Where’s Your Caravan?: My Life on Football’s B-Roads. Chris Hargreaves
going so well since I arrived back at my former club Oxford United, apart from my first game back that is, a dramatic last minute loss while leading, at fellow title chasers, Luton Town.
In his wisdom that night, the referee, and his good friend the much maligned fourth official, added on seven minutes of injury time. Yes, you heard right, SEVEN minutes. I think he added time for both teams’ warm-ups before the game, never mind the injuries sustained during it. As you can imagine, with the ten thousand home fans seeing the number seven raised aloft on the minutes board for the first time in living memory, they started cheering, and inevitably, in the seventh minute of said injury time, one of our lads lost his man at a corner, and they equalised. Straightaway I asked the referee how long there was to go – after twenty two years in this game I sort of have a sixth sense for doom – to which he replied with surprising cheer, ‘I’m adding another minute on for “their” celebrations’, to which I replied, with as much sarcasm as was possible for a slightly tired and disgruntled thirty eight year old, ‘Why don’t you add another minute on for good luck, you know you want to and I tell you what, why don’t you come up for their next corner and head the bloody thing in yourself?’
I escaped the booking, but I didn’t escape the second ‘extra’ minute, or the corner that he gave in the last seconds of the last minute of the added time.
Directly from the corner, with what proved to be the last kick of the game, our keeper Ryan Clarke misjudged the flight of the ball, and we watched on as it sailed into the top corner of the net. The place erupted and I watched in disbelief as their players celebrated as if they had won the World Cup and Champions League, all in one go. I half expected the ref to take his shirt off and start crowd surfing, and I could have sworn I saw him smiling at one point. It was my first game back as captain, and to say I felt robbed is the understatement of the year. At the final whistle, and without the benefit of a sword to fall on, I grabbed the ball and kicked it high into the back row. I lost it in the changing room afterwards, kicking anything that moved, and having a go at some of the lads, no doubt making a great first impression in my first game back at the club.
To make matters worse I had travelled in with Ryan Clarke that night. All ‘Clarky’ kept saying during that return journey was, ‘Fuck me, Chris, how did I let that corner go in?’
I couldn’t have agreed more, but Ryan is a really nice lad so I just kept quiet and offered my support (obviously while thinking to myself, ‘Fuck me, Clarky, how DID you let that corner go in?’).
To prolong the agony, or to give that crushing defeat a bit of humour, whichever way you want to look at it, the following day the local newspaper reporter, Jon Murray, approached me half laughing and said, ‘Should I put the claim into the club or give it to you direct?’
He continued, as I was none the wiser, ‘That ball you volleyed into the crowd the other night rebounded off the roof of the stand, and smashed into my laptop.’
Come on now, what are the chances of that? You can imagine the write up I got the next day.
The following few games went well, with three consecutive wins, but it was in the final ten minutes of that last win that my season changed. I stretched for a ball and felt something go in my groin. I tried to play the next few games, having injections to help me do so, but it was no good, I was going, or should I say limping, through the motions. I did return for another top of the table clash against Stevenage, a sort of title decider, but I tore my cartilage with only twenty seconds of the game gone. It was a bad neck-high challenge by our number five (me), but I wanted my opposing midfielder to know I was there. He got the message, but after forty-five minutes so did I, I couldn’t play on with cartilage damage for much longer, and I ended up hobbling off early in the second half.
I now have three weeks to get ready for what will probably be my sixth end of season play-offs in the last seven seasons, my seventh in all, and another very short summer. Our lead at the top of the table has vanished, and it is now more play-off uncertainty. My body seems to be rebelling against any form of recovery, but I really hope that the miscellany of treatments I am having work. A combination of ice, rehab, and not driving for three hours a day should help.
So, I am sat down beginning to type away; it is now 3.20pm, and I haven’t even turned on Sky Sports News to check the results; it is just too stressful. Who would be a fan eh? I will have a look at around 4.45 though – or more likely 4.52pm when the referee will have definitely blown his whistle! I will also check the results of the other nine teams that I have played for at the same time, as I do every week.
I find that to be able to write, especially for a long article, or in this case a book, the house has to be tidy (‘that’s the OCD,’ I hear you say) and it has to be quiet, both of which are a rarity with three children around. I have been writing a daily blog for the local paper for the past couple of years, but having my three-year-old daughter on my knee, trying to help the other two with homework (Cameron’s is testing for me at the best of times, never mind for him), and rushing to free up the laptop for my wife, just adds to the madness.
I do miss my children (and wife, of course!) when I’m away, or in this case when they are, and this week has been no exception. Had we all been together it would have been the normal pilgrimage to the beach with surfboards and a picnic, as the sun has been beating down in Devon this week. The first day or so without the gang was bearable, a few hours of decorating (I got paint everywhere), mending a broken ornament (I glued my fingers together), and attempting some gardening (using a lawnmower that has lost a wheel is plain stupid) kept me busy, but after that it was all downhill. I started to do jobs that just immediately put me in a bad mood, but that us blokes all around the country seem to do nonetheless. I tried to tidy the garage yesterday, but ended up coming out two hours later having achieved absolutely nothing; I swore around seventy times, trapped my finger twice, and left having gained no extra space at all. After playing at ten clubs during my career, I still have boxes marked ‘kitchen’ that have yet to even see a kitchen. Worryingly, there is also a box with ‘children’s pets’ written on it. I dare not even open it!
Then last night, after scrolling down the enormous checklist I had been ‘kindly’ left with, I attempted to sort the loft out. I cut my hand on an old picture and sustained some sort of allergic reaction to the three tonnes of foam insulation up there. And today, why I don’t know, I joined the other crazy lot and went to the dump, or should I say ‘recycle’ centre. It was crammed with people driving in with either just one plank of wood to throw away, or a small tree, large sofa, and four mattresses, all rammed into the back of a Ford Fiesta. How anything gets recycled lord only knows, as whenever you ask one of the lads where to put anything they shout, ‘Shove it on the pile, pal’ – TVs, batteries, duvets, asbestos, cyanide go on ‘throw it on, mate.’
The only thing I have actually achieved over the last week is to regularly hammer the gym, and my body with it. This is something you do when you are out of action and injured; it becomes an absolute obsession to get fit and every day seems like a week. It is as if you can’t function in your normal life until your body is one hundred per cent right, and you are back playing. You also feel like a leper in and around the club. Most managers’ philosophy on injured players is the same, ‘you can’t help me at the moment, so make yourself scarce’. If the team is winning you are even more leper-like, whereas if the team is on a losing streak your every movement and strike of a ball is monitored, until you are back fit and able to help the team.
I’ve had to have a quick look at Sky Sports News, and it’s 0–0 so far.
(Before I go back into my first season of football again, I feel the need to interject and officially apologise for the use of any offensive language. I will only use it when it is very, very necessary.)
1989/90
Looking back to 1989 is not so easy – the old memory is not what it used to be and my pyramid filing system of programmes and no DVD footage (it was all video back then!) doesn’t help matters. However, I have just found an old newspaper cutting with the headline ‘Chris on the mark’, referring to my debut for Grimsby Town juniors after my return from Everton. ‘Hargreaves scored with a good left foot shot.’ Not the best bit of journalism