The Peerless Wordsmith Of Holland Park

I wanted the Southampton v Arsenal game to mean more to me but couldn’t quite make it happen.

We get older and think about the time left. It was a good atmosphere the other day, even though neither side had anything at stake. As always, I enjoyed the drive down, passing the A272 close to Winchester  –  the A272 with its various landmarks fascinated a Dutch couple so much that they wrote an excellent book about it simply entitled A272  –  and the White Star pub/restaurant was as convivial as always but the game itself just passed me by. I was happy and relaxed but not greatly involved in the outcome. In that moment, I knew that thirty years plus of following the Saints here there and everywhere, right from the day I left SIS meant I had a lot of Saturdays free, was long enough and occasional visits will take over.

Where do the memories start? Well, years and years ago in the Third Division South with a night game against Port Vale, I think. But when I became a sports journalist there was 1994 and the Arsenal game with the Gunners fans waving ten-pound notes at Bruce Grobbelaar in the Southampton goal because he’d been accused of taking an earlier bribe. The story fizzled out and died; Bruce was far too strong a character to care about it anyway and kept a clean sheet as the Saints won 1-0.

Then, of course, there was the final game at the Dell when, perhaps inevitably, Matthew Le Tissier spun on the edge of the penalty area and hooked in an unstoppable shot in the dying seconds for a 3-2 victory. (I should add that, despite these two setbacks, Arsenal won far more games against Southampton than they lost.)

Lawrie Mcmenemy didn’t want me in a crowded press box for the 3-2 game. He’d been coming in to broadcast lunchtime pieces on SIS and didn’t like it when I asked why signing famous players late in their career had worked so well at Southampton but not at Sunderland, the club he joined briefly before returning to the calmer waters of Hampshire. Sky hadn’t been up and running for very long and I reported the game from the middle of the crowd, borrowing Pat McElroy’s mobile phone to get the job done. Pat, sadly no longer with us, was a great Arsenal fan from the moment he arrived in this country. He was also a stalwart of the Carnaby selling race at Brighton and one day several years ago, though he bet in very small amounts, he won over a hundred pounds for some doubles and a treble. He took out the betting slip so often, peering at it lovingly, that it was soon the worse for wear and Stuart Brodkin paid him out, putting the slip away carefully in his wallet so that it didn’t fall apart. Great days, great days.

Driving home last week, I reflected on how football and racing may not nave come all that close together, so to speak, but football and gambling definitely have and that worries me. I don’t like it that late-evening programmes include advertisements involving smaller (I suppose) firms that I’ve never heard of. The target is young people, of course, the kind of youngsters who know plenty about football but relatively little about odds and nothing at all about value. This is why the betting firms push hard on the ‘acca’ front, as well as promoting the various betting opportunties  –  ‘spins’ if you like  –  where casino games are concerned. This also brings women into the equation. Women never fancied betting offices, especially the grimy, smoke-filled parlours of yesteryear, because they were a bastion of male togetherness and forthright opinion. Sitting in front of a computer at home in the still of the night is a very different experience and may even be comforting  –  for a while.

I’ve been in the game for so many years but even I don’t know some of the operators and had never heard of them until recently. It used to be Coral, Hill’s, Ladbrokes and Mecca (now semi-forgotten on the High Street though in fact it was Bob Green of Mecca who made all the early moves re what became SIS). I didn’t know any regulars who were interested in casino games as well. In fact you had to be a member for three days before playing the slots, roulette or blackjack and there were hardly any casinos outside the big cities anyway.

I reported many games at Highbury  –  the Clock End, the singing policeman, Red Rum’s third Grand National victory in 1977 with a ripple of surprise and approval running through the crowd. Not that any of those Arsenal fans would have been interested in staying at home to witness the event; they were Arsenal, Arsenal, Arsenal.

Sometimes I try to remember where I was living when some of the games were on. Orient3 Blackburn 1, an FA Cup-tie on a near-waterlogged pitch was definitely Sawbridgeworth because I was married by then, while matches at White Hart Lane involved starting from a shared house in Cricklewood (the girls in the rooms below were renting by the hour), a venue I also remember because of Roae Dubarry’s success in the Norfolk Stakes at Doncaster. The later years are pretty straightforward  –  I was in the wine trade when Import won the Wokingham, so that’s Sawbridgeworth again, but the early 70s takes me back to Holland Road in west London and jogging around Wormwood Scrubs in the evening. Holland Park Avenue ran alongside and I loved the flat there, despite bever finding the Italian restaurants Au Caprice des Dieux (what a name for a gambling customer!) or even knowing about Chez Moi, the little place regularly patronised by playwrights Simon Gray and Harold Pinter. What conversations those must have been.

I only mention it because the celebrated football writer Brian Glanville, who cycled to games from Holland Park, died a short time ago and I’d see him in press boxes here and there, his intellectual grasp outclassing most of those present (including your correspondent) and quite possibly irritating those of a more tabloid, workaday hue. The fact that he spoke perfect Italian would not have converted them, either, but I must say I envied him that. Apart from a long stint on the Sunday Times he helped compile a musical celebration called Underneath the Arches, detailing the lives of Bud Flanagan and Chesney Allen, with the show later gracing the Prince of Wales theatre in London. Sir John Gielgud took the lead in Glanville’s play A Visit to the Villa, which was broadcast on BBC Radio.

He played left-back for Chelsea Casuals until well into later life (you wouldn’t try to dribble past him) and I imagine, if we’d stayed in the Holland Park area, I’d have found his base as well as these various Italian haunts but our section of Holland Road was demolished years ago. I did chat to him, though, and wandering away from the topic of football (he nursed anything to do with Arsenal in his heart) was never a problem. Talking of favourite film moments one day, I mentioned the closing sequence in The Third Man, where Joseph Cotton waits at the exit from the cemetery for Harry Limes’s bereaved lover, only to see her walk straight past in the falling autumn leaves. Brian smiled and just said: ‘Ah yes. Alida Valli.’

He is a sad loss but at least he made it to 93 and for that we should be grateful. His love of football lasted a lifetime and graced every piece he wrote.

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