CAN you remember wanting to do something as a child — really wanting to do it?

There can’t be many things that you wished for as a kid, that you still yearn for now. Which holds the same burning desire across four decades — the longed-for fulfilment of which plays a big part in your life 40 years on from putting away your “childish things.”

And then 40 years on, finally achieving your ambition.

Well, dear reader, I finally accomplished my aim last month.

I joined The 92 Club. 

A club for fans who have visited all 92 league football grounds in England — each and every ground across the four divisions from the Premier League and Championship through to League One and League Two.

Which is why I found myself driving to Harrogate at the start of last month — appropriately enough April Fool’s Day, for there was no more fitting date to fulfil my lifelong folly — to catch the Sulphurites’ Easter 5-1 victory over Gillingham in League Two. 

On Easter Monday, when folk are tending the garden or at the garden centre, down the pub or simply taking it easy, I headed all the way to North Yorkshire to tick off my final ground to finally make it 92/92.

I caught up with an old university mate who worked for the local tea company and to mark the occasion, I was presented with 1,000 tea bags — which I thought was rather fitting, considering how much tea I’ve consumed in the course of watching football up and down the land in more than 40 years.

“If we’d known you were joining The 92 Club we’d have arranged a message over the tannoy,” said the wonderfully helpful woman at Harrogate Town’s ticket office, situated on the Wetherby Road, a short walk back into that charming spa town, where my old pal and I celebrated with more than a few beers and caught up to date on our respective lives.

Because, for me, reaching The 92 Club has been never about simply numbers, nor anything other than a personal goal. 

I know people who have dedicated folders and spreadsheets in charting their progress to the 92, forensically, scientifically even. 

But for me, it’s been about the sense of adventure going somewhere new, the thrills, and spills and scrapes and lock-ins, pies, pints and programmes, and laughs and let-downs, not to mention the minor disasters that you still chuckle about with old pals.

It’s about the memories, and things you experience, and randomly recall — running on the pitch in deep joy at Aston Villa in the late 1980s to celebrate a Paul Merson goal, before breaking down on the hard shoulder of the M6 on the way home in my mate Mozzy’s grey Capri — as much as the football, or the numbers, or the stands, or the floodlights — although, whisper it, I do have an unbridled passion for historic floodlights.

When people asked me how I knew my totals, or even remembered where I’d been over the years — and where I still needed to go — well, I gave the only answer I could give: you simply knew.

Like Donald Trump moving his golf ball during a round, you’re only cheating yourself if you don’t tell the truth. Which is the worst lie of all.

Which is why, even now if you asked me whether I’d been to say, I don’t know, Oxford United, for example, I would immediately reply, Yes. My dad drove his old Cortina full of excitable kids to the old Manor Ground in deepest Headington, to the last game of the 1985-86 season to cheer on Arsenal.

We lost 3-0. The Us stayed up, and Ipswich were relegated. I only recall that last piece of information because I remember there was a group of increasingly disappointed Town fans who were standing in the away end near us, at that wonderfully disjointed ground no longer with us, who were supporting Arsenal for the day. For if the Gunners had won, Ipswich would have stayed up, and Oxford relegated. As it was, Arsenal subsided as badly as Ipswich’s hopes.

To fulfil the sometimes oblique and nuanced rules of The 92 Club, the fact I visited Oxford again, a full 38 years after I’d first been, this time to the curious three-sided Kassam Stadium — where you can see punters entering the nearby cinema from your seat — was enough to keep my claim valid. For you have to have attended a match at the club’s most recent stadium as part of club rules.

The fact Oxford was my first away game after my beloved father had sadly passed in January 2023, made the trip even more significant. As did the hug from Arsenal’s press officer and the subsequent, incredibly sensitive and emotionally intelligent letter from Mikel Arteta to my mother, offering his and the club’s condolences to her and our family. 

Of course, not every club visit has such poignant memories.

Attempting to find Colchester United’s old ground Layer Road for their League Cup second-round clash v West Brom in the pouring rain in 2004, while walking two miles in the wrong direction after my phone battery had given up, and without a jacket — while being forced to depart that evocative ground before extra time, simply to catch the last train back to Liverpool Street, thereby missing the drama of their 2-1 giant-killing — was a particular low point that springs to mind. (And yes, I have been to Colchester’s new stadium, for Arsenal’s Youth Cup quarter-final victory back in 2019, when a certain teenage Emile Smith Rowe scored a superb free-kick on the way to a 5-1 victory, if you’re asking.)

Or the time I drove for six hours to AFC Newport, via the athletics stadium and transporter bridge in that proud town, only to reach the grand old gates of Rodney Parade to be told the game had been called off five minutes earlier due to a waterlogged pitch.

I couldn’t even land a cup of tea, as I was told the tea urn wasn’t working. So, I simply got in my car and drove the six hours home, listening to Welsh-themed artists including my trusty plastic bag of an unfeasibly large number of CDs, which also included the Manic Street Preachers and Tom Jones. Such trips weren’t unusual, of course. I did eventually go back. For an evening game in the depths of midwinter. Roadworks had closed the Severn Bridge and I got home at 4am, after passing a milkfloat on its rounds. 

Starting my odyssey in the 1980s it was also about the dawning appreciation of stadiums gradually being mothballed and demolished, a sign of the changes in society as much as architecture — and the game itself — since that fevered decade.

Of my first trip to Hillsborough Stadium, in September 1988, looking at the dark, forbidding tunnel without lights, that led through to the Lepping Lane terraces, and the callous, threatening and intimidating behaviour of the South Yorkshire Police to the visiting “Cockneys,” I can still recall with absolute clarity to this day.

As indeed, my first trip to Upton Park in October 1985, where I saw a riot outside on Green Street, and a pitch invasion before the delayed kick-off, in news that no-one thought worthy of a single line in any national newspaper the next day.

I could go on. Suffice to say, I certainly would over a pint in a welcoming pub. 

As it is, I have to tip my hat to some of my favourites.

Barnsley (and Portsmouth, and Brentford’s old Griffin Park) for the floodlights — Oakwell’s proud red brickwork, and main stand that surely hasn’t changed since after the war make it one of my standouts — for, as you may be able to tell, I am a football romantic and as such, bright, shiny, soulless new stadiums leave me utterly cold.

Stockport County for its pies and warm welcome, for you can easily tell a club’s soul by the food it offers. And the stunning meat ’n’ potato pie, complete with a plentiful sea of mushy peas was as near heaven as I could find that cold day in Greater Manchester.

Everton’s Goodison Park for the glory of Archibald Leitch’s flying buttresses, of my first trip to Maine Road, via Moss Side, Stamford Bridge’s notorious electric fences, the Shankly Gates at Anfield, the old gates at Middlesbrough’s caustic Ayresome Park, the concrete barriers in the old forbidding away end at St James’s Park, complete with fences so thick you couldn’t see the goal at the Gallowgate End. Leicester City’s misshapen but raucous Filbert Street, the Popside at Derby County’s noisy Baseball Ground, rusting Roker Park’s North Sea gales, the allotments at Vicarage Road, Cambridge’s fairy cakes, pasties at Plymouth and so much more — but, as you’ve probably guessed it, nothing will ever beat my sepia-tinted memory of my beloved Highbury.

Highbury to Harrogate indeed.