existent one with my father.

To cut a long story short, and to provide you with only slightly less information on the subject than I myself have; my mother and father were never really together. The pregnancy from which I came into the world was unplanned and my father, though never a magician by trade, performed such a spectacular disappearing act upon hearing the news of my mother’s proof of fertility that his loss was to be felt as keenly by me as it was the world of amateur illusionists.

I was born in the winter of ‘92 and was, so I’m told, almost immediately (albeit unofficially) adopted by my grandparents—Nan and Grandad, Brenda and Ron—who doted on me and who between them shared not a single fault. Well, perhaps there was one glaring fault: they weren’t particularly into football. But I was keen to change that.

I don’t remember the first football match I ever watched, the first goal I ever saw, or the day I realised I loved kicking a leather bag of air about. I just remember a joyous childhood irrevocably entwined with the sport.

I remember adoring Manchester United, a fact I usually hasten not to share unless completely necessary; instead endeavouring to banish the memories deep into the darkest recesses of my mind. An altogether necessary practice, given that I’ve spent the last 20-odd years of my life supporting Arsenal.

I remember wanting to be David Beckham more than anything in the world, so much so that I spent many years (probably more than I should have) eagerly pursuing him on his barmy journey through a maelstrom of messy barnets. I remember wearing a United shirt, so proud that it had my surname on it: Sharp. It didn’t really matter that it was actually the team’s sponsor — emblazoned in the middle of the front of the shirt and not at the back on the top, like the real footballers’ names were. I remember football being on my mind all day, every day.

As a youngster, any time I wasn’t outside, I’d inevitably be found sat attentively before the television in my living room, my eyes squaring as the hours tumbled away while I played FIFA. There were fleeting flirtations with other PlayStation games—Crash Bandicoot, Tomb Raider, Spyro the Dragon—but I was enraptured by FIFA; every FIFA, all the FIFAs I could get my hands on, feeding an addiction, as I set about discovering football teams and players from places far beyond my imagination. I learned of Bayern Munich. I learned of Juventus. I learned of Real Madrid. How unfathomably exotic these teams were.

So enamoured was the eight-year-old-me, by my discovery of the aforementioned Spaniards, I asked to be escorted to the one shop up town I knew would stock one, where I—or, rather, my Nan—could buy a Real Madrid jersey, which I wore any time I played football with the local kids on my street. On its back, I had ‘Raúl 7’ printed, the number replete with a Premier League logo at its base, such were the limitations of the local stock available at the shop. It was an inaccuracy I cared little for but that I distinctly recall being mocked for, by an older kid at a training session, a few years later. I didn’t care. I loved it. “I’ll be Raúl!”

I vividly recall being on ‘holiday’ in Cornwall, sitting on the floor of the frankly anaemic, everything-cream-coloured caravan in which we were staying, entirely ignorant to the change in surroundings on account of my eyes remaining transfixed on the tiny 13” TV-VCR-combo showing Manchester United away at Juventus. I still remember my Nan remarking: “they’re bloody dirty, them Italians!” (those particular Juventus players, not the entire nation, I hope) as knee-high tackles traded.

Such was my desire to consume any and all football, it wasn’t long until my Nan and Grandad went along with it too. It was just easier that way. Despite the 50 or so years they had spent on Earth prior to my impromptu arrival, caring not in the slightest for “the bloody football”, because of me or, more likely, for me, they took an interest, and would call themselves Manchester United fans. My Nan still does, almost 20 years on, though she will often declare with an impassioned injustice, “I just don’t know any of the players anymore!” And that’s fair enough, Nan, we’re all slaves to nostalgia, although, even you’ve got to admit, United wouldn’t be all that today if you had your way and it was still the Treble-winners of ’99 lining up week in, week out. Atrophy’s annoying like that.

My Grandad passed away in 1999, when I was almost seven, and though I can’t recall ever being more heartbroken in all my life since, the tragedy did provide the smallest of silver-linings, at least as far as my love of football was concerned. A few years after his death, I can’t recall exactly how much later, my Nan eventually strove to move on with her own life and attempted to rediscover romantic fulfilment with somebody else. This lead her into a (somewhat forsaken) relationship with a man named Dave.

As it turned out, Dave was a prick. They dated for a few years before breaking up, much to the delight of most of my family who rightly believed my Nan to be far too good for somebody like Dave. But I, not yet even old enough for secondary school, enjoyed his company purely because he loved football.

Whenever my Nan went to his home, they would sit in the living room and chat over endless refills of tea, while Dave would play for me any one of his grand collection of old Arsenal videos; cup finals from the ‘70s and ‘80s. Whether or not the older, more wizened and socially-attuned me would care to admit it, it was probably from him I inherited my love of the Arsenal.

I remember Dave taking me to watch our local team, Folkestone Invicta, at their tiny, sparse stadium. Striding through the mustard-yellow turnstiles, paying just a couple of quid for the honour, gazing out from the typically spacious concrete terraces at a tatty green that seemed to stretch out for miles, made me feel like a competition winner.

Growing up, I remember developing an acute awareness of the feeling I wasn’t particularly good at being a man. I wasn’t even sure what ‘being a man’ meant and that was, to me, even worse. Some things never change. I was never taught how to ride a bike or how to shave. To me, watching on from life’s sidelines, most men could ride a bike and shave with ease, at the same time if they’d really wanted, and I was clueless as to how to do either.

But at the football, though it was likely (and quite ironically) more apparent there than anywhere else in the world just how little of being a man I understood, I could at least watch and learn. Perhaps they weren’t the greatest of role models, but they had plastic cups filled with beer in their gloveless hands and they gulped their choice poison without grimacing. They met unsatisfactory shots or gutless tackles with loud remonstrations, shouted insults littered with obscenities I’d later share on the playground amidst curious clusters of schoolmates, and acted, you know, blokey, so it seemed like they knew what they were doing. The least I could do was take notes.

I remember wearing just a t-shirt and shorts to a match once. It was an evening match, sometime in December, and it felt as though it were 20 degrees below zero. I shivered for two hours straight, standing on the stone steps of the home end, wondering which would greet me first: the full-time whistle or a most-anticlimactic death. Upon returning home, my Nan berated Dave for taking me out to a game so late, in such cold, in so little clothing. “He wanted to wear shorts!” Dave attested. He wasn’t wrong. It was idiotic — I’m still surprised I didn’t return with a scarf, a match-day programme and the makings of pneumonia — but I did want to wear shorts. It’s what the players wore and they were men, damn it.

I’ll never forget the day Arsenal won the 2002 FA Cup final, against Chelsea. I was 10. Dave was in hospital and I recall watching the game at home, desperate for them to win to make him better. I remember calling him excitedly on the phone, immediately after full-time, to let him know Arsenal had won. “Parlour scored from miles out, it was amazing! Ljungberg scored too!”

As I said, ultimately, Dave didn’t stick around for very long. Eventually he and my Nan parted ways. But my love for Arsenal, and for football, as a way of life, stuck around. I played football, watched football, talked about football and learned about football whenever and wherever I could.

My evenings and weekends were soundtracked by a varying accompaniment of shouts from my neighbours. Footballs raining down on their doors, their walls, their windows, their cars. Some couldn’t help but roar the odd, unstifleable “fuck off down the park!” from their doorsteps. Others—the neighbours I liked, unsurprisingly—would instead raise an eyebrow and remind us to be careful before chucking the ball back our way.

I’d love to know the sheer number of brand new footballs I promised I’d save for the park, so as not to scratch their smooth, unblemished leather on the road, that I would then surrender to the urge to play with and have end up looking years-old after my owning them for mere days. The number of footballs that were popped under the wheels of cars speeding along the road that adjoined our cul-de-sac. “Sorry!” We became very accustomed to shouting that.

Me and my mate from down the road, Charlie — Henry and Drogba, Pirés and Lampard, Ljungberg and Cole, as we were more often known by one another while playing on the street, such was the unerring passion with which we felt the need to represent our diverging allegiances at any and all opportunities — were the accidental terrors of our neighbourhood. A two-boy pint-sized pestilence. Not quite deserving of an ASBO apiece, but certainly an unyielding annoyance to anybody with a home or car they’d rather not have decorated with muddied football prints.

Though I remember growing up wishing to be nothing other than a footballer, there was one time I told people I wished to be an estate agent.

At an event organised by my primary school, we were each instructed to write and perform a short monologue, to a crowd of teachers and parents, describing what we wished to be when we were adults. I, of course, told my teacher I wanted to be a footballer. But in true British-education-system-style, my dream was swiftly bludgeoned. I was told I couldn’t pick ‘footballer’ because it was already taken by a couple of the other boys in my class: “Just pick something else.”

I racked my brains. “I don’t want to do anything else. I want to be a footballer. I’m going to be a footballer,” I mewled. “I’ve already pointed out the big house that I’ve promised my Nan I’m going to buy her when I become one.” Then, I suddenly remembered: an estate agent had been showing a house on our road that week and they drove an incredible fancy-looking car. For what it’s worth, I think it may have been a Lotus Elise. It was definitely yellow, whatever make it was. I settled for estate agent, without the slightest clue about what they actually did for a living, just knowing that whatever it was they did meant they could afford cars that didn’t look like the rest of the cars on my road.

At the school event I took to the stage when my turn came around and enthusiastically uttered into the microphone that when I grew up I wanted to be an estate agent. Cue laughter from every corner of the crowded hall. “That’s it,” I told myself, “now I’m definitely becoming a footballer. Nobody laughs at them.” They’re just bombarded with deluges of racist and homophobic abuse every week. But I digress.

As it turned out, I had nothing like the kind of ability needed to become a professional footballer, despite the incalculable hours I spent practising as a boy. That didn’t stop me trying though.

I remember feeling sick with embarrassment when I was substituted onto the pitch during a Herald Cup match for my school, circa 2001, only for the full-time whistle to sound literally seconds after I’d entered the field; at the same time, I feel I should mention, as our school team’s only girl: Stevie. Our PE-teacher-turned-coach had allegedly asked the referee how long was left and relayed back to me that he had been told five minutes remained. Whether or not he was lying, I suppose I’ll never know, but I received nowhere near my promised five minutes. I did, however, receive the same small wooden accolade as all of the other lads, so, no harm done, eh; beyond the irreparable emotional scars. Thanks again, Mr Lamb!

I remember the kindness shown to me by the parents of boys I played alongside in the local youth teams. With just my Nan and I at home, me being so young and her having never learned to drive, I found myself agonisingly out of reach of training sessions and local tournaments. Every time, though, somebody stepped in; the team’s voluntary coach, the striker’s Dad, the captain’s uncle. Every time a training session, match, or tournament came around, a knock would sound on my door, as I’d be waiting in my living room with shin-pads already on and boots already laced, my knees bouncing with excitement, and outside there’d be a car waiting to take me to and from the football.

As I think back upon their selfless commitment to affording me every possible opportunity to play football—remembering collecting the miniature trophies that still take pride of place in my Nan’s living room cabinet, that I cannot, even now, pretend mean anything less than the world to me, and who without those generous parents I’d never have had the chance to win — it is hard to stop from welling up.

Though I truly never dwelled upon my lack of a father — I would say, whenever asked, like somebody who already had it all figured out: “you can’t miss something you’ve never had!”— it felt like I didn’t need a dad, so long as I had them.

I remember my best friend discovering his love of the matchday at Charlton. He too had grown up supporting Manchester United, but had attended a Charlton Athletic match at The Valley, as part of a school trip, and from that point on never looked back. It wasn’t long before I joined him.

Still an Arsenal fan at heart, I adored our trips to Charlton. Boarding the coach from our home town and journeying up to south London felt to me as though we were discovering unmapped territories. Sharing seats among fans who had been making the same trip to the same stadium, a stadium they called home, for what seemed to us like centuries. Suddenly we were a part of the hallowed tradition.

One time, we boarded the coach to Sheffield, a round trip of some 15 hours or so; two teenagers travelling miles upon miles just to watch Charlton, to sing songs about putting other teams on bonfires and Valley Floyd Road and indulging in every match-day tradition we could think to tick off. Walking about the roads surrounding the stadium; taking in the sights, if you could call them that; sampling pre-match burgers; flicking aimlessly through matchday programmes and taking our seats earlier than early, just to be in there, amongst it.

I remember Charlton losing in Sheffield and the excruciating silence in which the coach was held for the whole journey home. But that didn’t stop every one of those fans turning up to The Valley the following week. I still have the programme, and the ticket for each game sellotaped inside the front cover, from every Charlton match I attended. I’ll continue to do the same for every future fixture too. I had nothing passed down to me, so I learned to make my own traditions.

I remember going to watch football with my uncle: the country’s most unlikely Scunthorpe supporter; my squeaky southern voice being lost in the harangue of northern accents. I remember being called in from the street for dinner every single day, the warmth of my evening meal ebbing away while, inevitably, next-goal-won on the tarmac outside. I remember wearing hand-me-down Arsenal shirts—JVC, SEGA, Dreamcast—that my football-averse cousins were as desperate to depart with as I was to receive. I remember waking up absurdly early on weekends to watch highlights of the Copa Libertadores: “they play in South America too!?” I remember Charlie sleeping round my house every Friday night, so we could wake up early on Saturday mornings to watch Soccer AM with platefuls of beans on toast on our laps.

I remember my life changing so fast, faster than any child could run to keep up with, but my love of the game always staying, reassuringly, exactly the same.

I don’t remember having a father growing up. But I do remember football, almost nothing but football, and I remember being so happy to have it. Whether it’s sad, or reassuring, or some feeling half way between the two, to admit it; even after all this time, I still am.