Playing away from home
By Apollo Latham
The analogy is obvious : a man marries young, but finds years later
that his wife has gone to seed a bit. He meets a younger woman, who
has many of the qualities of his wife in her youth, and they have an
exhilarating affair, but eventually reality intervenes and he returns
to the familiarity of his first love, wanting someone to grow old
with and missing the shared memories. The affair eventually takes on the
status of a dream - a brief escape from the mundanity of everyday life.
I was that soldier. Watford, the wife. The mistress, unlikely as this
may sound, Cambridge Utd.
October, 1989. As I started my first term as an obnoxious Cambridge
undergraduate, the idea of slumming it for a bit with a Fourth
Division side seemed to have a kind of perverse attraction. I had only
really known First Division football at Watford, apart from the
play-off season (88/89), and still thought of us as promotion
contenders (ah, the folly of youth!). At the time, the "U"s were
91st out of 92 league clubs. Scunthorpe at home was to be my
inauguration. "We" won 5-3, with 3 goals in the first ten minutes, 2
from the half-way line in the howling wind. I never looked back - nor
did Cambridge, who started a run of seven consecutive wins.
The league form was good, if unspectacular, but the F.A.Cup was the
spark that really got the ball rolling, as Ron Atkinson would
say. Close-run wins against Aldershot, Woking and Darlington were
followed by a glamour tie against First Division Millwall. This too
was won in a replay, in extra-time with the luckiest own goal
imaginable, and then Bristol City, still two divisions above
Cambridge, succumbed 5-1 in a second replay. To get to the
quarter-finals was a major achievement, though sadly Crystal Palace
sneaked a 1-0 win with a late goal from Geoff Thomas, damn his eyes,
through a forest of players. Palace went on to the memorable 4-3
semi-final against Liverpool. The vagaries of ticket pricing and
allocation meant I actually paid more for my ticket to the Palace game
than I did for my ticket to the World Cup final a few months later.
Every ill wind has a silver lining, and with the end of the cup run
came the realisation that with so many games in hand the play-offs
were a realistic possibility. Under the new manager, John Beck, who
had taken over in January, an excellent run-in ensued, and a win at
Aldershot was enough to get us into the play-offs. I travelled all the
way to Dartford to watch a nail-biting win over Maidstone. Well into
extra-time, with an away goals defeat looming, Dion Dublin scored two
goals to take Cambridge to Wembley for the first time in their
history. Chesterfield went down 1-0 in the final, and lo and behold,
Cambridge were in the dizzy heights of Division Three.
So where were Watford in all this? I plead not guilty, well, not
entirely guilty. I did see Watford in the vacations, even missing the
poll tax demo to watch Colin Lee's barmiest of armies beat Blackburn
in one of his first (and, let's face it, only) victories. But with only
meaningless end-of-season games remaining at Vicarage Road, my
thoughts were starting to wander to events in Cambridge.
The start of the 90/91 season was grim for Watford. By the time term
had started, we were a quarter of the way through the season and
without a win. I was serving chips in a canteen and was glad to
escape. Cambridge were doing well - and yet at this time the first
signs of criticism of the long ball style were being heard. Still, it
was good to go to a game confident of victory, and to see that
confidence rewarded more often than not. 1991 was an annus mirabilis
for Cambridge, and best of all was the cup run. The coup de grace was
the 5th round 4-0 win against Ron Atkinson's Sheffield Wednesday, who
won the League Cup that season and got promoted to Division One. Ron
Atkinson was a former Cambridge manager, which was the icing on the
coup de grace. It took Arsenal, who went on to win the league, to beat
us, 2-1 away, in the quarter-final. In the league Cambridge were
always near the top, and again took advantage of games in hand to get
promoted, and went top for the first time on the last day of the
season to clinch the championship. By this stage the stadium was often
filled to capacity, and incredibly I was in a position to call the other fans glory-hunters.
It was at this time that the comparison to the Glory Days at Watford
seemed appropriate - Cambridge made a rapid climb up the table, were
derided for their long-ball tactics, had great cup runs, played in
yellow, and had a ground with a vaguely ecclesiastical name. Truth
to tell, that was about it, and Cambridge's kick-and-rush was really a
pale imitation of the exciting attacking wing-based football of
Watford earlier. Still, it felt good at the time.
Watford of course were staging a memorable come-back of their (sorry,
our) own. We had been drinking in the last chance saloon without a
paddle, but our brave new manager, Steve Perryman, provided us with an
extraordinary end-of-season run-in, and we avoided the drop.
Cambridge managed to start the 1991/92 season well, but already by
November the tide was beginning to go pear-shaped. Nevertheless, we were
top of the table, easily a record league position, and promotion
looked likely. January that year saw my first clash of loyalties,
with Cambridge playing Watford at the Abbey Stadium. Ironically it was
in the vacation, so I still had a long trip, but I dutifully went to
the away end. Baiting the opposition didn't seem quite so much fun
that game I remember, and the usual joy of nicking a totally
undeserved win (David James played a blinder) wasn't quite there. By
this stage the Cambridge names were more familiar than some of the
Watford ones, the moose song and "I've got a lovely bunch of coconuts"
were as much a part of my footballing identity as Z-Cars. I even
bought a yellow and black scarf, kidding myself I could wear it at
either team's matches. Watford were still my team, and I saw them when
I could, but...
Cambridge were pretty poor over the second half of the season, and
went out the cup in the third round. Fortunately no-one else in the
division played with any consistency either, and we managed to scrape
into the play-offs. There we faced Leicester, who nicked an undeserved
1-1 draw before winning 5-0 at Filbert Street. Thus Cambridge missed
the chance of being founder members of the Premier League, the
play-off place instead going to Blackburn. I left Cambridge and moved
to Brighton, still intending to follow Cambridge as a kind of "second team".
Cambridge's glory days ended even more suddenly than Watford's. Dion
Dublin went to Man Utd, and Shaggy, another significant player, had
already left. Colin Bailie, still in his 20s, retired from football
rather than play for John Beck again, and Steve Claridge took an even
more drastic measure - he went to Luton. All this before the end of
the summer following the play-offs. New signings (including Devon
White) failed to catch on, and soon John Beck resigned. He had never
been particularly popular with the fans, possibly in part because he'd
inherited almost all the players that won his success. Cambridge went
down on the last day of the season, and after a failed attempt at the
play-offs, went back down to the bottom division in 94/95. Like
Aeneas, I saw the smoke from the funeral pyre, and knew what was going
on, but didn't turn around. It wasn't really my problem anymore.
A few of that Cambridge team have managed to have reasonable success -
Dion Dublin, Steve Claridge, Alan Kimble - and a few more like Lee
Philpott and Danny O'Shea have had brief flirtations with the
Premiership. John Beck seems to be having a rollercoaster career and is
doing okay at the moment at Lincoln. I've seen Cambridge once since I
left, a 1-0 defeat away to Bournemouth in November in the season they
went down to the third division. Already the tables had turned full
circle, and Cambridge were just another lower division side, with few
fans and fading memories. Nothing remained of the team I had loved,
and then callously tossed aside when it suited me. Shortly afterwards
I even stopped checking Cambridge's results in the Sunday paper.
Looking back, I suppose I could have done something a little more
productive at University. I often wish I'd done a bit more work,
especially when I'm teaching idle students now and have to learn the
stuff I didn't do first time round. After all, part of what makes
going to football worthwhile is the way in which each game adds to a
shared sum of experience, a continuous set of memories against which
you can measure your life. Every game, good or bad, adds to this, and
to your status as a fan, and thus your self-esteem. Playing away from
home doesn't really add anything meaningful, it can only be a
substitute for the real thing, and looking back, you wonder if it ever
really happened, and what it was all for.