“Good lad!”

late 1960s

Forest reserves v various teams 
(Central League, City Ground)

In the years when I was considered too young to go to watch Forest, our regular family routine was that Dad would take Robin to Forest first team matches and Mum would take me to the ice stadium. I would say she took me ice skating, but I was ungainly and lacking in confidence, so ice-walking-gingerly-around-clutching-the-fence-at-the-side would be more accurate. Then, to give Dad his weekly fix of Forest and to make sure I was brought up in the same faith, the roles would be reversed when the first team were playing away. Robin would go skating with Mum and I would watch Forest reserves with Dad.

Dad wasn't one of those fans who has a radio welded to his ear, but updates on the Ivor Thirst scoreboard behind the Bridgford End meant we could keep up with how the first team were doing. This usually meant keeping track of how many we were losing by, as the Reds were in a period of decline after the double-chasing 1966-67 season.

Those games saw me betray my youth by blurting out whatever came into my head by way of encouragement to the reserves. So it was that I would yell “Come on you red tomatoes!” (scanning the limited horizons of a four-year-old to find something red to liken the Forest players to), “Come on you red dustbins!” (likewise, but clearly abandoning my search for red things in favour of something that summed up how rubbish I must have thought we were playing) and, much to Dad's amusement, “Good lad!” (following his lead in praising a good bit of play by one of the younger players, who would have been about fifteen years my senior). I also had the chance at a young age to 'spot' one or two stars of the future, most notably a young Duncan McKenzie, whose goals and fancy flicks would not be seen regularly in the first team for a few more years.

This routine must have continued for a couple of years, but I can no longer remember how long Dad and I continued to watch the reserves on first-team away match days once I had been given my first season-ticket (1969-70), at the ripe old age of six. I resumed the habit of watching the reserves in my mid-teens towards the end of the decade, when Ivor Thirst's updates tended to bring much better news.

“It's Ian Moore gone little”

Forest 2 Coventry City 0  
(Division 1, City Ground, 15 August 1970; 25,137)

 As a schoolboy there are advantages to having a birthday in the middle of the summer holidays. For example, you never get the birthday bumps, in which ritual you are lifted bodily by your eager peers, held horizontally and then 'bumped', in other words jerked sharply upwards, once for each year of your age. If that were all, it wouldn't be too bad; you'd be bumped nine, or twelve, or however many times and that would be it. Tradition has it, however, that someone will always 'pretend' to lose count at some point, so the count has to start again from one. Then, when your age has eventually been reached, you are hurled upwards as your assailants let go of you on the final 'bump'. You then have a choice of twisting quickly in mid-air in the hope of landing, cat-like, on your feet or plummeting to the hard playground, still horizontal, and not being able to walk comfortably for a week afterwards.

Another advantage of an August birthday is that it can coincide with the first home game of a new season, a time when the inevitable crushing of your (usually-misplaced) optimism has yet to occur. So it was in 1970, when I eagerly joined my Dad and my brother Robin on the walk from our usual parking place near the station. This was before the days of over-priced replica shirts, but I had been given a red football shirt for my 7^th birthday and wore it with white shorts and red socks. When a teenage girl saw me and exclaimed, “It's Ian Moore gone little!” I had never felt so proud.

Moore (who, magazines told us, preferred not to use the Storey- part of his name in those days) was my first Forest hero, the star of the team that challenged for the Double in 1966-67 and of those that struggled in the years that followed to live up to that season of over-achievement. A pacy winger with a good shot in either foot, he had been Forest's top scorer in three of the previous four seasons and would repeat that distinction in both his final seasons with the Reds. A year or two later, when Robin was deemed old enough to take me for a haircut from the barber in the Victoria Centre, I asked for “an Ian Moore”. (The barber was a Wolves fan, so he may have sneakily given me “a John Richards” instead...)

And so we took our seats in the Main Stand, a few rows behind the committee box. It was here, later in the season when Luton visited in the FA Cup, that I first became aware of away fans (and of the glottal stop), when a lone voice piped up, “Cam on, Lu'on!” during a lull in the play. Robin and Dad sat to my left, while on my right would have been a middle-aged lady whose name I never knew, who seemed to have a head-scarf permanently welded to her scalp and who would usually have a friendly word, and occasionally a sweet, for me and Robin. My birthday was complete when my new lookalike added to Barry Lyons' goal to seal Forest's win. Despite the Reds' wretched form at the end of the previous season, we began with two wins and four draws, before more normal service was resumed with just two further wins before the end of the year.

Forest: Barron, Hindley, Winfield, Chapman, O’Kane (Hilley), Newton, Lyons, Rees, Ingram, Cormack, Storey-Moore.