Simon Curtis

Why Blue?

As a young lad my cousin used to open pop bottles for Sale Rugby Club. He was a year younger than me in those days and would tower above me as I craned my neck for a squint at the top shelf at the local newsagents. Somehow hearing his description of the Playgirl of the Month never quite lived up to getting to know her properly yourself. He lived in Brooklands and used to travel all the way to Weymouth every Summer holidays just to goad me with his homemade red and white bar scarf. We lived on the Isle of Man at the time, so that just shows what an oaf he was.

The Isle of Man is the sort of place where you can wander along the Victorian promenade in Douglas and believe that you are living in a time warp. Old ladies with hairnets give you farthings and the man on the corner with the wall eye is usually busy selling wicker baskets of tripe, when he’s not entertaining passers-by with his impersonation of marmite. The local football scene is reminiscent of a mixture of Old Corinthians and Ale House Thunder. With cousin Eric romping around the rock pools in his scarf and trunks, a strange loathing was welling up inside me which would out in one of two ways. Either I could force his head into a giant clam and run off for dinner or I could counter his bad taste with something more chic and adventurous. Then I found out there was a Third Way.

For some reason at this time there was football on Thursday afternoons. It didn’t seem odd at the time but then all that tripe was making me hallucinate anyway. I remember watching a match on the old Grundig between City and a black and grey striped Coventry. The date was January 16th 1974, soon after the official end of City’s greatest period in history. This was to haunt me for years until I realised that supporting City is supposed to be like eating semolina with a fork.

It all seemed to fit: here was a team full of mavericks. Lee, Law, Summerbee, Geoff Hammond. They played across the city from cousin Eric’s lot. Mick Horswill looked like a stand-in for Pan’s People. It was perfect. When I saw Tony Book’s flares there was no turning back. That season, after a strenuous League Cup run that took us past mighty Walsall, Plymouth, Carlisle and York, we were to face Wolves, the first team in the entire run to Wembley not playing in the bowels of the league. We all laughed at Geoff Palmer’s Three Degrees haircut, then Wolves won the cup. If I had realised that there was a very obvious pattern which was already developing in front of my teenage eyes, I would have taken up sword swallowing instead. By the following season things were beginning to move on. Cousin Eric, sporting his very own Geoff Palmer haircut, had a red tracksuit. I had a sky blue one. Someone had set Keith MacRae’s hair on fire and it was becoming crystal clear that I had lumbered myself with something on a par with bedsores. We beat Shooting Stars of Nigeria in a friendly to commemorate King Barry III’s graduation from Lagos Tap School. In the FA Cup we had the good fortune to have to play an away tie against Newcastle at home because Newcastle fans had dismantled Nottingham city centre the year before. We lost. Still the penny didn’t drop. Instead I got more and more interested. Ged Keegan, Mick Docherty and the original Fourth Degree Kenny Clements were my new heroes. Clements looked like he should work in a butchers. Docherty played as if he did. It was this season that we lost 4-2 to South Korea B in a friendly and an overhead kick by Dennis Tueart secured our last trophy before we went into hibernation. No turning back, obviously.

I still couldn’t get to a game, however. The only way to get off the Isle of Man in the seventies was to row like hell and hope that you didn’t get caught in the fishing nets. My dad, a keen agoraphobic and collector of hatpins, did not see the funny side of it at all. When we did manage to get him across the water and into the precincts of Goodison Park, he stepped in a mountain of horses**t and has never been seen at a football match again. If it was going to be this good each time, I’d make it across more frequently, I thought to myself.

Since then the drug has grown inside me to epic proportions. I left to study in Sheffield, where I was an unhealthily frequent traveller across the Pennines taking in Full Members’ Cup matches in sparsely populated places and generally living the life of Reilly (or Nicky Reid, as it was then). My career since then, for what it’s worth, has taken me to a variety of continental destinations, where I have watched the likes of MSV Duisburg, Borussia Dortmund, PSG, Cannes, Ajax and now Benfica without a hint of the Blue fever dying down. I found that you can adopt a local team to laugh at, to compare, even to urge on occasionally in times of need, but you cannot sit there in a pool of sweat like you do about the maverick Blues. You can’t ruin a relationship over Borussia Mönchengladbach after all. You can’t make terrible, expensive trips across Europe to sing yourself hoarse for AZ Alkmaar. You can’t spend hours pouring over newspaper cuttings of Valencia (can’t even understand newspaper cuttings about Valencia). Thus, I will be there for the Bolton and Forest games, as I was at Wembley, eyes bulging, heart tripping, pants sighing. Having been stupid enough to inaugurate the official supporters’ club on the Isle of Man and the CSA Holland branch, I am now digging for would-be members of the Lisbon Branch. So far we are four but give me time. I don’t give up easily. Let’s face it, none of us do, do we?

First printed in: MCIVTA Newsletter #526 on