My footballing decade, by Oliver Holt

By Oliver Holt in Mirror Football Blog

Published 13:19 20/12/09

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The Daily Mirror's Chief Sports Writer recalls his most memorable adventures of the past 10 years...

1) When the new decade was only a few days old, FIFA staged the first World Club Championship in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. Manchester United, who had been persuaded to pull out of the FA Cup in order to compete, qualified as Champions League winners from the year before.

United didn’t catch the sunny mood of the tournament and behaved, as so often, with great discourtesy to the local media who wanted to report on their progress. While Real Madrid and the Brazilian representatives invited the public to their training sessions, United insisted on practising behind closed doors and Sir Alex Ferguson had a flaming row at a press conference with Martin Samuel, then of the Daily Express. The trip was a PR disaster for the Treble winners.

For the English journalists who had travelled to Rio to cover United, it was difficult to know whether to laugh or cry. United refused to speak to us so in between games, with no training sessions or press conferences to attend, we were compelled to spend our days on Ipanema Beach, playing football on the sand.

In one game against a group of Brazilian kids with lavish skills, we were being taken apart. So we abandoned our own attempts at samba football and reverted to traditional English style. Our goalkeeper launched a massive throw up the beach and one of our lads nodded it past their bemused keeper. Direct football won the day.

It was the best work trip I’ve ever been on. Other hardships included attending the Miss Ipanema Beach at Romario’s bar in the Barra district of the city. The fortnight we spent out there felt like an education in the ways of a country that loves football even more than we do. It was the first time I’d been to the Maracana Stadium, too. What a thrill that was.

United lost their first game at the Maracana when Gary Neville played a couple of misjudged back-passes that let in Romario and in another game, David Beckham was sent off. They were eliminated early. The final was played out between Vasco Da Gama and Corinthians, a Rio-Sao Paulo grudge match. It ended 0-0 but Edmundo, the star of the tournament, missed the crucial penalty for Vasco. I’ve still got the front page of Lance newspaper which has a picture of Edmundo on his knees under the headline 'Mundo Cruel'.

Amid all the intoxication of revelling in football at the home of the beautiful game, though, one thing took me aback. When I was sitting in a taxi stuck in traffic on the way to the final, we saw a coach full of Corinthians fans on the opposite side of the road. They weren’t the fun-loving, happy, dancing Brazilians that had been my idea of what Rio football fans would be like.

They looked like the worst kind of football hooligans I’d ever seen. Scary men, shaven-headed and crammed tight into that bus, their eyes eager for conflict and trouble. That was my first proper glimpse of poverty in Brazil and the other side of the country’s society. It’s one of the reasons it’s so popular. It’s an escape.

2) I have always loved going to watch football in Istanbul. The atmosphere in Galatasaray’s ground, the Ali Sami Yen, was like nothing I’d ever seen before, particularly in the hour leading up to the start of the game. The crowd on the upper tier bounced up and down as one and made an infernal din and from the armoured personnel carriers outside the ground to the riot police inside it, there was always a great sense of theatre and melodrama.

I even enjoyed all the nonsense at the airport when visiting English teams arrived, the Galatasaray or Fenerbahce fans running up to the coach and drawing their fingers across their throats at the players stared down from the windows. I followed the Chelsea coach from the airport back to their hotel once, watching the Turkish supporters in pursuit in their cars. It was like a scene from Mad Max 2 .

That kind of behaviour took on an altogether more sinister and tragic air when two Leeds fans were killed in Istanbul in 2000 but I still felt there would be something epic about Liverpool’s Champions League final against AC Milan in 2005 even before we arrived on the shores of the Bosphorous.

The match was not at the Ali Sami Yen but out in the low hills on the edge of the city at the Olympic Stadium. On the journey out there, it made the spine tingle just to seen the lines of Liverpool supporters marching through the arid countryside on their way to the stadium. It was like a biblical scene. Like a pilgrimage.

It didn’t seem as though the game was going to be an epic at half time, though. It was an embarrassment. Liverpool were 3-0 and being cut to pieces. Some fans left. But then Steven Gerrard began the comeback with a rare headed goal and suddenly, unbelievably, Liverpool were level at 3-3. I knew they were going to win it when Jerzy Dudek made a miraculous double save from Andriy Shevchenko late on. They clinched it in a penalty shoot-out.

What a night that was. What a result. I never believed that any match could ever equal the drama of Manchester United’s late, late victory over Bayern Munich in Barcelona in 1999 but the Miracle of Istanbul did equal it. It was beautiful, breathtaking drama.

The next morning, I went out to Liverpool’s hotel on the Sea of Marmara to go to a press conference with Rafa Benitez and Gerrard. It still felt hard to grasp what had happened. Afterwards, when we were all milling around waiting for transport, I went up to Gerrard and asked him to autograph a team sheet. I’ve never done that before or since but it had been a special night. I’ve lost that team sheet since. Serves me right for being star-struck.

3) When it became known that the England team were going to be based in Baden-Baden for the 2006 World Cup Finals, the Mirror booked me into a lovely hotel in the town called Brenner’s Park where a handful of other English sports journalists were staying. As the tournament got nearer, the word spread that many of the players’ families and their wives and girlfriends would also be staying in the hotel.

And that was the way it turned out. Brenner’s became the unofficial headquarters for the England team. The WAG culture was at its height and it often seemed that the players were down at Brenner’s every other day. Often, we found ourselves sitting in the television room that the hotel had rigged up, watching one of the group games in the company of Wayne Rooney and Steven Gerrard and their families.

There wasn’t that much contact between us and the players but there was plenty between the journalists and the players’ parents. Some of the parents felt, understandably, that they had scores to settle with some of us over things we had written about their sons. But most of the grievances were soon forgotten.

It was amazing what a little contact did. I spoke to Peter Crouch’s dad, Bruce, about the hurt he felt when he saw his son described as ‘a lamppost’ or ‘a beanpole’. I wasn’t the worst offender but I’d done it without thinking a few times. It was good to see it from the player’s side for once. I haven’t called Crouch a beanpole since.

There were quite a few surreal moments, particularly in the hotel bar. One night, I was having a drink with Sam Wallace from the Independent when Victoria Beckham came up to have a chat. Out of the shadows, Cheryl Cole appeared and asked Victoria if we were bothering her. She said we weren’t but Mrs Cole looked like she was up for a scrap. “Just as long as you know I’ve got your back,” she said as she left.

There were a few proper rows, mainly journalist on journalist. But the friends and relatives of Jamie Carragher and Gerrard gave my colleague from The Sun, Steve Howard, a particularly hard time and he gave as good as he got. The Carraghers became the talk of the hotel. Their behaviour was…well, it was probably not quite what the Brenner’s Park staff was used to.

In the end, after one run-in too many, Jamie’s dad, Phil, and his family left Brenner’s and took over a more modest hotel a few hundred yards away above a bar. The English journalists nicknamed it the House of Scouse in their honour. It was a sad day when they left Brenner’s but they did it in style. They marched out of the back of the hotel and waded across the little river at the edge of the hotel gardens. When Jamie’s dad got to the far side, he turned and saluted us.

“Tally-ho boys,” he yelled. “Tally-ho.”

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