I bloody love football. I really, really do.

I bloody love football. I really, really do. 

It was one of those damp, grey December afternoons that only South Wales seems capable of creating - and with ancient Cambrian care and precision, I should add. The kind where the drizzle doesn’t so much fall, as just hang in the air - it lingers, like a stranger in the stadium seat next to yours, who won’t take the hint to stop bumping your fucking leg. December 28th, 1994 - the tail end of the Christmas revelry period, when the last of the nut roast (I grew up vegetarian) had been turned into increasingly dubious nut-based sandwiches, and the only sensible escape was to the little back garden to kick a football around. 

It was also the day I saw my very first professional football contest with my own two eyes. 

I was a 12-year-old kid, who sort of loved football. Old enough to know the offside rule, sort of - but young enough to still sort of believe that professional footballers were gods who simply chose, on most weekends, not to prove it. My uncle Ed had collected me after lunch, with the casual authority of a man who had done this sort of thing many times before. Which he had. “Come on then,” he said, as if we were popping out for milk - rather than driving 45 minutes east of my village to witness something, some things, that would quietly rearrange the furniture of my entire life. “Birmingham City are coming in. Should be a decent match, Lukey.” We were heading out to Cardiff City's venerable Ninian Park - that old, creaking, peeling, rusting cathedral of capital city football memories on the outskirts of the Welsh city of Cardiff. 

I remember the smells as well as I remember the sights. Everything smelled of history, wet metal, cheap food offerings sizzling away, cigarette smoke - and the faint, salty, optimistic aroma of the inexplicably popular beef drink, Bovril. I had no idea what anything was, or meant, or if it was important or not - I just remember being enthralled, breathless, quiet. Everything was old and decrepit and dirty and glorious and big - I wanted to touch absolutely everything and absolutely nothing at the same time.  

Cardiff City were, in the mid-1990s, not so much a sleeping giant as a giant that had been repeatedly been bludgeoned into a coma by its own boardroom. By geography, by the slow economic grind of a post-industrial city, and by the simple bad luck of existing in the cursed lower reaches of the English football pyramid. At that time they yo-yoed between the third and fourth tiers, with the weary predictability of a public bus that always ran late but never quite broke down. Crowds were thin - sometimes barely scraping five figures on a nice sunny afternoon - and the club carried the slightly embarrassed air of a once-proud name and history now tucked away at the back of a thrift store. 

Ninian Park itself was a glorious bastard of an anachronism: terraces that still allowed you to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers who might - at any moment - decide your accent wasn't local enough and yell at you, hurl R-rated abuse at the nearest non-Welsh player in the vicinity, or simply light up a cigarette and say "alright mate? Want one?". You were never to know, and never to ask. Also starring: a pitch that cut up quicker than a politician’s promises, more peeling paint than the presidential reflecting pool, and an atmosphere that could turn from warm to menacing to Resident Evil within minutes, depending on which end of the ground you were standing in and how much we "hated" the other team. Almost exactly a year prior had featured the infamous “Battle of Ninian Park” against nearby Swansea City; the scars of that particular partisan disagreement, hundreds of fans of both clubs clashing bloodily on the Sloper Road outside the ground, were still fresh enough memories that police escorts and segregated trains just felt like standard operating procedure for most fans. As young a lad as I was, I couldn't help but wonder why there were so many police on horseback milling around. I distinctly remember wondering that exact thing that day - and through the years and the hundreds of games that followed, I unfortunately learned as many answers to that question as I could possibly handle. More on that another day, perhaps. 

Birmingham City, by contrast, probably arrived on that particular day with the swagger of a club that still believed, probably correctly, that it belonged a little higher up the football food chain. A big-city name with big-city ambitions, they were in the third tier with us - but carried themselves like a team merely passing through on the way back to more rarefied company. Under their flamboyant manager Barry Fry - football’s answer to a carnival barker, a human soundbite who peed on pitches to break curses, and wheeled-and-dealed players by the dozen on nothing but his own hunches - they had invested heavily in talent, and were busy trying to turn potential into points. One of those players was Ricky Otto, freshly arrived from Fry's old club Southend United for a substantial fee. I didn’t know Otto's full story then, and Uncle Ed certainly didn’t volunteer it over the pre-match pie (which tasted, as all football pies did back then, of nothing but industrial-strength pastry and working-class sadness). I would only piece it together properly years later - on that particular day, to me he was simply the really fast guy on the other team who had cool hair.  

Otto had grown up in Hackney, East London, in the kind of environment where talent and trouble shared the same postcode. He was quick, skillful, and blessed with the sort of speed-and-hairstyle combination that always, always, always made him instantly recognizable from any angle of any pitch. He had also, by his own later admission, been a “thug, bully and out-and-out menace to society” in his earlier life. Five prison spells, the last of which had been for armed robbery in 1988  - four years handed down, at the age of barely twenty. While serving time in Wandsworth Prison, two long-term inmates watched him playing football in the gym. One was doing twenty-four years for murder; the other, a mere seventeen for manslaughter. Instead of the usual prison-yard currency of intimidation and manipulation, they offered something rarer: genuine advice. “Don’t serve the time,” they told him. “Let the time serve you.” Otto listened. He became a gym orderly, changed his diet, worked on his fitness with the desperation of a man who finally understood the alternative (or lack thereof). 

He was released early for good behavior in January 1990, a changed man - rehabilitated, motivated, activated. Within months he was turning heads at the non-league level - local Leyton Orient were the first to take a chance on the ex-criminal with the illegal turn of pace. Then Barry Fry, never one to be put off by a colorful CV if a lad could play, paid £100,000 to bring him to Southend in 1993. Otto repaid the faith with goals, trickery, and the kind of wing play that made second-rate defenses look like they were in the middle of a...well, honestly, an armed robbery. He scored screamers, tormented full-backs, and became a terrace favorite almost overnight. He experienced some of his best form there, helping build an exciting and successful cut-and-thrust cavalier side. Then, in 1994, he followed Fry to Birmingham City for a much larger fee. By the time of my first match he was wearing the blue of Birmingham, and slowly but surely making his long-awaited mark in a higher-profile setting. Football hadn’t just saved his life; it had given him a pulpit from which, decades later, he would eventually preach as Pastor Ricky Otto. But that afternoon in Cardiff, he was simply a layman - a left-sided locomotive with a point to prove and a recent history of making defenses look like doomed sinners. 

Uncle Ed found us a spot on the Grange End terrace, among a sparse but vocal home crowd. He was, as ever, the consummate neutral observer - lifelong enough to have seen most of the game’s post-war iterations, but non-partisan enough to applaud a piece of skill regardless of the shirt color. He had - and still has - the dry, sarcastic, observational wit of a man who had long ago decided that football was less about tribal victory and more about the infinite variety of ways human beings can delight and disappoint on a rectangle of grass in equal measure. “Watch the lad on the left for them,” he murmured to me with a nudge of the elbow as the teams emerged from the tunnel. “Otto. Birmingham paid some fair money for him, now. Means he’s either bloody good, or Barry Fry’s having one of his episodes again.” Ed took a sip from his little styrofoam cup - tea, probably black with two sugars - and added, almost as an afterthought, “Football’s the only business where you can buy a man’s legs, but still not own his head. Remember that, Lukey.”

I remembered it. It's still true, now more than ever.

The game itself was a classic lower-league clash, in the sense that it was scrappy, occasionally brutal, occasionally shit, and punctuated by moments of genuine quality that felt like they’d wandered in from a higher plain. Cardiff, penniless and pessimistic and fighting for their relevancy in a basement division, carrying the weight of a city that expected more, pressed with the urgency of the underdog. Birmingham, conscious of their superior resources but aware that Christmas games have a habit of ignoring league tables and reputations, looked to impose themselves. The pitch was heavy, the ball skidded unpredictably, and the referee appeared to be operating on a different timescale from everyone else - blowing for fouls that hadn’t happened, and ignoring ones that....you know...had. Operating, I later came to observe, with the serene detachment of a referee who knew his decisions would be loathed today but forgotten by Tuesday.

At half-time it was goalless, which felt about right - even in my blissful 12-year-old ignorance, I could tell this wasn't what the grown-up fans around me could possibly term as "good football". The crowd’s singing and chanting had the ragged, hopeful quality of people who knew what I knew, but on a much firmer footing. Uncle Ed dissected the first forty-five minutes with the precision of a man who had watched too many matches to be surprised by Bluebird incompetence. “Cardiff are doing what they always bloody do - running around like someone’s lit their arses on fire. Birmingham are waiting for someone to do something clever. Otto’s the only one who looks like he might.” He offered me a mint from a battered half of a tube. “The thing about these games,” he said, “is that the bigger team has to score first. If it stays level, the bigger team usually nicks it late because they’ve got better legs and worse excuses". Made perfect sense at the time - still does, for the most part. 

The second half began in much the same vein — Cardiff huffing and puffing in the mud, Birmingham occasionally breaking with intent but lacking that final killshot pass. Then, around the seventy-fifth minute, the game found its protagonist. Ricky Otto, dreadlocks swirling around his head and shoulders like the tendrils of a West Midlands kraken, collected the ball on the left touchline, perhaps thirty yards from goal. There was nothing immediately on. Two Cardiff defenders closed him down, seemingly with the enthusiasm of teenage Kroger cart attendants - men who had been told this was their job, but not how to actually do it. Otto feinted one way, then the other — then another. Quick feet, low center of gravity, arms and legs and dreadlocks flailing with their own choreography. He slipped between the hapless Cardiff stoppers, accelerated into the space ahead, and from the edge of the area unleashed a left-footed drive that bent, dipped, and found the far top corner with the sort of precision that makes goalkeepers consider early retirement. The net bulged. The Birmingham players swarmed him. The Cardiff fans around us groaned with the deep, authentic pain of people who had seen this film a dozen times before on VHS and knew precisely how it ended.

It was the winning goal. Not just any goal — the winning goal in my first professional match. I remember the sound more than the sight: the sudden, sharp intake of breath from the home supporters, the roar from the knot of travelling Birmingham fans down the other end, and Uncle Ed’s quiet, appreciative “Well, that’s why he paid the money.” I didn’t jump up and down like a child at a birthday party. Neither did I cry, or pout. I didn't really know what to do, or what I was supposed to do. I just sat there, slightly stunned and sad but also slightly enthralled. Taking it all in - as if someone had opened a door I hadn’t known existed, shown me what was on the other side, and then fucking shoved me right through it into the company of eight thousand damp, angry, sweaty strangers. 

This was what live football could do. It could take a rainy Tuesday - or whatever day it was, I have no fucking idea actually - in a half-empty stadium in South Wales, hand the narrative to a man with a criminal record and an axe to grind, and turn it into something that felt - for ninety minutes, at least - like it mattered more than almost anything else. I was hooked, and I knew it. I still am. 

Birmingham held on. Cardiff huffed some more, but never quite found the equalizer their effort perhaps deserved. We didn’t stay long after the final whistle. On the way back to the car, through streets that smelled of winter and chip shops and oil, Uncle Ed was thoughtful. “That Otto bloke,” he said eventually. “He’s got a story, you know. Not the fairy-tale kind - prison. Proper trouble, like. Then football came along and gave him somewhere to put all that energy instead of using it to rob people. You don’t see many of those stories at this level any more." He glanced down at me - he didn't have a choice but to glance down, he was six feet six and still almost is. “The game’s at its best when it surprises you, Lukey. Not just with a goal, like. With what people are capable of when they get a chance.”

I didn’t fully and immediately understand what he said back then, but the seed was planted. Quite a few seeds, truth be told. Over the following weeks I found myself checking Birmingham’s results in the paper with more interest than a neutral should have. I started noticing Otto’s name in match reports - another goal here, an assist there, the occasional quote from Fry that typically managed to somehow be both outrageous and oddly insightful. I badgered my parents for a Cardiff City shirt (they refused on grounds of both cost and sanity), but kept my Otto obsession smoldering in the back of my heart. I watched whatever lower-league and cup highlights made it onto television - and began to understand that this new Premier League, for all its glamour, was only one version of the sport. The version I had seen that afternoon - gritty, flawed, cold, damp, but occasionally transcendent - felt more honest, more organic, more evocative. There were more Ricky Ottos, and it had room for them all - characters like him with less-than-diagonal life stories, clubs like Cardiff that simply refused to die quietly, and for fans who turned up week-after-week knowing the odds were firmly against them but singing and chanting and spending and sipping Bovril and munching on "meat" pies anyway. All welcome - come one, come all, just come. It's shit, you'll love it. 

The football love affair that began that day has outlasted several relationships, two marriages, multiple house moves, a couple of COUNTRY moves, a dozen jobs, and the slow realization that my own footballing talent peaked somewhere around the age of eight. I came in on the ground floor at a time before the Premier League’s transformation of football into a global entertainment product, the arrival of VAR (which would have ruined a lot of Otto’s goals, by the way, with all the pauses and reviews and re-reviews - he played the game on that kind of knife edge), and the creeping sense that modern football sometimes forgets the people who actually pay to watch it. Football has taken me to other grounds, other cities, other countries, other cultures, other versions of the same essential drama: twenty-two men, a ball, and the twenty-two-dozen stories they each carry onto the pitch with them. I have stood on terraces in torrential rain, leaned against concrete walls in tram-sheds of stadiums in the middle of nowhere; enjoyed all-seater stadiums with bum warmers and shrimp toast and corporate hospitality staff in padded velvet horse-boxes that cost more to get into than some people’s monthly rent. Everything in between, too - even a converted fucking shipping container in downtown Detroit (iykyk). I have watched games that were far, far, far technically superior to that Cardiff–Birmingham scrap, and felt nothing like the same electricity. 

Because the first time is never just about the football. It’s about the moment the game stops being something you watch and becomes something that you are - measuring your capacity for hope, for disappointment, for irrational attachment to strangers in multi-colored polyester.

Uncle Eddie is 4,000 miles away these days - but I still hear his voice sometimes when a match threatens to drift into controversy, or a bone-headed unforced error is made. “That’s why they paid the money,” he would have said, dry as the Martini he never drank (beer only, maybe a Bailey's at Christmas). I choose to believe that he's quietly pleased that the little boy he took to Ninian Park that misty, miserable day over thirty years ago never really came back the same. The spark he lit has burned steadily for all that time, with barely a flicker - it has warmed me through tough times, poor seasons, bad economies, and worse refereeing decisions. It has introduced me to people, thoughts, cities, countries, hopes and dreams that I would never otherwise have encountered. And it all traces back to one goal, scored by a man who had every reason to believe the world had already written him off, on a damp afternoon in a stadium that no longer exists, in a game that I doubt not a single other South fucking Walian even remembers for any reason whatsoever. 

But I do. I remember it. I remember it all. I have to. 

Ricky Otto’s incredible journey - from the streets of Hackney through Wandsworth Prison’s gym yard to the terraces of Roots Hall and then to storied St. Andrews in Birmingham, and eventually to a pulpit - reminds me, every time I think of that afternoon, that football’s greatest gift is not the glory or the money or the winning goal. It is the permission it grants people to rewrite their own stories in real time, in front of whomever happens to be watching. On that December day in 1994, with Uncle Ed’s little cup of tea and half a roll of mints and quiet, studious wisdom beside me, I received my own small rewrite. I walked into Ninian Park as a boy who liked football, and I walked out as someone who would never again be entirely free of it. Otto got to end his sentence - that day, I was just beginning mine. 

And for that, I remain profoundly, irrationally, forever grateful. 

Because I bloody love football. I really, really do.