Oh the glamour

THERE seems to be a common misconception that life as a football reporter is packed full of glamour.
It isn’t. You do not automatically get sucked into a footballer’s lifestyle. There are no WAGS, no flash cars, no sipping pink champagne in exclusive corners of night clubs.
There are, however, cold meat pies or rat burgers on the menu, malfunctioning sat-navs that seem to confuse football stadia with grimy housing estates that make Basra look like Basingstoke, and, then there is reserve team football.
And let me tell you, you haven’t known the true nature of fear until news filters through, five minutes before kick-off, that a stiffs game – or more specifically a reserve game at Billingham (for the uninitiated, that is a far-flung corner of the country somewhere close to Hartlepool) – could be called off.
Perhaps I should have taken the hint as I attempted to navigate my way through a car park that David Walliams might well have swum across.
My passenger’s appeal for a lifebelt was only uttered half in jest.
But things were to get dramatically worse. After finally finding a corner where I could park without my car being in real danger of floating away, it became clear that this really could be the least of our problems.
Because as well as puddles in the car park, there was the small matter of a very large one in the middle of the penalty area.
During the pre-match warm-up Forest keeper Dale Roberts’ foot sank up to the ankle in the pitch.
From that moment on, it was obvious that there was little chance of any football being played.
A two-and-a-half hour journey from Nottingham had been wasted.
Hartlepool had only paid £120,000 for the pitch to be laid at Billingham over the summer.
That kind of money would be enough to keep the average Premiership star in Bentley’s for a while.
But it is not enough to ensure decent drainage on a football pitch. At least the pie was nice.