On Saturday 11 October 1975, my dad took me to my first ever football match: Aston Villa (hooray!) against Tottenham Hotspur (boo!). I would be lying if I were to claim that I could remember much of the game now. I was so captivated by the spectacle, and particularly the unimaginable noise of 40,000 people shouting vaguely in unison, that I spent much of the time looking anywhere but the pitch.
That day marked the start of a ritual for the two of us that would endure until I left home at 18. Every other Saturday Dad would drive us to the ground from our home in Nottingham, with the radio tuned to Birmingham’s commercial station, BRMB, which always had a more partisan, Villa-centric take on sports reporting than the BBC.
Upon walking the final mile to Villa Park, we’d head first to the club car park, where the players and managers of both sides would each have to fight off an army of hangers-on, pre-teen autograph hunters and – once – gangland enforcers apparently looking to collect a debt from a player. Andy Gray, Brian Little, Martin Peters, Alan Hudson, Bobby Robson … reader, you may not know them, but I harassed them all, and still have the written evidence.
And what a time to become obsessed with football, and Villa in particular. Masterminded by unsmiling manager Ron Saunders, they were just about to embark on a remarkable renaissance that within seven years would see them win the league for the first time since the Edwardian era and then top that by winning the European Cup.
