Stuttering England aside, it’s been a great Euros so far: the comedy of Scotland, the tragedy of Croatia, the miracle of Georgia. Now that the knockout rounds are upon us, I intend to see every remaining game live in full. This is when the memorable moments will begin in earnest, in these win-or-go-home games: last minute twists, astonishing upsets, penalty shoot-outs. I can’t wait.
There’s just one little problem with this plan to saturate myself in football for the next fortnight: Steve and Katrina’s wedding today (Saturday). They are former colleagues of my wife who went on to become good friends and we’ve had the invite stuck by magnet to our fridge door since last summer – since before the Euros qualifying stages had even been completed.
This leaves a fourth, nuclear option: absconding completely
They’re having a small ceremony at Marylebone town hall followed by a reception at a pub in Crouch End. The latter starts at 5 p.m. – the exact moment of kick-off in the first knockout match. I’ve known there was going to be a clash between this wedding and the first two games of the knockout rounds for months. Part of me wanted one of these games to involve England. I figured that this might force the couple’s hand: popular demand might persuade them to install a big screen at the reception, or something. A late Denmark winner against Serbia on Tuesday night would have swung it so it was England playing today – but it never came. England don’t play until tomorrow afternoon, against Slovakia.
Steve is quite a big football fan and so, I gather, are many of his friends. I’ve been to matches with him. He supports Leicester, his hometown club. His mum is dog-walking friends with their former star player Harvey Barnes’s mum. And Catrina supports Luton. An uncle played for them. The thoughts of both are unlikely to be on football today. And I can’t see the couple going to the trouble of installing a big screen merely to allow me and one or two of their friends to watch Switzerland–Italy. So my options are going to be limited.
The first and most obvious tactic is sneaking downstairs from the private function room to the main body of the pub to try to watch the match on the TVs there. But that’s if there are any. It’s a very middle-class north London pub and I don’t think that there necessarily will be. Instead I could try watching on my phone – but that’s unsatisfactory both as a medium for viewing football, as well as for the poor-form spectacle the viewer presents to any person seeing them do this. The third option would be trying what is popularly known as ‘doing a Likely Lads’ – so named because of a classic 1973 episode of the sitcom in which Terry and Bob try to avoid hearing the result of an afternoon England game so that they can watch the highlights as if live in the evening. But, as that episode repeatedly demonstrates, carrying this off is notoriously difficult. Furthermore, even if I were to manage it, I can’t imagine being in any condition to watch four hours of football on record when I stumble in from the wedding disco well after midnight.
This leaves a fourth, nuclear option: absconding completely. It would involve sneaking out of the reception and heading to the more downmarket, Sky Sports-y rival pub five minutes up the road. This place will definitely be showing the football. And the advantage of this option is that virtually no one will realise that I’ve done it – as I’m on the outer reaches of the guest list and so won’t be missed by almost anyone. But there is one very serious flaw here. Because one person would miss me and would view this as a straight red card offence: my wife.
So I go off to today’s wedding unsure of what my best strategy is – and in this I am perhaps echoing Gareth Southgate’s uncertainty as he faces down Slovakia next week. I’ve been grappling with the etiquette of clashing big football games and social or work events for almost 40 years.
My first experience of this was at Glastonbury in 1986. The festival weekend coincided squarely with the England–Argentina World Cup quarter-final in Mexico. I had figured that I’d be able to find somewhere on the festival site to watch it there but this was in the days before football became fashionable. There was not a hint of a TV showing football anywhere. So I ended up listening to Maradona’s wonder goal on a tiny transistor radio belonging to some bloke from Wolverhampton – along with about 70 other disenfranchised men in a hushed huddle.
In 1990, I spoiled a long-arranged university reunion meet-up by insisting that, instead of the brasserie the others had booked, we repair to a seedy basement bar off Tottenham Court Road to watch England draw 0-0 with Holland. One guest who had travelled from Edinburgh didn’t speak to me for another ten years as a result. In 1994, as a young tabloid reporter, I was meant to be doorstepping Gillian Taylforth at her home in Totteridge over the fallout from her romantic lay-by liaison and resulting libel trial – when I realised that Romania–Argentina was turning into a classic. I sneaked off to a pub by Totteridge tube station to watch the second half. One friend tells me that his voice can be heard roaring home the late winning British Lions try by Alan Tait in Cape Town in 1997 on a friend’s wedding video – his screaming unmistakably revealing that he had been hiding in the catering van where he had located a portable TV.
But my favourite of these stories takes us back to England in the football. During Italia 90, my sister-in-law had tickets to see the Rolling Stones at Wembley, which clashed with the England–Germany semi-final: Gazza’s tears, Lineker’s head tap and all that. She was reconciled to missing the match but one person there wasn’t: Mick Jagger disappeared off stage for some ten minutes, leaving Keith to pick up the vocals, while he watched the penalty shoot-out.
I presume that when he came back on stage after seeing Stuart Pearce and Chris Waddle both miss and England go out they went straight into ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’. I’m not sure I’m going to get what I want this afternoon.
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