Mass brawls, breathless hedonism and Jarrod Bowen: how West Ham gave me the night of my life

It felt at times like it might last forever. Like they might never stop singing, never go home, that the mini Cresswells zigzagging about the six-yard box had somehow slipped the surly bonds of bedtime. What else is there, frankly, that keeps the little kid alive inside the fading grown-up quite like football, asks Tom Peck

This was winning something. Actually winning something. Not being promoted, or avoiding relegation, or securing qualification for this, that or the other. But getting to the very end of a competition and being the only team still in it (AFP via Getty Images)

There’s a little girl chasing her dad round the park. He tries to run away but he looks like he can hardly move and lies down on the floor. So she heads off toward the goalposts instead, acquiring a football at some point which she then pokes into the bottom corner.

She’s done very well to finish with such composure, little Myla Antonio, daughter of West Ham forward Michail, given that rising above her all the while is a raging sea of pink arms and red throats, who aren’t going to stop singing about being “champions of Europe” for at least another hour, and who aren’t going to forget this moment for the rest of their lives.

And not a fleeting moment either, as people like to say. It felt at times like it might last forever. Like they might never stop singing, never go home, that the mini Cresswells zigzagging about the six-yard box had somehow slipped the surly bonds of bedtime.

If you happen to support West Ham United, it doesn’t feel inaccurate to say that out in the Prague suburbs, in a stadium that looks like a Premier Inn and is barely any bigger than the Tesco Extra over the road, everything changed.

It was not so much a football match as a makeover. It was like finding the boring old house you’ve lived in all your life has suddenly been double Bowened: transformed by Jarrod and Laurence Llewellyn.

If you happen to be anyone (well, almost anyone) who devotes a frankly unjustifiable amount of your time, money and emotional bandwidth to the fortunes of a football club, then you can easily go whole decades, lifetimes even, without ever knowing that this has always been what it’s all about: flying out to a European city, standing around in the sun and then coming back with a trophy.

Winning something. Actually winning something. Not being promoted, or avoiding relegation, or securing qualification for this, that or the other. But getting to the very end of a competition and being the only team still in it. And then, in an exactly half-filled stadium, long after the other half have gone, raising up the prize.

It’s not to everyone’s tastes, all this. Of course it’s not. Over the course of two hot days, this true gem of a town felt like it was hosting some kind of Guinness World Record attempt for the planet’s biggest stag do. Prague is well set up to cater for such things, but it found its capacity for brazen, breathless hedonism pushed right to its limits.

Within at least a half-mile radius of the Old Town Square, there can almost certainly not have been one bar, or restaurant or cafe that went un-chanted in. West Ham fans’ favourite song of the moment is, to the tune of a well-known advert, “Just sold my car / to Lucas Paqueta.” Make of that what you will.

And yes, as is often the way, there were a vanishingly-small number of self-declared Italian “ultras” who wear black and start fights and who, on this occasion, were arrested en masse by the Prague riot police on the floor of a very ritzy looking shoe shop.

And as for the person who threw his vape stick at a Fiorentina player taking a corner and cut his head open – well, all you can say is that it really wasn’t easy to get a ticket to that match. You’ve got to care a hell of a lot about West Ham to have been there, and once the necessary procedures have been through, he’ll probably never get to watch them again – there could hardly be a harsher but fairer punishment.

On the pitch at the end, Joe Cole asked Declan Rice what he was thinking, what was going through his head, when Jarrod Bowen went through on goal in the last minute. Rice, who is an extremely articulate and intelligent young man, paused, let out a deep breath and said. “I looked up, and I think I even said the words out loud: ‘This is your time.’” And it was.

It’s a script too impossibly saccharine even for Ted Lasso, but it also happens to be true. This is your time. As he said the words he looked like a little boy, out in the back garden, providing his own breathless commentary for his big Cup Final winner.

At 2am, in a very noisy Irish bar in the Old Town, two cockney geezers in their early sixties ordered two pints of lager and one of them said to the other, “This is the best night of our lives,” and he absolutely meant it. Why does it matter so much? Well what else is there, frankly, that keeps the little kid alive inside the fading grown-up quite like football?

That was their last round, those two, and I watched them turn up Karlova Street and as they went round the corner, I swear I saw one of them jink his hips slightly to the left and slot an imaginary ball between two bins. I think he thought he was Jarrod Bowen, but he looked more like Myla Antonio to me.