Hornby - Fan Mail: Twenty Years of Writing About Soccer

I have been watching football for a quarter of a century, and only a few seasons have a life, a heart and a personality of their own. There is Arsenals double year, obviously; the two recent Championship triumphs; the season I started going; the year they played nearly seventy games, reached two Cup Finals and won nothing; and Cambridge Uniteds record-breaking, mind-boggling 1983/84 season, when they went an astonishing thirty-one games without a Second Division victory. (I was working in Cambridge at the time, and split my passions schizophrenically between palatial Highbury and the ruined Abbey Stadium, Cambridges home.) In some ways I enjoyed Cambridges catastrophe as much as I enjoyed Arsenals run of twenty-three league games without defeat at the beginning of the 1990/91 season: both sequences had a momentum, a tension and an atmosphere fans will remember for ever.

Of course, it was irritating to begin with one does not enjoy seeing ones team lose. And it was to some extent inexplicable. The same back four had, just months before, set a new record of a different kind: for the longest time spent without conceding a home league goal. (This run, incidentally, ended memorably. Malcolm Webster, Cambridges goalkeeper, was invited on to the Abbey pitch at half-time a fate-tempting piece of timing that the club probably regretted to receive an award commemorating the feat; in the second half, the inevitable happened. He conceded four goals in less than twenty minutes.)

However, as it became clear that there might be a little history to be made, each 50 away defeat, each 22 draw snatched from the jaws of victory, became perversely satisfying. Hartlepool recently set a record for the longest period without scoring. How many Hartlepool fans, even in the midst of their temporary jubilation, did not feel a little pang, a sense of something gone, when the net finally did bulge after Lord knows how many goal-less hours? Their impressive failure even to convert a penalty captured the imagination of the national sporting media; once the record had gone, they became just another terrible team.

Cambridge United were a terrible team that year. They won four games (two of them after they had already been relegated) and lost twenty-four. They used thirty-two different players, fourteen of whom played in the number seven shirt at some stage during the season, and four of whom were goalkeepers. And they got through the requisite three managers (one sacked, one caretaker, one who saw out the rest of the season). It was brilliant.

At the time of writing, Andy Sinton is to play for England, in the World Cup against Turkey. Ten years ago, he was playing for Englands worst team, in the Second Division against Brighton. He was just seventeen then, but astonishingly strong and exceptionally mature: even at that age he volunteered to take the penalties (at thirty-five, I still avoid them in our five-a-side games whenever possible) and he scored them, too. He got one in this game, one of those muddy, gloriously stupid afternoons that stick in the mind, right at the beginning of the not-winning streak: seven goals, Eric Young sent off, an injury-time Brighton winner after Cambridge had fought back to 33 after being 31 down.