Get Her Off the Pitch! by Lynne Truss Page B

which had sunk to terrible lows in the 1980s (Tottenham had been playing to crowds of around 10,000) were already recovering thanks to the formation of the Premier League and the investment from television - but, basically, Après Euro 96, le deluge . In the context of all this, I believe my own small journey into football for The Times was a clever editorial decision: I would be a trundling wooden horse freighting a few new readers into the sports section. It was also, however, a deliberate and rather rash mind-alteringexperiment, familiar from films such as The Fly and (more recently) The Curse of the Were-Rabbit , and I have sometimes wondered subsequently whether I ought to sue. No one thought about the consequences, least of all me. We merely thought: let’s connect the brain of this apathetic 41-year-old literary woman to a big lot of football, maximise the voltage and then see what happens. If she starts getting up during matches to yell, ‘Can we not knock it?’ then the conclusion is clear: football can appeal to bloody anyone. If she starts describing Gazza as a priapic monolith, however, things have probably gone too far, and it may be necessary to reverse the polarity.
    But I agreed to do it, so there you are. And my first act as special know-nothing Euro 96 correspondent for The Times was to go out and get a book. I acted on the advice of a child, which seemed appropriate. ‘How should I prepare for Euro 96?’ I said. And the child said, ‘Get a sticker book.’ So I bought a special Euro 96 sticker book in W.H. Smith’s and the astonishing thing was: it was only a pound. Imagine my disappointment, however, when I took it home, shook it, and no stickers came out. Apparently you have to buy the stickers separately at considerable expense - something the child had neglected to tell me. But never mind. I was now committed to Euro 96. I had invested in it. And in the build-up to the event, I persevered with my research. I bought a magazine-sized glossy bbc guide to the championships, for example, which was packed with pictures of completely unfamiliar long-haired men doing historic things for their countries in very, very brightly coloured football shirts. Evidently, quite a few of these chaps played for English teams while artfully retainingtheir foreignness for international contests. I wondered how this could possibly work in practice. I also wondered, seriously, whether it ought to be allowed.
    I also read every word in the supplement that came with The Times , bored to tears, and spent a long time studying the cover picture of Les Ferdinand with no shirt on, trying to memorise his chiselled features for later identification. (Since the injured Les played no part in England’s Euro 96 games, this turned out to be a waste of time.) Having nothing else to do until the games began, I pored over the results tables waiting to be filled in, speculating on their use. There were columns headed ‘ W ’, ‘ D ’ and ‘ L ’, for example, which I immediately deduced were abbreviations. Win, Draw and Lose was my guess. However, after ‘ W ’, ‘ D ’ and ‘ L ’ came columns for ‘ F ’ and ‘ A ’, and here I drew a blank. I searched the page for a key, but there wasn’t one. Damn. I couldn’t work it out. F ? A ? Even if it was to do with the number of goals scored - which seemed likely - how did that get to be represented as two columns? Dear, oh dear, there was so much to learn.
    The good news was that the opening match (to which I would be going) was England v Switzerland. Phew. What a good idea to start things off playing a nation known not only for its keen neutrality and cleanliness, but also for its extreme tardiness in giving women the vote. In all my years of not really listening to sports news, I had never heard of England fans having particular antagonistic feelings towards the Swiss - not even for their