Get Her Off the Pitch!: How Sport Took Over My Life. Lynne Truss
breath without choking, but that was hopeless, too.
It turned out to be truly a game of two halves, that Scotland game. The first half, watched from that ghastly pub, was pure, goal-less misery; by the end of the 45 minutes, I’d had enough, and so had Robert. At half time we made a dash along the sea-front - all ozone, seagulls, energy and sunlight - and threw ourselves into a light, colonially decorated bar in one of the big hotels where the screens were of a normal TV size, and awkwardly bolted to the ceiling, but at least we could sit in upholstered white wicker chairs and hear the commentary. It was here that we saw the England team score its two goals against Scotland - and David Seaman save the penalty from Gary McAllister, don’t forget, which was just as momentous (they said it was the first penalty saved by an English goalkeeper at Wembley since 1959). Gascoigne’s tremendous, genius clincher - flipping the ball over Colin Hendry’s head, dodging round him, and then volleying from some distance into the net - is one of the greatest ever moments of three-dimensional football, only slightly ruined by the way it’s followed by him lying on the ground with his mouth open for the ‘dentist’s chair’ goal celebration (a highly contrived reference to the England team’s recent drinking excesses while on tour in the Far East). I’m always disappointed by that rush of Gazza’s to assume the dentist’s chair position. All that beauty and spontaneity followed immediately by something so yobby. It perfectly encapsulated Gazza’s tragic misfortune: that the downside to having a foot like a brain is that you get a brain like a foot, to go with it.
The following Thursday, it was England v The Netherlands, the last of England’s group games. The championships had been going for only 10 days. Against all expectations (and precedent), England beat The Netherlands 4-1. It was a historic night for English football. I watched the match from an airship circling Wembley Stadium. No one ever believes me when I tell them this. They think I am making it up.
It does sound suspicious, I admit. Why did the Fuji airship people offer The Times a place on board that evening? Well, who cares? My orders were to arrive in the early afternoon at a field near Woking, bringing a fearless friend if I wanted to. My friend Susan brought a straw hat and a pair of binoculars (clever). I brought the pager and some chocolate cake. A freelance photographer joined our party - but, aside from the pilot, that was it. Nice men from Fuji’s German publicity operation met us and showed us the silvery airship as it rested in long, parched grass. A warm breeze rippled the tops of trees. All was peaceful. Susan and I asked intelligent questions about how the airship had flown here from Germany, what was its exact length, weight, age, mix of gases, pet name, number of flights, and so on - and basically tried ever so, ever so hard not to mention the Hindenburg.
In the end, sensing our English reticence, they mentioned it themselves. All thoughts of the Hindenburg were to be banished from our minds, they said; the canopy of a modern airship was emphatically non-flammable. The worst that could happen with a damaged modern airship was a very, very gentle descent, landing with a soft bump, probably somewhere open and safe and absolutely lovely like the middle of Richmond Park. Our American pilot, whose name was Corky (how marvellous), had flown airships round Superbowls hundreds of times; and so confident was he of the non-flammability of the vast, gas-filled canopy that he actually chain-smoked at the controls. The only thing we had to be prepared for, Corky said, was that being in an airship gondola was less like flying; more like sailing. Thermals made the ship both pitch and roll, especially in the full heat of a June day. He didn’t add that, at the same time, there is a deafening noise from the propeller, and no bathroom. (We would find these things out soon enough.)
At 4.30 in the afternoon, a small team of German men in white boiler suits, four on each side, shouldered the nose ropes and solemnly walked our lighter-than-air dirigible to its launch position. It was a heart-stoppingly dignified operation. I felt there should be some Bach playing, and that they should be wearing powdered wigs. Then they let go of the ropes, Corky started the engine, and we lifted off. The instruments of an airship turn out to resemble those of H.G. Wells’s time machine - a bicycle wheel for a rudder; cotton reels on bits of string for adjusting the mixture of gases; pedals for something or other (presumably not brakes). Reassuringly, however, Corky had state-of-the-art headphones with radio contact to air traffic control, and at no point took them off in order to change into a Phileas Fogg top hat.
‘Move about if you like!’ he shouted to us over the engine noise. ‘Open windows!’ I discovered that I felt instant nausea if I looked at the ropes hanging from the unseen canopy’s nose in the middle distance - so I sensibly stopped doing it. The aforementioned pitching and rolling, as we made our way north-east, then north above such landmarks as Epsom, Croydon and Wimbledon, made moving about quite difficult, but we survived quite well in the circumstances, with our stomachs knocking against our ribs. An astonishing number of houses had identically-shaped swimming pools, by the way: if you were a swimming-pool salesman with the Surrey concession, the view would have made you very proud. Anyway, Susan firmly declined the chocky cake, but was otherwise OK, as was the photographer (who found the chocky cake very acceptable). Evidently a TV puppet called Otis the Aardvark had been copiously sick on a previous flight, which we all found completely hilarious.
We could see Wembley from miles away. There is a wonderful Dickensian passage at the beginning of Patrick Hamilton’s novel The Slaves of Solitude describing wartime London as a great, breathing monster, sucking thousands of tiny people in through all the train terminals in the morning, and breathing them out again at the end of the day. This passage came to mind as we arrived over the great white stadium, which was drawing people towards it from far and wide on this light summer evening. Why doesn’t TV use more aerial shots? It’s such a missed opportunity. Of course, such shots would be easier to achieve if the airships could be stationary - which they can’t: they have to keep circling, circling, circling, circling, otherwise they die, like sharks. But the view is phenomenal: 75,000 people assembling in one place for a sporting contest is a grand sight. The grass is incredibly green. The fans are (in this case) a beautiful white and a beautiful orange. Thousands of individual camera flashes make the scene sparkle. Once play starts, the 20 free-flowing outfield players spread and converge restlessly, like droplets of mercury being tipped about on a mirror - or like droplets of mercury all in mindful pursuit of a moving ball, anyway.
We were told we were flying at around 1,000 feet, but I don’t know whether that was true. We could open the windows and lean out; we could see the players not quite well enough to identify them individually. And of course we had to keep re-orientating ourselves because of the non-stop circling. England are playing left to right. No, hang on, England are playing right to left. No, I was right the first time: England are playing left to right. But when the ball was destined to fly into the net (as it was four times for England in the course of that astonishing evening), seeing it from directly above was the best view you could possibly have.
What people tend to overlook about that generally well-remembered England-Netherlands match, actually, is how nice and varied the goals were for anyone watching from overhead. First, there was the penalty in the first half - which helpfully got us used to the sight of a white ball punching into the back of a white net and dancing there. A chap in white (Paul Ince, as it turned out) appeared to trip on the edge of the penalty box, and play was suspended. Players stood back to watch while another chap in white (Alan Shearer, as we later learned, courtesy of the pager) placed the ball on the spot. Up in the airship, we were bloody excited. Above the roar of the engine, we could hear the cheering from the stadium - but, truly, only just. It was like watching through the wrong end of a telescope. There was a run-up; the ball was smacked into the corner of the net, and the jubilant little ant-sized player ran off at top speed while we danced about in our little gondola, and Corky made his mind up to stay for the second half - which was a relief, as his instructions had been to leave Wembley at half time and get us back to Woking before dark.
The rest of the first half was highly absorbing, by which I really mean unbearable. The Dutch kept getting corners; players increasingly smacked into one another on purpose; the daylight started to give way to floodlight; cameras flashed; the score remained 1-0. Chocky cake was no longer of interest. The only thing that mattered was the puzzle of how to get that ball from one end to the other, using only white players, and finally knocking it past the chap guarding the net. Tactics were wonderfully clear from the air: you could see how a goal attempt