Get Her Off the Pitch!: How Sport Took Over My Life. Lynne Truss

The cruel point was, alas, that Berger resembled a rock star while Poborský - well, Poborský didn’t. Poborský was so old-crone-like in appearance that he evoked childhood terrors of the witch Baba Yaga in her house built on chicken legs.

      Reaction to foreign players was bound to be mixed, given the proud xenophobic traditions of the game. But mainly, supporters needed a lot of reassurance that managers had not been out squandering their club’s precious Eurocheque facility on the footballing equivalent of pigs in pokes. At a Rangers-Hibernian match at Ibrox, the man sitting next to me indicated the tall blond figure of Erik Bo Andersen (a Dane, as the name suggests), and said, wearily, ‘See that man? Number 16? Really a heating engineer. Not many people know that. Can’t play football at all, just a mix-up.’ Andersen promptly made the worst unforced error I had ever seen. Standing a few yards in front of an open goal, he knocked the ball wide, to a general gasp of horror. ‘That was terrible,’ I said. ‘Uh-huh,’ said the Rangers supporter, taking his head from his hands. ‘But he’s a very good plumber.’

      To a neophyte, however, the foreign players were extremely attractive and evoked no mixed feelings at all. Put simply, I was always on their side. This was the year Kevin Keegan deserted Newcastle without explanation, and left his dazzling foreign players David Ginola and Tino Asprilla in the hands of Kenny Dalglish, which was a bit like hiring Cruella de Vil as your puppy-walker. The consistent wronging of David Ginola (which continued when he moved to Spurs) became quite a theme of my weekly pieces, and I staunchly voted for him as man of the match week after week, even on occasions when he wasn’t playing. But the more the xenophobic crowds hooted the fancy dans, the more I personally rooted for them. When Chelsea’s handsome all-star international team took the pitch at Blackburn (it was one of Gianfranco Zola’s first outings), I heard shouts of ‘Go back to Spain!’ which annoyed me so much that I got out my notebook and wrote it down. When I was sent to see Middlesbrough at Southampton at the beginning of the season, it was principally to report back on the expensive foreigners that Middlesbrough’s manager Bryan Robson had just recruited: the Brazilians Emerson and Juninho, and the Italian Fabrizio Ravanelli. On that memorably golden autumn afternoon, Middlesbrough were roundly beaten 4-0 by the red-and-white British foot soldiers of Southampton FC, which was absolutely hilarious, of course. ‘What - a waste - amunny!’ was the gleeful chorus from the stands.

      For me, 1996-97 was a time of all sorts of assimilation. I’d never bothered to find out before how football was organised, with leagues and so on. Was the Premiership a legitimate division, or was it just made up of clubs with TV contracts? As far as fixtures were concerned, I’d always assumed, given how much football there appeared to be every week, that the question of who-played-who was probably just everyone plays absolutely everyone else as many times as possible until the whole torrid business has to start all over again. Cup-wise, I didn’t know there was more than one cup. Meanwhile, I’d never wondered where the notorious Hillsborough stadium was, or whether it was attached to any particular club; and I had no idea about the system of promotion and relegation, either: I assumed that, if a team was in the Second Division (say), that was where it had always been, and always would be. Finally, I didn’t know that teams had nicknames like ‘The Crazy Gang’ or ‘The Owls’, or suspected that you only had to know: