My Beautiful Game is a place for people we like to describe their perfect football match. Our guests get to choose everything that would add up to make their ideal game. Teams, year, ground, players, score, what they’re wearing, who they’re going with, what they’re drinking, where they’re heading afterwards. This week’s guest is Jonathan Wilson. Not many people do it better than him. Guardian Football Weekly legend, writer of about 100 amazing football books, founder of the brilliant Blizzard, and so much more; we were very excited when he said he’d give us a glimpse into his footballing nirvana. Strap yourselves in; we’re off to Roker Park…
I'm going to watch...
Sunderland. I’d like to go and watch the Hungarians of the early 50s, or the MTK of the early 20s, or the Ajax of the early 70s, but if this is going to be an afternoon of fun rather than note-taking, let’s make it nostalgic. Specifically, it’s the Sunderland of the early 90s, which was when, in my mid-teens, I first started going to games regularly, not with my dad, but with my mates. This feeds into a thought I have increasingly regularly as I approach 50. Specifically, what it would be like to go back and do stuff again, knowing what I know now. Imagine going back to university after 25 years of writing articles to length and deadline. I would be phenomenally efficient—but then I’d lack the memory to be any good at exams, and I’d realise that the beer in the college bar was crap, and my lack of pace would mean I probably wouldn’t even get in the third team (maybe as a keeper?).
What would it be like to go back to those days when football was fresh? When I remembered details of games with terrifying detail and got frustrated with my dad because he couldn’t instantly recall line-ups from the 60s? When I really thought Brian Atkinson might play for England? But to go back knowing what I know now, that Malcolm Crosby wasn’t a messiah, that John Kay’s aggression might at times have been counterproductive, that Colin Pascoe was a useful left winger but little more. I suspect it might be a bit like seeing a picture of somebody you used to fancy: the heart would flare, but there’d be a bit of your brain thinking, “Really?”
The game is at...
It’s at Sunderland, obviously, but at Roker Park. My dad would stand in the Roker End, in the spot just up from the left-hand post where he’d stood at the majority of home games since the end of the war, and I would be with my mates in the Fulwell End, in the centre, ideally against the barrier at the back of the middle section. It was always easy enough to pick out my dad. As soon as it got remotely cold, he’d put on his big padded maroon anorak—and this would be a cold day, December or January time. Maybe a touch of mist in the air to mingle with the cigarette smoke and add an element of soft focus under the floodlights.
My dad always moaned that it wasn’t the same since they’d lopped the top off the back of the Roker End in the 70s, and the noisier support had shifted to the Fulwell End, drawn by the better acoustics provided after the corrugated steel roof was added for the 1966 World Cup. (My dad saw Lev Yashin play at Roker, which always seems wildly incongruous, but his only real memory of the quarterfinal in which the USSR beat Hungary was that the ball burst.) That always seemed like ancient history, but this mythical visit is closer in time to 1966 than it is to now, which feels terrifying. Where did it all go? What have I done with all that time? What could I have achieved if I’d spent less time fretting about whether it was better to go with Tony Norman, who was vulnerable to crosses, or Alec Chamberlain, who was vulnerable to long shots?
Before kick-off, we're having...
Well, if we’re going full retro, we’d go to the Methodist church hall next to the ground for a coffee and a sandwich, but these days, I’d rather have a beer. If we were going to the Stadium of Light, I’d go to the King’s Arms for a couple of pints of White Rat, but it’s probably too long a walk to Roker for that to be comfortable, which means probably the Blue Bell in Fulwell, where we always used to go after Boxing Day games because it was local for Dave, whose birthday it was.
He was two years below me at infant school (the same school Jill Scott went to)—my first memory of him was him laughing when I got sent out of assembly for sneezing (it might have been 1982, but I haven’t forgotten, Mrs Thirlwall, and I certainly haven’t forgiven). There’s a really nice restaurant overlooking the Wear at Sheepfolds next to the Stadium of Light, but I’d rather take on something light before the pub and have a sandwich to soak up the booze at half-time.
I'm attending the match with...
This is difficult. In the old days, there was a group of about half a dozen regulars, plus occasionals, including two Newcastle fans, and a few of us would go to watch Newcastle maybe half a dozen times a season in return (which led to the incident in January 1992 when Steve Watson performed an astonishing diving headed clearance off the line, only for Liam O’Brien to turn the subsequent follow-up into his own net as Newcastle, having been 3–0 up lost 4–3 to Charlton; I was laughing so hard I essentially couldn’t breathe, doubled up over a crush barrier as an old bloke in front worried I was having an asthma attack).
