Where’s Your Caravan?: My Life on Football’s B-Roads. Chris Hargreaves
in the thick of a bramble bush, and still had thorns embedded in my hands to prove it.
That same night, after my gardening and TV work, I pulled on the football boots and coached the young boys at Exeter City. Not a normal day, but a thoroughly enjoyable one all the same.
As you can see, at the moment my work is all about survival and these jobs are just part-time really, but I am excited about the future, and certainly not down. I want to work, and if that means managing or coaching at a club, then great, but if it means digging roads for eight hours a day, then bring it on.
The fear of stopping playing drove me on each season, and that fear remains, but after twenty odd years it looks as if I will no longer be pulling a top on and waiting for a bell to ring, come three o’clock on Saturday. For now, it is a case of keeping my head down and streamlining our lives to within an inch of living in a caravan (no comments please), but when people say to me, ‘Oh no! What are you going to do, how are you feeling?’ I answer, ‘I’m feeling great thanks, I haven’t got a flesh-eating disease (although my leg is still very itchy after my gardening work) and I’m not going to become an alcoholic.’
I say that as my wife tops up my glass of red wine.
With the Hull City deal all done and dusted, I was soon driving the short journey across the Humber bank. I had been the first signing Hull City had paid for in quite a few years, and although it wasn’t a huge amount, the supporters had provided it, and to the club it was a lot – the fact that the supporters’ group had raised the money proved how hard up the club was at that time. The lads at Hull City were a good bunch, a mix of locals and pros who had spent most of their careers up north.
The manager, Terry Dolan, seemed OK, as did his sidekick, Jeff Lee. On the pitch, the pre-season went very well, including a victory at home against my former club Grimsby Town, followed up by a couple more impressive team and individual performances. All was looking good as we went into our last pre-season game, away to Halifax.
Then disaster struck.
Defenders have always got stuck in, but before the rule to stop tackles from behind was brought in and enforced, things were particularly bad. Usually, I would sidestep bad tackles, especially after my last ankle-breaking incident, but this time I failed to get out of the way of a two-footed challenge. Result: broken ankle, damaged ankle ligaments, and three months out. I was going to miss the start of the season with my new club.
It was Sod’s Law that the person they brought in to replace me, Linton Brown, a local lad from the local leagues, went on to form a great partnership with Dean Windass, who was already a big favourite at the club.
Off the field things were pretty good and, at first, living in Hull was great. A few of us had rented a place on Victoria Dock, where lots of the players, including Dean, and Alan Fettis, our goalkeeper, had houses. Like most keepers, as clichéd as it might be, Alan Fettis was slightly mad. With the move to Victoria Dock, my ties to Cleethorpes had been almost severed. Now it was much more about the football than the nights out.
My nickname at Hull City was ‘Sniffer’. No, I didn’t smell, nor did I smell other people. One day, when I was out of the house, the lads ransacked my gear, and found an old tape of mine. On it was my first interview, after I had scored two goals at York in my FA Cup debut for Grimsby Town. The presenter, Dave Gibbons, who is now on the BBC team down in Devon, said to me that I reminded him of Alan ‘Sniffer’ Clark, the old Everton centre-forward, and there it was, the nickname stuck. To be honest though, it couldn’t have been further from the truth because, for two years, I wasn’t able to hit a barn door at Hull City. At Grimsby Town, Arthur Mann had said I was the best natural finisher he had ever seen. Well, at Hull City, I honestly think that if there had been a net erected covering one whole stand, I would somehow have managed to miss the target. The saying ‘cow’s arse with a banjo’ is very appropriate for my fortunes in front of goal. I would go as far as to say that, if there had been an open goal the size of an aircraft hangar on offer, with no keeper in it, and with a ball that had a magnet on it that attracted it to the net, I would still have somehow contrived to miss the target, something – a small earthquake, a sudden bout of Delhi belly, or some sort of random floodlight failure – would have stopped me from hitting the onion bag.
Obviously, I did eventually return from the ankle injury and made my first appearance. It was a tough game and I was a bit ring rusty, but I felt as if it was going OK. I was maybe trying a bit too hard, and I dragged a few shots wide, but on the whole I was getting back into the swing of it. However, in his wisdom, Jeff Lee dragged me off with twenty-five minutes to go. I say Jeff Lee because although Terry Dolan was the manager, it was really Jeff, the ‘blow dart’ specialist, who ran the show. I call him a blow dart specialist as, like a tribesman in the jungle, he was an expert at stealthily taking down ‘enemies’, one at a time.
I only ever showed fleeting glimpses of what I could do at Hull City. A couple of decent performances do spring to mind – in particular, away at Bradford and then Birmingham. I gave Eddie Youds, another ex-Evertonian, and now playing for Bradford City, a torrid afternoon, running him all over the place in what was a great win for Hull City that day. The fact it was against one of our local rivals made it all the more sweet. The Birmingham game also sticks in my memory and not just because there was a big crowd there. I remember walking off the pitch at St Andrews, the home of Birmingham City, to the chant of ‘There’s only one Chrissy Hargreaves’, which was great.
Even Barry Fry, the Birmingham manager, said that if he’d had eleven Chris Hargreaves that day, he would have been a happy man. But, as I said, these moments of form were fleeting. The fans were brilliant to me really, considering I should have done a lot better; they could see I was trying, but the constant cycle of being in and out of position, and in and out of the team, meant for a pretty frustrating and disappointing time at Hull City.
Needing my own space, I had decided to purchase a house in Beverley, a small market town about ten miles from Hull. It was a bad move financially, as I couldn’t really afford the place, but it was where I struck up some great friendships, some that I still have to this day, and none better than with Michael ‘Chatty’ Chapman.
Other than the odd polite ‘Hello’ for the first six months of us being neighbours, Chatty and I never spoke to each other. I can’t even remember when or how we got chatting, but somehow we did, and over the next eighteen months we had some great laughs.
As well as Mick, I also met his group of friends, top people with totally non-football backgrounds. This was great for me, as on the field I was having a right royal nightmare. The last thing I wanted to do was yap on about it outside of the club. Mick’s mates were an eclectic bunch. There was Lee Watson, aka Bernard G. Shaw – his middle name was Bernard so we embellished it a bit – who was Chatty’s best mate and was obsessed with his spiders and his old Scirocco; Caroline Bradley, who was Lee’s on/off girlfriend and a one woman party; ‘Bonga’, who only spoke on a need to know basis; Julie, who was brought up on a farm and could drink more than most blokes; and ‘dopey’ Dave, Julie’s on/off boyfriend, who sounded like he was constantly drunk. They were the type of people you could not only have a great night with, but who could talk about football without prejudice, because apart from Mick, who was both a Leeds United and Hull City fan, no one really gave a shit.
These laughs would continue for the next fifteen years. Michael Chapman was not your typical lad’s lad: he worked in trading standards, was the son of a vicar, and had a great upbringing behind him; he was a real gentle giant who also happened to love music, partying and footy. He did morph into more of a Hull City fan, as Leeds United were going the other way though, shallow or what? We used to frequent the watering holes of Beverley, most notably ‘Nellies’, and also the non-ritzy side of Hull, such as the Blue Lamp club, which was a bit like a jazz club, where you went if you were recovering from a few years of the rave culture. We also knocked about in The Mainbrace – a pub in which Paul Heaton, of the Housemartins and later The Beautiful South, would regularly drink. It was a very welcome change to the normal football.
After training I would go over to Chatty’s and listen to his woes about finding a good woman or, in fact, any woman. To be fair, I didn’t really help him too much on that front.