Holte Enders In The Sky (Part I)

I could have easily wound up supporting Aston Villa.

Presenting at an EFL event there, just before they were promoted back to the top flight, I realised just how easily.

I was on the stage, lamenting – tongue-firmly-in-cheek, I should add – the folly of youth when making life-changing decisions.

You see, my uncle Colin was the biggest football fan in my family when I was young, and by some distance. As the twentieth anniversary of his death fast approaches, he was one of the biggest influences on me, especially where football was concerned. The last game he attended was at the 2006 World Cup when he replaced my friend’s Dad at short notice due to illness, and we managed to bag tickets for England versus Ecuador.

He was clearly ill himself, and possibly too ill to travel across Germany, but his doctor told him he should go. Fittingly perhaps, he was able to bow out in style and doing something he loved, at a World Cup no less, because it was pretty much all downhill from there.

In his younger days, he was what we’d call a superfan. He’d already been a season ticket holder at Villa Park for goodness knows how long before I was even born, and he still was when I began to take an interest in the game.

I watched my first ever match – the 1980 FA Cup Final – with him at my nan and grandad’s house. The next year, Villa were involved in a two-way battle with Ipswich for the title and he was here, there and everywhere. I was still quite young but fascinated by the fact that someone would choose to spend almost half of their weekend watching a football team, and do it every week too.  

If it was a home game, he’d leave his house mid-morning and get a lift with a mate. They’d park in streets where you had to pay the kids to ‘look after’ your car, then head into the nearest pub to the ground, before getting into the stadium just before kick-off, and then reversing the entire journey after the final whistle.

An away match was something else entirely, often starting before the sun was up and with him rolling home an hour either side of midnight. The aforementioned Ipswich, plus Liverpool, Southampton, Brighton, Manchester United and City, Everton, Sunderland, Crystal Palace and Norwich were all ticked off as the season’s long-haul trips, but the Midlands-heavy division also had Wolves, West Brom and Villa’s city rivals, Birmingham, as well as the other City contingent of Coventry, Leicester and Stoke in it. Shorter journeys that always seemed – peculiarly – to still meant getting home at midnight or later.

In the two-point-for-a-win (this was the last season it was used) days back then, Villa lost eight games including the final one at another all-day-tripper, Arsenal. But sixty points was still enough to win the league, and another crazy – by today’s standards anyway – stat was that they used only 14 players across the whole season.

Ipswich missed the chance to catch up after losing at Middlesborough on the ‘last day’ although they did have one more game to go. But by then, they had their eyes firmly on the prize of the UEFA Cup and a two-legged final against AZ Alkmaar of The Netherlands. In a strange quirk, my first ever day working in football was at Highbury in early 2006, and I watched the goals from that 1981 UEFA Cup Final on a screen in the AZ Museum whilst doing an assessment out there a few years later.

I shudder to think what my uncle spent during 1980/81 following his beloved team home and away, although I’m sure he’d have said it was worth every single penny. But that was nothing compared to the season after that.

Curtains

With a crack at the European Cup (aka Champions League) on offer and an English club having won it every year since 1977, he got his passport in order and added stamps for Reykjavik, two trips behind the Iron Curtain to Berlin and Kyiv (almost – the game was switched to a venue a couple of hundred miles away to escape the worst of the winter weather in the Soviet Union), then Brussels before the final in Rotterdam. I still have the programmes from all of the games in the garage somewhere.

It’s also where I entered the story. Well, almost. Although I was probably too young, he offered to take me to the final at the De Kuip Stadium. I was game, obviously, but my mother – and his younger sister - less so. Villa fans, rather selfishly, had been involved in hooliganism with their counterparts from Anderlecht in the semi-final. That was enough to put an end to my hopes, and I had to settle with watching on TV as Tony Barton's huge underdogs defeated a Bayern Munich XI that would provide most of West Germany’s team in the World Cup Final later that summer. I did finally get to go to the stadium in 2019 (for an assessment at a Feyenoord game).

But had I gone in 1981, would that have inextricably linked me to the club? There is a good chance, given what an incredible night that must have been. I was starting to get really involved in both playing and watching by now but still hadn’t settled on a club. Some more of my relatives tried to pull me towards Wolves, my Dad was a Walsall fan although rarely found time to go because of work, and I was born in West Bromwich. But Villa seemed to be the logical choice. Serial winners, and with someone to take me to games. You can see how close I came to taking that path.

Villa were not done quite yet either. There was also a UEFA Super Cup win in early 1983, in which Villa thumped Barcelona 3-0 at Villa Park, and their attempt to retain their European crown two months later when they met Juventus in the quarter-final. This was my uncle’s final shot at getting me indoctrinated in all things claret and blue. I’d been glued to the TV during the World Cup as Italy and France had been the winners of the actual prize and the people’s champions respectively. In their teams had been Golden Boot winner, Paulo Rossi, the French maverick, Michel Platini, and also the explosive Zbigniew Boniek, whose goals had propelled Poland to third place.

Now the three of them graced Villa Park and I was there too. Rossi scored after just 40 seconds, while Platini strolled around like he would when single-handedly securing Euro 84 for France a year later, and his sublime pass set up Boniek for the later winner. Forty-odd thousand Villa fans were shattered by this, but I lapped it up, seeing the world’s best players in action meant I was hooked on football by now, but not so much on Aston Villa funnily enough.

Maybe it was the distance as, even by car, it still felt a long way for a kid. Or possibly the huge stadium and attendances – the Holte End at the time felt enormous – were a bit overwhelming. I honestly can’t remember although playing on Saturday mornings for my own school or Walsall Schoolboys might have also played a part in the decision.

Either way, I needed somewhere a little closer to home.

Next: Part II – Walsall Calling