Free Nearly Reach the Sky by Brian Williams

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    Anyway, back to the best game I never saw. From what I’ve witnessed since on video highlights, the night Eintracht Frankfurt came over for the second leg of our Cup Winners’ Cup encounter, UptonPark was almost as big a mudbath as Highbury had been. But that didn’t stop Brooking producing another jaw-dropping display.
    I wasn’t there to see it because, on the way to east London, I got cleaned up by an articulated lorry on the North Circular. Such was the mess that truck made of my beloved Ford Escort (red; the four-door 1300; good runner but some mild corrosion – near offers accepted) that I didn’t get home in time to see The Mid-Week Match either.
    And ITV was not like Sky – it didn’t show the same footage over and over again in a television Groundhog Day that lasted all week. You watched the highlights on the night or not at all. So for years I had to use my imagination about what went on under the Boleyn lights as we attempted to overturn a 2–1 deficit from the first leg. I had the newspaper reports of course, and for weeks afterwards I would pester those around me at League fixtures to tell me what they recalled of that magical evening. But it wasn’t the same as being there.
    While we’re on the subject of ‘being there’, this might be a good time to point out that it doesn’t always pay to believe what people tell you about how to get there in the first place. The fella I was going to the game with was something of a hippy by nature and a big follower of a self-styled Tibetan monk called Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, who advocated a method of getting around called ‘astral travelling’.
    Prompted by my mate – who reckoned he could do it – I tried to master astral travelling myself. The idea is to project your inner self into the ether and then control your out-of-body experience, allowing a ghostly form of yourself to go wherever you like (a sort of spiritual Oyster card). The benefits seemed obvious: for one thing you could float over Upton Park and watch a game for freewithout actually having to slide out from under your Slumberland continental quilt. And it would take all the hassle out of getting to away games. But I could never do it, which is why I’d saved my hard-earned cash and bought a second-hand Escort instead.
    It turned out there was a good reason I couldn’t astral travel. The whole thing was total bollocks and Tuesday Lobsang Rampa (real name Cyril Henry Hoskins) was, in fact, the son of a plumber rather than a spiritual guide with an A–Z of the cosmos.
    Back on the A406, my bullshitting mate and I had come within a whisker of spending the rest of eternity floating in the ether after a juggernaut misjudged the moment to change lanes and solved the problem of my rusting flitch plates once and for all – by obliterating the front half of my car. And while the collision didn’t prove fatal for us – nearly, but not quite – it did for my beloved jam jar.
    Had we made it to E13 we would have witnessed one of the most truly outstanding West Ham performances of all time.
    The highlights I have watched subsequently offer no evidence that anyone trotted out ‘Trevor Brooking Walks on Water’ that night. But there is a burst of ‘Aye-aye-ippy’ as we put Frankfurt to the sword. Was there a squadron of Boy Scouts in the ground that night? I’ve sung some questionable songs at Upton Park in my time (including a highly juvenile version of ‘Distant Drums’ that still makes me redden with shame at the memory). But ‘Aye-aye-ippy’? What were you thinking, guys?
    Trevor Brooking scored twice that night. Contrary to public opinion, he did not use his head purely for thinking. Occasionally he would use it to score goals for West Ham. This was one of those nights when he did just that – with a powerful header from close to the penalty spot at the start of the second half.
    That made the tie all square on aggregate. Brooking’s pass from inside his own half gave Keith