Football at three o' clock on a Saturday afternoon.

 Football at three o'clock on a Saturday afternoon.

Crikey! What a revelation, what a very rare spectacle, almost an endangered species, something we'd almost forgotten about completely. There was a time when English and Scottish football used to kick off at three o'clock on a Saturday afternoon almost simultaneously, give or take five minutes in case there was a logjam of heavy traffic on the roads and streets around the football grounds. So then allowances were made and the general consensus was that it didn't really matter. Besides, Dixon of Dock Green on BBC One could wait for a while and the buses were fairly regular while the trains were utterly reliable. 

The fact is that the whole unvarying structure of the day would never be disrupted by some unsavoury event that couldn't really be helped but that was how things were back in the old days. We still knew where we were in relation to the rest of the world, huddling together on the seething terraces, standing and then sitting down in readiness for the thrills and spills, the high octane action, 90 minutes of fiercely competitive football that never disappointed. Of course we were familiar with all the game's nuances and cadences, its trials and tribulations, its entirely different set of notes and chords, its tribalism, its earthiness and its invigorating authenticity, the lows and highs, the goals that were or weren't or should have been.

But above all football would always start at three o'clock on a Saturday afternoon as regular as clockwork, customarily and traditionally, punctuality itself although who cared about that anyway. Nobody bothered to check their watches in case it was a couple of minutes late. Besides it was a lovely, warm afternoon in August or September or alternatively, a brisk, cold but beautiful afternoon in October, November or December and the seasons just seemed to merge into each other.

We would wake up on a Saturday afternoon observing all of football's hard wired rituals, its normal functions, its automatic reflexes, its familiar dynamics and acoustics. We'd get dressed quite enthusiastically, shirts, ties, coats firmly attached to our persona, rattles and rosettes festooning our coats and lapels, jackets and hats neatly stashed away in snug chests of drawers before heading for the front door. After a quick shampoo and wash of the car and a fleeting visit to the bookmakers to put on several bets on the horse racing, extended families would all walk towards our footballing shrines, yelling, cheering, biased and partisan. You'd have hardly expected anything else.

The stadiums were invariably situated next door to our shopping emporiums, huge, towering edifices that looked like monuments to time itself. Our grounds were slap bang next to our butchers, bakers and candlestick makers. They were right on the corner of corner shops, greengrocers, five minutes away from those supermarkets that would keep growing in size throughout the ages. Football was our non judgmental friend but our critical cynic who would just tell you to keep away from football on a Saturday afternoon because this constituted a major disturbance of the peace and those policemen would never tolerate those thuggish hooligans of the late 1960s and 1970s.

Essentially football was securely entrenched in the world of the working class proletariat, the folk who would clock off from their early Saturday shift before sprinting towards Anfield, Old Trafford, Highbury, White Hart Lane, Goodison Park, Brammall Lane, Hillsborough, Ayresome Park, St James Park, Highfield Road, Loftus Road and Villa Park. Football was their blissful escapism, that detachment from the every day realities of working life, a place where you could unashamedly unleash four letter expletives and obscenities without any self reproach whatsoever.

But everything was conducted in a fashion that almost became second nature to our parents and grandparents because this was the type of behaviour we'd been conditioned to for ages. Saturday was the weekend and therefore the perfect opportunity to slow down, winding down from the stressful exertions of work, forgetting supposedly tyrannical bosses we hated or maybe bosses we loved to do business with. Football on a Saturday afternoon was the day we were drawn together as friends or families at the same time, the same cafe, the same chippie and the same location every time.

Admittedly we still congregate together in unison since we always have and had done so. Our hair was longer in those days and our jeans much tighter than perhaps they used to be. In fact during the 1960s dad always seemed to wear formal, starched white shirt and tie with a clip and trousers that were dark or navy. Nowadays T- shirts with amusing messages emblazoned across them and trainers on our feet are very much the fashion of the day.

But football always kicked off at roughly three o'clock on a Saturday afternoon. You followed your team home and away, by long and short distances, patiently longing for that explosive release of dormant emotions that were so vitally important to us. Suddenly football grounds would bear an uncanny resemblance to rowdy trade union conferences, bearpits of fierce rivalries, huge political demonstrations where vast crowds gather together just to prove that they were there to see that championship winning victory on the last day of the season or just get their frustrations off their chest.

And so today those immensely popular British conurbations of Manchester, London, Nottingham, Sheffield  and Newcastle will play host to football on Saturday. These sentences may never be uttered for quite a while because the FA, in their infinite wisdom, has finally decreed that the last November weekend of the Premier League season should be reserved for football on a Saturday. The Kinks once extolled the virtues of this almost cherished day and time and how right they were.                                                               

How we find ourselves worshipping at the altar of Saturday football in the middle of the afternoon. We know that by this time next the probability is that we'll be forced once again to change the time of our social engagements and move our meal times to some random hour that may not be of our choosing. However, we'll still remember what it was like to be witness that occasional weekend throughout the football season when all is synchronicity, more or less a level playing field but then again why ever not. It might be worth considering doing this more frequently during the Premier League season. You'll never hear any objections from some of us.