“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.