Max Rushden's Beautiful Game
Join the host of Guardian Football Weekly on a trip back in time to a sandy pitch in Cambridge…

Words:
Max RushdenImages:
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.
For this edition, we are welcoming the right honourable Max Rushden. Stalwart of Soccer AM’s glory years, king of Guardian Football Weekly and an incredibly authentic and obsessive Cambridge United fan, his Beautiful Game involves a close shave in the Comet car park, Marvin the Moose and an early morning clarinet lesson. Never change, Max…
I’m going to watch…
My beloved Cambridge United. Picking a year is so hard. The obvious temptation is to go back to the glory years somewhere between January 1990 and April 1992. John Beck as manager with sand on the pitch, the long throws, just players kicking it as far as they possibly can.

Dion Dublin up front with John Taylor, Steve Claridge and his gravity-defying socks coming off the bench. Andy Fensome and Alan Kimble hitting channel balls. Lee Philpott and Michael Cheetham jinking down the wing. Around 2008 or 2009, I played in a charity game with that entire team—walking into the (tiny) dressing rooms and seeing your heroes all in a circle was totally surreal.
But I’m tempted to go back to the late 90s solely because I’m in the midst of a mid-life crisis and would do anything to be 18 again. So, Roy McFarland is the manager, and John Taylor is BACK with Trevor Benjamin and Martin Butler. As it’s a flight of fancy, the players can just appear and disappear. So, some cameos from David Preece, Lionel Pérez, Wes Hoolahan. And then every time I look back, another disappointing target man will be failing to ‘make it stick’—I miss Devon White!
The game is at…
The Abbey Stadium. I go back so rarely (I do live in Australia, which feels like a reasonable excuse) that I become quite emotional walking up to it now. I had two stages of watching. First, as a kid in the Junior U’s enclosure—cycling to the game with Matt Walsham, Clive Sanders with my dad and his dad sitting a few rows behind us. Just before the FA Cup fifth round second replay with Bristol City, Matt said he’d give me and Clive each one of his Polos for every goal we scored. We won 5–1! Sweets of any kind were currency back then—so many Polos!
Anyway, during those games in the Main Stand, we’d stare at the Newmarket Road End with its darkness and noise and fags and swearing and think one day we’ll be there, with the ‘ultras’. And when we were in there, having finally graduated from the Junior U’s, it felt like the Kop. It doesn’t even go the full width of the pitch!
That’s where I am for this game. Just to the left, halfway down the terrace, leaning against the second bar up. There’s a group in leather jackets who look like Mulder’s nerd friends from The X-Files in front of us who shout: ‘We never score from corners’ every time we get a corner. Cigarette smoke will fill the air. I’ll nod at the slightly older guys who go to our local—one looks a bit like Sean Bean.
The opposition is completely irrelevant. Occasionally, when I’d ask non-matchgoing mates if they wanted to come, they’d often say, ‘Oh, who are you playing?’ as if that might be the day Inter or Boca Juniors were coming to town. It’s always Stevenage or Rotherham. We’ll be wearing the Beaumont Stainless Steels sponsored shirt with black and amber stripes.
Before kick-off, we’re having…
We won’t have a drink before the game. But we’ll all drive in Fraser’s Peugeot and park in Comet. He only had the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack on cassette, so we’ll listen to the disco instrumental ‘A Fifth of Beethoven’ by Walter Murphy and the Big Apple Band with the windows down. That song transports me back to that time instantly.