The Leaving of Goodison

I really knew what Goodison Park meant to me when I sat on the terraces of the Gwladys Street back in the mid ’90s. I was in my early thirties and It had been a tough time. I thought to myself, "Well, partners come and go, jobs come and go, houses come and go, even friends come and go... (For me, most of the aforementioned had fairly recently just gone) but I’ve been coming and standing or sitting in this place for 30 years." And I looked around at our still magnificent Old Lady of Goodison and felt, well, at home, in the way home speaks back to you about who you are and who you’ve been. And tomorrow, after what’s now 47 years, I’m going for the last time.

What Goodison Park said to me, as a 4-year-old, approaching the ground on my Dad’s shoulders, having ‘driven’ the bus at the front of the top deck and jumped off at the Mons ’cos the exercise kept him going, past the Water Works and through the terraced streets, then St Luke’s and Goodison Road,... What Goodison Park has always said to me, is ’Wow!’; a secular cathedral of epic scale, proportion and beauty.

Think of the dizzying precipitous view, up the impossibly steep steps, from the top tier of the Main Stand, not just of the ground but the City beyond. Or emerging from up the steps of the Street End for an evening game, with the luminous emerald green baize of the pitch below, and the feeling your life too could be the setting for something spectacular. I wanted a place there and every other week the Old Lady had one for me.

I first went to Goodison in 1966, with my Dad, and even saw Pele and Eusebio there in the World Cup, but I have only fleeting memories of the games. My first great hero was Alan Ball who, mudcaked and battered, but alert and absolutely focussed, embodied for me the fact that sometimes the one who wins is the one who just keeps going and going and going....

I still remember like yesterday the devastation when I read about Ball moving to Arsenal. It was on the torn back page of the previous day’s Daily Mirror on the dusty floor of my parents’ bedroom. And a chasm of misery opened up beneath my feet. It couldn’t be true... but it was — the blueprint of all future disappointments, maybe the exact point at which innocence started to turn to experience.

And then there was a period, late childhood to mid adolescence when my happiness or misery absolutely depended on Everton’s fortunes. Going with the older sons of neighbours and then with mates from school, when Everton scored it was communal ecstasy on the Street End, jumping up and down, hugging strangers, swearing joyously at the top of our not quite broken voices, as Latchford (more often than not) notched up another from a Ronnie Goodlass or a Dave Thomas corner.

But then, of course, as teenage years turned to manhood, that buckling of your heart to the Old Lady inevitably started to loosen. And I’m bouncing up and down, arm in arm with the sweaty lad from Allerton who always came on his own, ’cos Andy King scored that goal, but I’m thinking I hope Jackie Cushing, or was it Jackie Heynes (I had a thing for girls called Jackie...) turns up to the church hall disco tonight. And it was a moment of existential angst, Everton scoring I knew to be the greatest happiness known to schoolboy, and yet if Jackie H... or, well, either of them really... were just to give us a second look....

By the mid 80s, I was away from the City and in my first ’big’ relationship, the beauty and happiness of which was mirrored when the team from Goodison were the uncrowned, but widely acknowledged, greatest team in Europe. Sadly it, like the relationship, wasn’t to last. But one of the few games from the hundreds I’ve seen that I can clearly remember was our Andy Grey led 2-0 destruction of Sunderland in our greatest ever season. Bracewell’s crossfield pass, facing the wrong way, for Steven’s goal was a rare thing of passing beauty. Maybe I remember it too ’cos it was the only time both my sisters and my brother and I all went to the game together, and we couldn’t have gone to a better one. One sister was, and is, a Red.

It’s funny how lots of the best memories don’t have a lot to do with the games. I remember Moyes terrifying the players with his, pale as milk, nobbly knees as he took the warm-up for his first game in charge, and taking a pensioner neighbour to the game, who was thought to be a bit down, shall we say, on Catholics, but who I knew to be an Evertonian, when we had a ticket spare and getting an education from him in the Medlock on the Club and the teams in the 50s and early 60s. Or my Dad slipping on the steep steps in the main stand and spilling hot coffee on a Wolves fan. Far from turning nasty he turned out to be a great bloke and we had from then on a ‘second’ team.

There are lots of things I won’t miss about going the game of course. The deafening tannoy, the bloody awful 80s playlist (I don’t think I really need to hear Spandau Ballet’s ’Gold’ ever again really, ever....), Pukka pies you need a Wonga loan to buy, and the pissin’ post in front of the penalty spot from our end of the Lower Bullens. And I won’t miss those fellas for whom ’going the match’ is obviously still bearing too great an emotional burden: "Fuckin’ ref!! Bet you’re a fucking red shithouse bastard"....etc...etc. To which one can only reply. "It’s just a throw-in, mate."

Although of course I’ve probably been him a few times myself. But I’ll miss the Toffee Lady, Johnny Todd, the Fellaini wigs, and the pre-match drinks in the Medlock. I’ll miss the ’auld ones’ with their sticks in the Lower Bullens, the Dutch, German and Scandinavian Evertonians and the foreign school parties who also tend to sit round here. I’ll miss sitting here with my lad, now grown up himself, and the brother and sister who never went astray. And the stewards who do their best to get me up the steps, even threatening to carry me up if I don’t get a move on.....

So my disability means I’m not going to get to the match much any more, and living in Berlin (about which I write here here).....doesn’t help either; although having a wonderful wife helps with pretty much everything else. And no, she’s not called Jackie.

ps: Final game — Everton 2-0 QPR. ’Nuff said.

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