Chris Wood: My first Liverpool FC match - Chelsea 1 Liverpool 2

THE first of the so-far 966 times I have seen a Liverpool team play live occurred on Christmas Eve, 1966 when the reigning First Division champions travelled to play Chelsea at Stamford Bridge (the reverse fixture, as was so often the case in those days, came two days later at Anfield on Boxing Day).

So why was I there on that cold, winter’s day?

Neither of my parents were from Liverpool; nor were any of my grandparents, although I did discover years later that my paternal grandmother, who was actually born in Australia, was a member of the large and influential Bold family in north Liverpool, after whom Bold Street is named.

My great-grandfather John Bold, an engineer, had emigrated from Bootle to set up the tramways system in Fremantle, Western Australia, which is why my grandmother was born there. Decades after taking the OOT route to Anfield when attending a home match involved a round-trip of 400 miles, I discovered that I did have a genuine link to the city after all!

My father had no apparent interest in sport at all as I grew up in Upton-by-Chester, the location of my first (primary) school. He only ever took me to one football match in England, when it seemed that half the city of Chester travelled to Old Trafford for an FACup-tie against Manchester United in 1965.

Later in the decade, after his job took him to Paris, he took me to a couple of matches in the French capital, both at the Parc des Princes at which, following extensive renovation from my visits in the 1960s, I would see Liverpool win the European cup in 1981.

My mother was more interested in cricket than football and did take me more than once to the more gentle of the two Old Traffords. But one of her friends took me to Sealand Road in Chester so it was there that I saw my first competitive football matches.

Whether my teenage affection for Liverpool came because of its proximity to Chester, I don’t really know. Like so many others of my generation, I might have been influenced by the musical revolution that was taking place at the same time as a certain Mister Shankly was bringing about his own revolution at a football club a few miles away from the Cavern Club.

I avidly bought and read the football magazines of the time and my mother regularly sent them down to me at the boarding-school in Somerset where my parents had decided I would spend my secondary education.

It was a rugby-playing school and I hated playing rugby from the day I arrived until the day I left. Rugby never had a chance of replacing football in my affections. It was clear that many of my peers felt the same.

The boarders came from all over England and further afield and consequently there was support for many different clubs within the English game. I suppose we either choose a club in our youth or it is chosen for us.

I had already made my choice and I made sure that everybody knew it. Even though the dream of going to watch Liverpool play live was never far away, distance wasn’t the only obstacle in my path.

Mind you, most of the other boys who pledged allegiance to whichever club hadn’t been to live matches either. Saturday afternoons would see us crowded around transistor-radios avidly listening to the BBC’s coverage of the English matches.

Looking back, I can remember a little clique of odious kids who championed the cause of Manchester United irrespective of where they lived. Some things haven’t changed over the years, have they?

In the days before replica-shirts and other souvenirs, a scarf was about the only thing you could possess that showed your allegiance; but they were just plain woollen scarves with no name on them. I remember my mother asking me one year if I wanted a red-and-white scarf as a present and I replied “What’s the point? I’ll never be able to see Liverpool play!”

I got the scarf anyway and made the mistake of wearing it at school. I was spotted wearing it and as it contravened the strict uniform rules at such establishments, was warned that it would be confiscated if I was seen wearing it again.

Probably feeling that failing to wear it was somehow letting the team down, I took a chance and put it on a few days later, was again spotted and it was taken away from me. I was furious. It was my own fault but it was just about the only thing I owned that proved I had anything to do with Liverpool Football Club.

My parents’ marriage ended and my mother re-married, to a man who was from Liverpool but unfortunately the Blue half of the city. Joe and I traded insults happily for the next 30 years. He was even foolish enough to have a pound-a-point bet with me for most of the 1970s and some of the 1980s.

I cleaned up year after year. The points-differences between Liverpool and Everton from 1973 until 1984 inclusive were 23, 13, 1, 18, 15, 1, 17, 25, 15, 23, 18 and 18. In the summer of 1984 I asked him if he wanted to have our “usual bet” but this time he declined.

A few months later Everton finished first and we were second 13 points behind. But he didn’t take his chance, probably because he was completely fed up with having to pay out every May and expected it to happen again.

We never did put that bet back on, just as well for him because 1987 apart when it would only have cost me £9, I would have cleaned up for the next ten years as well!

My mother and step-father recognised my interest in football and Liverpool in particular. School-holidays tended to be split fairly equally between each parent (my father had also re-married in 1966) but as luck would have it I would be spending Christmas in London with my mother and, even luckier for me, Liverpool were playing Chelsea on Christmas Eve and they had bought three tickets for this momentous occasion.

It’s pretty hard to properly describe the excitement a kid will feel when he knows he is going to such an event. Although I would be watching the team I supported for the first time, I already knew plenty about the club and the men who represented it.

The big day arrived and we were off to Stamford Bridge. We got in early and I watched the crowd build up. In a decade when football supporters were making the news for the wrong reasons, I already knew that the Liverpool fans had a bit of a reputation - and not just for their noise, colour and humour.

I watched in absolute fascination as thousands (and I do mean thousands) of Liverpool supporters entered the stadium and made straight for the middle of Chelsea’s Shed End. Mary Hopkin’s “Those Were The Days” wasn’t released until 1968 but that Christmas Eve in west London we certainly “took The Shed”.

This Chelsea v Liverpool match was BBC’s choice for Match Of The Day. I watched the highlights in the evening (Christmas Eve was a Saturday in 1966) and over 30 years later I managed to acquire a DVD of the programme.

English matches were often beamed live to Scandinavia in the 1960s and I made contact with someone in Sweden who had kept many such games. It was a huge thrill to watch the highlights again so many years later

My impression of the size of Liverpool’s support had not been imaginary. On the highlights disc, despite it being a few years before colour television was the norm, it was easy to see the mass of Liverpool supporters in the middle of Chelsea territory.

For the record, Liverpool won 2-1. The first Liverpool goal I ever saw live was an own-goal scored by Chelsea’s Marvin Hinton.

Geoff Strong added to that before John Boyle replied for the home team. Before the end of the 1960s I managed to watch a few more Liverpool matches if I was lucky enough to be in the area.

It was January 1969 (an FA Cup-tie against Doncaster Rovers) before I was allo

wed to travel on my own to Liverpool from Chester at the age of 16. Once I left school in December 1969, I already knew that the number of matches I attended was going to increase significantly.

As my first full season as an ‘active supporter’ approached, I had seen the team play 13 times. By the time the 1970s turned into the 1980s, I had upped that figure to 358, a total I would have deemed quite impossible as I sat listening to the radio at school in the 1960s.

Life changes for all of us as we get older. The one constant is our support for our football club and again it doesn’t matter if it was chosen for us or if we chose it ourselves. I have been lucky.

I have seen things supporters of other clubs can only dream about. As I close in on my own personal ambition to see a thousand

live Liverpool games, I know that if I do reach that target I will think back to the day it all started in London nearly 45 years ago.

Even if I don’t reach my target, my memories of my Liverpool 'debut’ remain very clear and fortunately I also have the video-evidence to back it up!