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116 pages

English

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When You're Smiling is the story of a football team's journey from also-rans to champions and a football fan's journey from boy to man, through laughter, loss and home defeats. Monday, 2 May 2016 was a day Matt Bozeat thought he would never see. It was the day Leicester City, the team he had supported through thin and thinner all his life, were crowned Premier League champions. The story of the 5,000-1 outsiders winning one of European football's top prizes put a smile on the face of millions worldwide. Three days earlier, Matt had experienced an even greater miracle. When You're Smiling is a nostalgia-filled treat brimming with memories of football and the wider world in the 1980s and 90s. It's a book about belonging and thinking your dreams will never come true - and then they do come true.

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Publié par	Distributed by eBookpartnership
Date de parution	05 septembre 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781801503242
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2022
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
Matt Bozeat, 2022
Every effort has been made to trace the copyright.
Any oversight will be rectified in future editions at the earliest opportunity by the publisher.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.
A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN 9781801501651
eBook ISBN 9781801503242
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eBook Conversion by www.eBookPartnership.com
Contents
Foreword
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Photos
For Mum and Dad and Carla Diana
Thanks to Philip Sharkey and Julia Hall for their support
Foreword by Steve Walsh
WHEREVER YOU go in the world, people know Leicester City Football Club and our amazing story.
I m proud to say I was a part of it.
I joined a special little club in 1986 and have watched it grow and grow.cI had some great times in my 14 years as a player at the club - but never envisaged Leicester City would become the club it has become.
I joined Leicester in 1986 because I wanted to play at the top level - and we were relegated that season !
We had a terrific start, beating Liverpool and Nottingham Forest and drawing with Manchester United, but I got a bad groin injury at Coventry and we ended up getting relegated.
The road back to the top flight was a hard one.
There was a time when just being in the top division was the dream - and look where we are now !
We had those heart-breaking play-off final defeats against Blackburn and Swindon and some supporters were starting to think we were never going to get there.
I got the goals that finally got us to the Premier League against Derby County on a day I will never forget.
I was told my season was finished months earlier and I ended up writing my name in the club s history books with the goals that took us up.
I couldn t have written it better myself !
Getting into the Premier League wasn t enough. I wanted to be part of a Leicester City team that won things and it was Martin O Neill who turned us into the team I always hoped it would become.
Martin got the best out of every single player who pulled on the blue shirt in those magical few years and we won the League Cup twice and had four top-10 finishes in the Premier League.
It was such a special few years.
There was a time when Wembley seemed like Leicester s second home !
I think a lot of Leicester City supporters thought those days under Martin were as good as it was going to get for them and there were some tough times after Martin left, including a dip into the third tier for the first time in the club s history.
It really is astonishing to see where we are now.
It is unreal what has happened, a story that has captured the hearts of millions and one that is told here by a lifelong Leicester City fan.
I BLAME the parents.
Dad was always doing jobs, Mum was forever cooking, cleaning or shopping.
Ours was a busy house.
We weren t rich and we weren t poor. Above all, we were an honest family. We never had anything we couldn t afford and we never pretended to be anything other than who we were.
We were from Leicester, so we supported Leicester City.
Only the hard kids at my school supported City.
The hard kids and me.
Perhaps you had to be tough to support City - or perhaps you became tough by supporting City.
Perhaps all those Monday mornings spent listening to people with thick Leicester accents taunting you for Leicester losing does that to you. I could see how walking to school glowing from your team s latest win was preferable to dreading another day of mockery, but how much does it mean to you if you come from Leicester and support Liverpool because Liverpool always seem to win and Leicester always seem to lose?
How much does it mean if you always get what you want?
I was never hard and supporting Leicester didn t make me any harder, I don t think, but I was always stubborn - and proud.
Why wouldn t you want to come from Leicester? To me, it seemed like an exciting place to come from.
The city centre was full of big, tall buildings that stretched into the sky, lots of people and shops. It could be a bit scary sometimes, but it was exciting, too.
Every time I went into Leicester city centre, I sensed something might happen. I might see a Leicester City player or a police car screaming its way through the traffic, like you saw on the television.
Not everywhere was as exciting as Leicester, I discovered. Nothing seemed to happen where my grandparents lived, for example.
We drove through the town centre without me even realising and there was no Football League ground for more than 50 miles.
What sort of place was this?
So rather than spend their evenings and weekends watching football - come to think of it, Nan may not have been that keen anyway - my grandparents relied on the television for entertainment.
On one of the three channels you might see Engelbert Humperdinck singing, Willie Thorne playing snooker, David Gower effortlessly swatting a cricket ball to the ropes or, best of all, Gary Lineker sticking one in the back of the net.
All from Leicester.
Who wouldn t want to come from such a place?
Even if you never went to a Leicester City match, if you grew up there in the 1980s you knew a couple of things about them.
Firstly, they were too good for the Second Division, but not good enough for the First.
They belonged in a First Division-and-a-half, somewhere between the two.
The other truism stayed with them for years. They beat the top teams, lose to the rubbish teams.
This was all proved in the space of a few months in 1980, around the time Leicester City came into my life, smacked me on the leg and frightened the living daylights out of me.
***
I ONLY went to the football ground to keep Dad company when he went to collect some tickets and I ended up with a giant spouting absolute gibberish at me.
The giant was Leicester manager Jock Wallace, but what on earth was he saying?
What he was saying - in a thick Scottish accent - was, Who do you support?
Dad told him, Leicester.
I said, Ipswich.
Why don t you support Leicester?
Dad tried to act as a peacemaker between his five-year-old son and the fearsome Leicester manager.
He supports Leicester really.
I just sat there, wanting to go home.
So I didn t become friends with Leicester s manager - we could have taught each other English perhaps - and the affection for Ipswich lasted only a few more months. I liked Ipswich because they were good, and then Leicester started being good. Good, but inconsistent.
There was the embarrassment of an FA Cup defeat at non-league Harlow Town followed by the joy of winning the Second Division and the toppling of the European champions.
***
THE CHOICE facing everyone growing up in Leicester at that time seemed to be: Leicester City or Liverpool?
Really, it had to be Leicester.
If you ever left Leicester for holidays or family visits - and I wasn t sure everyone did - you told people that s where you were from. Did you then wag a finger and say, Oh, but I support Liverpool.
Why? Did you want to be someone else?
If you were from Leicester, surely they had to be your team? It seemed straightforward enough to me, but for others, it wasn t as simple as that.
They had a choice to make between Leicester and Liverpool.
They had The Beatles, we had Showaddywaddy.
1-0 to Liverpool.
They had Anfield, we had Filbert Street. 2-0.
They had Kenny Dalglish, we had Andy Peake.
Peake chose Leicester.
Peake was one of ours, a lad from just down the road in Market Harborough, who grew up supporting Leicester and then lived out all our dreams for us by playing for his team - and scoring a goal that helped them win their biggest match of the season.
The 1980/81 season started with losses against Ipswich Town and Everton and nobody envisaged City s first points coming from their next match.
Liverpool, champions of England and Europe, were coming to Filbert Street.
Introducing the highlights on ITV s The Big Match , Brian Moore told viewers Leicester were a young side, average age 21, and, well, we all know about Liverpool.
Liverpool s defenders didn t appear to know much about Peake or if they did, they weren t too bothered about him. They just stood and watched as he got the ball around the centre circle, put his head down and set off towards their goal. He kept running and running and no Liverpool players seemed to notice.
Possibly annoyed that nobody seemed to think he could shoot from range, Peake decided to try his luck and left commentator Hugh Johns gasping disbelievingly, He s beaten one of the greatest goalkeepers in the world from 30 yards, after the ball flew past Ray Clemence s fingertips.
Martin Henderson made it 2-0 and afterwards, Wallace made the bold prediction that his team could go on to win the First Division.
They didn t. They finished one place off the bottom.
But Leicester did have the satisfaction of twice beating Liverpool that season, handing them their first loss at Anfield in 85 games by a 2-1 scoreline.
That thunderbolt against Liverpool at Filbert Street would make life much easier for Peake years later after he became a policeman. He said that drivers initially furious at being pulled over would recognise him and want to reminisce rather