Footballing legacies handed down from Father to Son

An ode to those no longer with us

I’m sitting here staring at this Chelsea ticket, in a world where I should be unbelievably excited about playing a team that I have a fundamental distaste for (one that pre-dates Abramovich) and pumped to finally see us play in the top-flight for the first time in my life. 

Don’t get me wrong. I am, but equally I’m feeling frankly a little bit lost and alone at the prospect. 

This was meant be an article about the emotional roller coaster that has been the last four months of my life. But every time I have tried to start this article, the start has gone further and further back. From Saturday to a week before, then from March, to 1994. It probably really needs to start on the 24^thApril 1988 (well, probably 11 months before then but let’s not be uncouth!). 

Three years before, my dad had been freaking my mum to death because she had seen Millwall ‘85 on the news and he didn’t know anything about it because he had made it to the pub before it had all kicked off. As a result, there was no way she would let my dad go to Wembley when I was sat there at less than two months old. 

So, in essence, this is a story about how one man was unable to go to the biggest two games in our history. But football isn’t about logistics, it’s about feelings. 

Looking back now, my birth evidently untethered him from the football club. Although I am sure missing 88 and seeing 89 probably didn’t help. This is a man who would later tell me that the trip back from Villa Park in 1985 was the ‘longest of his life’. Maybe, somewhere in the back of my mind, that had as much bearing on Sunday when I fully wanted Everton to survive almost as much as I wanted us to win the day before. It might just be possible that I wanted revenge next season for him. 

By the summer of 1993 then, I look back and am not even sure if he had been at a game since that second Littlewoods Cup Final. With my brother being born that summer, on paper, that should probably be the complete uncoupling of his relationship with the club. 

But then came that cup run. Looking back now, I was aware of football and aware of Match of the Day. In fact, the earliest memory I can place is a BBC preview of the England v San Marino qualifier.  But until I turned on MoTD for the fourth-round highlights, I am pretty sure I was completely unaware that the Hatters existed.  

Maybe I was in from that moment. More likely it was the indelible image of the late David Preece going potty trying to climb the ‘hooligan fencing’ at Ninian Park to join the away end that was seared into my then almost 6-year-old retina and will probably be there until the day I die. I know that kind of adult elation was not something I had every seen before and it was something I wanted to see and experience. 

There are very few other memories I have of my pre-teen years. But I will never forget the feeling when I saw those two glistening tickets with the twin towers logo on the bottom that meant that my first ever live game would be with my father at an FA Cup semi-final. 

It’s also the reason that I have been desperate to beat Chelsea ever since (thanks Kerry Dixon). So much so that when we had a junior school talent show years later and I decided to replicate the last few minutes of commentary, studio show and post-match interviews of a FA Cup semi-final (complete with sheepskin coat and some ‘terrible defending’ comments from Hansen), who was the team Andrew Fotiadis scored the winner against?  

Chelsea 

And who was on hand with props and costume changes ready? 

My Dad 

It wasn’t a straight road from there. Neither of us were season-ticket holders for nearly another decade but, it was me using half my maturing post-office account (remember those) at the age of 16 that allowed me to pull my dad back in. 

From that point on, I had not only re-tethered my dad back to the football club but the rest of my family too. At one point, during the Diverse FM era, the only one not going almost every week was me, because I was stuck in the studio! 

This wasn’t meant to be a history lesson, let alone my life story. So, I apologise for this. The point being that nothing, other than maybe cricket, has strengthened the bond between me and my dad more than this crazy little football hemmed in between one of the most vibrant South-Asian areas in the UK and a disused railway-cum-busway.  

My love and pride of this club probably directly correlates to my love and pride of this town. It is probably the entire reason I wanted to be a councillor, because I am immensely desperate for others to see what I know. That this town has a huge amount to be proud of.  

This summer, the one we have all just experienced in all its unique crazy and emotional maelstrom, is something that was beyond the dreams of all of us. Certainly, I never considered the possibility that this was even possible.  

Heck, I remember getting back from Manchester is sheer distress in 2011, after the worst coach journey of my life and my dad just turning round to me and saying, ‘that was worse’. Instantly knowing what he meant. 

What has just happened should go in the pantheon of the best summer of my life; along with my wedding, working at the Olympics, playing cricket for England and seeing the literal land of my fore-fathers, Wales, reach the semi’s of a Euros and the finals of the World Cup. 

Surely it will, but right now, it is me that feels untethered. As things go, I consider myself quite a logical person. So, when my dad told me not long ago that he had some spots on his leg where he had skin cancer three years ago, I was probably more clinical than most would be. You don’t get away with these things twice. 

Even so, if you told me that the person that I was watching the first leg of the semi-final with, who had little more than a sore throat, would not be at Wembley. Well...I would have only considered that it would be because Sunderland we there.   

The whole thing went so fast in the week leading up to the Play-off Final that I am not sure I even had time to process it. It went from needing a walking stick on Sunday, then trying to change his seat to a wheelchair space on Tuesday to him being in hospital in less than a couple of months to live on Thursday. 

My clinical side probably didn’t let me process things at the time. We had the most important game not only in the history of the club, but the entire history of the time coming up. Allied to that was the simple fact that because things developed so quickly, what I needed to do regarding tickets and travel plans and work plans were changing equally quickly. 

I simply didn’t have time to process it. Maybe I still haven’t. 

What I never quite realised, was how much my Hatters experience was interlinked with my dad.  I didn’t really go with him. We went to different games and sat in different places (partially down to preference and partially superstition).  But living in this world without him on the other end of the telephone line or at my family home to talk to has shown me, just how much that my relationship with my dad was conducted through the prism of sport in general and our beloved football club in particular.  

Even in death he has managed it. Those ever-changing plans caused by his illness meant that we didn’t get to see the orange hordes at West Hampstead station that we otherwise would have done. By planning his funeral and demanding that ‘if they can wear orange for Luton, they can wear Orange for me’, he replicated it.  

I didn’t think about it until we pulled into the Vale that day but as we pulled up towards the crematorium, I suddenly realised what it might look like and by heck it did. 150-odd people creating an orange sea that my dad would take one final journey through. 

After 63 years, Luton have probably done enough to drill the optimism out of anyone, if not the vibrancy which that orange showed. Little wonder that whenever we discussed the new ground, he would always say ‘I’ll believe it when I see it’ or more pertinently ‘It won’t happen while I’m around.’  

I’ll give him his due. It takes remarkable commitment to a viewpoint that his response to the only thing (PL money) that would confirm Power Court without a shadow of a doubt, was for his body to do the only thing that would prove him right! 

So, as we go onto Chelsea and then our face-lifted beloved home ground that my dad avoiding seeing Millwall attempt to destroy all those years ago. I will be entering my first few games of this season not yet knowing how I will react or feel.  

This is no unique experience though, there will be many others who have lost people that have been on this journey all of us Luton fans have been on. Heck, in some ways I’m lucky, I knew this was coming before Wembley, there will be some for whom Wembley was their last ever game and they had no idea at the time.  

When we finally get to see top-flight football at home, many of us for the first time. At least spare a moment for those of us that we lost along the way. From Ian Pearce, to Santa, Mick Justin and the many of those who we knew by face but not name. One of whom is now my dad.