I truly fell in love with football at a Boxing Day game – it’s now I miss fans in stadiums more than ever

My memories of early trips to see Burnley FC are less of goals and more of the noise, colours, smells and atmosphere

I’ve never gone big on Christmas, taking the old-fashioned view that the key is in the first six letters, Christ, and as I don’t do God, I don’t do Christ, and therefore, I see no reason to piggyback a religious festival in the name of consumerism and gluttony.

OK, I get presents for the family, but that’s about it. Parties, carol services, the Queen, trees, turkey, sprouts, mince pies, crap jokes in crackers, I can happily do without it all.

This year, it is possible to grumble, “God, this is s***, isn’t it?" without the chorus of “Scrooge… Grinch… miserable git” that I have unleashed annually in previous decades, stretching back over half a century, for daring to be one of the few people honest enough to admit what I know millions feel.

Now, with a pandemic gripping the world from one year into the next, the most useless government in UK history going from not very good at their jobs to full-on mind-blowingly incompetent, and with the world also looking to have decided we are a governed by a clown – the pretence has gone. It really is s*** right now.

The only thing that I have ever really liked about Christmas is the thing that Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp hates – a glut of football matches. Boxing Day football is the thing that tells you normality is returning, the annual agony is over.

Of course a part of me feels sympathy for players, many of them with young children, who have to train on Christmas Day, and if playing away have to travel after training to stay in a hotel, away from the family, ahead of the game the next day.

Mind you, Klopp and co should count themselves lucky. There was a time when the league clubs played on Christmas Day too. The last Christmas Day game in England was in 1959. They carried on in Scotland until 1971, one of the many reasons that growing up, I considered Scotland to be a vastly superior country to England.

It was partly a Boxing Day match that cemented what has been a lifelong passion for Burnley FC. The year was 1963. I was six. And that was the number of goals we put past Manchester United. Those of a certain age who like to tell their children that football was better in the black and white era might enjoy the full classified check from the English top flight that day.

Blackpool 1-5 Chelsea

Burnley 6-1 Man Utd

Fulham 10-1 Ipswich

Leicester 2-0 Everton

Liverpool 6-1 Stoke

Nottingham Forest 3-3 Sheff Utd

West Brom 4-4 Spurs

Sheff Wed 3-0 Bolton

Wolves 3-3 Aston Villa

West Ham 2-8 Blackburn

I’ll save you the chore of adding up… 66 goals. Sadly, Match of the Day didn’t start till a year later.

My memories of those early games in my six decades following Burnley home and away are less of goals, passes, tackles, or saves, than they are of noise, colours, smells, rituals, mood and atmosphere.

The journey to the ground. Seeing the floodlights. Buying a programme and a badge. I loved badges. Queueing. Noisy clicking turnstiles. Noisy fans. Drunk fans. Sometimes fighting fans. Pushing through people twice my size and more to get to the front so I could see when the teams finally emerged.

Songs. I have loved football songs all my life. The different crowd noise that greets a good pass, a good tackle, a foul, a corner. The mayhem that follows a goal.

During the first lockdown I was asked to write a piece about what I most missed about “normal life” and number one, by some distance, was “football”. However, as the lockdown wore on, I realised it was not strictly true. It was Burnley that I missed.

When football came back, albeit without crowds, I realised it was not just Burnley games, but going to them, and all the things that go with games, and especially all that a crowd can bring to the spectacle.

I have been luckier than most in that as I occasionally co-commentate for Clarets Plus, the club’s broadcast outlet, I have been able to get to some games. But the truth is that even when we won at Arsenal recently, as I left the stadium, there was none of the buzz that I would normally feel after a win like that. The crowd is part of the event before, during and after. You need crowd congestion and traffic jams to know that it mattered.

Also, although I have seen every minute of every Burnley game, either in person or on TV, I have barely watched any other matches. Pre-Covid my idea of a perfect Sunday was exercise in the morning, a bit of work, then get on the sofa, channel hopper at the ready, and watch a variety of Scottish, English, German, Dutch, French, Spanish and Italian football. I watch a lot less than I did.

It was former Celtic manager Jock Stein who said that football without fans is nothing. He was right. And please, spare me that fake crowd noise. It is dangerous… it risks making us think that football without fans is OK. It really isn’t. It is not OK at all.

On this and so much else, Jock Stein was right.