My dad and I had a difficult relationship to say the least when I was a kid. I used to envy my friends who seemed to have dads who were also their mate. Mine was distant and something of an authoritarian - just about the only things we had in common were a shared love of It's a Knockout and a devotion to Everton FC.
It came as some considerable surprise then when I came home from school one day and my dad asked me if I wanted to go to Goodison with him to see Everton play Villa in a League Cup replay. I was born in Walton Hospital but, along with thousands of other scousers, we'd left Liverpool for Winsford a decade or so earlier, thus cruelly depriving me of any chance of getting to L4 under my own steam until I was an adult. I'd long been jealous of my dad and my granddad going week in week out to watch the likes of Labone and Hickson, Dean and Lawton.
In those days football wasn't nearly so ubiquitous - my only contact with my heroes Bob Latchford and Andy King were the Shoot! posters on my wall, reports in the Daily Express and the occasional appearance on MotD or The Kick Off Match. Now, suddenly, I was in the car driving with my dad to Liverpool to actually see them in the flesh! Were they actually real, after all? Was Goodison Park something other than a mythic bastion of legendary feats? We hardly spoke all the way there but that didn't matter because my head was spinning with a thousand Everton related thoughts so my own company was perfectly adequate. We parked up somewhere - who knows where? - and suddenly I was joined in the street by thousands of kindred souls, all blue-scarfed and animated, walking purposefully in the same direction. As we got nearer, the smell of pies and fish and chips and cigarettes filled the air and our pace instinctively quickened. And then, almost out of nowhere, there it was - the School of Science looming ahead of me. So it was real after all.
We sat in the Upper Bullens, midway between the halfway line and the Street End and I marvelled at the brilliance of the floodlights, the enormity of the Main Stand and the astonishing vivid greenness of the pitch. Strangely, I remember very little in the way of details about the actual game although I know we won 4-1 with Big Bob thrillingly bagging a brace of goals as if to confirm his god-like status for me. Other than that he hardly even seemed to notice I was there at all but I really didn't mind. I knew he had a job to do.
Afterwards, suddenly, me and my dad were walking hurriedly towards to the car and talking to each other animatedly about the game. In the car on the way home I asked him about Alan Ball and Alex Young and he told tales of great victories and dreadful humblings, of titans and gods. Suddenly, we were friends. Father and son.
Happy Fathers' Day, dad.
I loved Nobby Fielding who used to hold the bottom of his sleeves, think all the kids wanted to be Nobby in the street.
