England-Italy 1997

Day -820. ‎WorldCup2018‬.

One thing I could probably throw in here occasionally is a personal World Cup memory. Yes, there are numerous from watching on TV, but no live ones. I could probably go through quite the memory bank of qualifying matches that Malta played and I was at. But were they "big" matches? For me at the time, yes. But of interest to anybody else? Well, you may get me reliving them anyway. But there is one World Cup qualifying match which I was present for and which would definitely classify as "big". And I realised that over the course of my 2014 World Cup countdown and all during that World Cup and the past 179 days I have never mentioned it. Strange, because it was a huge match. So here goes.

In February 1997 I went to England, from Malta, for one night to watch England play Italy at Wembley in the qualifying for France 1998. Wembley Stadium. England against Italy. Huge. I could write a book about the sociology of growing up in Malta, a country divided between supporting each of the two countries and my own allegiance switching in my early football-supporting life. But, that morning as I got to the airport in Malta my only thought was about the enormity of being at Wembley to watch England. At Wembley Stadium to watch England play Italy. After that there should be a rush of memories, right? No.

England lost 1-0. Gianfranco Zola scored the only goal right in front of me. Matt Le Tissier, the incredibly talented player who everybody wanted to be great for England but wasn't, missed a couple of chances and Alan Shearer was injured. But those memories are quite cloudy. I even had to look up who scored, just to be sure. Instead, there are two incidents that stand out clearly. To understand why they stand out may need a study in the workings of not the human brain in general, but the differences between different brains. What do we store and why?

Before the match I arranged to meet my brother somewhere in London. He wasn't going but was excited for me that I was. As I waited for him on a street corner, across from a pub where a large number of supporters had gathered, I took in the pre-match atmosphere created by the legendary (good or bad) English fans. The singing was continuous, loud, crude, with the IRA a regular target of the abuse. Whether those fans, fuelled by whatever it was they enjoyed, really had any true understanding of the politics of England and IRA to have genuine hatred requires yet another sociological study. To put this situation into perspective you have to put yourself in the shoes of a football lover from Malta, in his early twenties, who's experience of fanatical football supporters had mostly involved sitting at a half empty stadium in Malta watching supporters from rival teams trade insults about the village saint, to the amusement of anybody else sitting outside the areas designated to the respective teams' fans.

Back to that street corner in London. As the fans drank and sang, and entertained, a bus drove past and, it being a busy intersection, did so quite slowly. Why it happened, I'm not quite sure and wasn't close enough to know, but suddenly the bus was a target for a barrage of beer glasses and bottles, and maybe more. Maybe because it was terrifying, it raised the level of entertainment. Naivety was an innocent and useful weapon back then.

Fast forward to me walking to the underground station at the end of the match. As I walked amongst the mass of disappointment, I noticed one of the despondent fans on his cellphone, this before it was abnormal to be one of a few not on a phone soon after leaving an event like this. At about the same time somebody else noticed the phone talker. I do not remember the exact words but non-phone talker yelled across to man on phone, "Oi! If that's Glenn tell 'im thanks from all of us for f**king up another World Cup." With a few disgruntled acknowledging moans and a few resigned smiles the crowd moved on. Glenn Hoddle was the manager at the time and he hadn't endeared himself to the fans by picking Le Tissier, seen as a bit of a Harlem Globetrotter, than a real make-a-difference-to-the-team kind of player.

And that was that. Malta to England one morning, big football match that night, back to Malta the next morning. And the two things that stood out for me didn't even take place inside Wembley.

Maybe it's time for a remedy, time to watch Canada in its qualifying campaign and build some new memories.