Watching the football highlights this weekend, getting more than a little excited about Norwich City’s win at Everton, set me thinking about where my interest in the game began.
Anyone who follows football will always have a unique place in their heart for the first match that they went to. That first time of being taken to what seems like such a grown up and adult experience. For me it was in Malta. I lived there between the ages of seven and eleven and it was the beginning of something that has never left me.
In those days Malta was a place that English teams went to play pre season friendlies. The sort of games where players are breaking themselves back in after the summer. The first game I saw was between Arsenal and the reigning Maltese champions of the day. My memory is of an exciting game that kept a ten year old boy enthralled, although with hindsight it was probably a very gentle affair with the English team taking it easy in the Mediterranean sunshine. After that we started to go to some local league matches and I still have programmes from games involving Sliema Wanderers, Floriana and Hamrun Spartans. Exotic sounding teams that I still occasionally google to see how they’re doing.
Malta was also where I first played football. The St Andrews Army School B team to be precise. My dad wasn’t in the army but somehow when we moved to the island he managed to get me enrolled at their school. There were three other British forces schools on the island at the time and we played in a Saturday morning league that included teams from all of them. I think that we played in green and white striped shirts but as the only photo that I have is black and white I can’t confirm it. What I can tell from the photo is that I was a tall and gangly ten year old who appears to have towered over most of his team mates. We must have had some success because the only sporting trophy that I’ve ever won dates from that time. Each of the team were presented with their trophy by Stanley_Matthews who happened to be living on the island at the time. Now I know that he was one of the best English footballers of all time, back then I don’t think I had a clue who he was.
During the time that we lived in Malta we never had a television in the house. There was a service on the island but I can only assume that my parents didn’t think that it was up to much. What it did mean was that to watch any football on television I had to go next door to Mr Bonnet’s house. He had access to Italian television stations and I would sit watching games with his family. I might not have understood a word of the commentary but I still felt part of what was going on. Not only was Mr Bonnet a keen football fan but he also ran the local toy shop. When you’re ten years old it doesn’t get much more exciting than that. When I mentioned Mr Bonnet to my dad recently his memory of him was the fact that he always had plastic lemons tied to the branches of the tree in his front garden. Somehow that’s a quirk that makes my memories of him even fonder.
David in the kitchen. 