“It’s your own fault, David. After all, if you’d let her sit and watch it on the TV with you, she’d have got it out of her system by now and we wouldn’t have this problem.”

    My mother’s lips parted thinly in a knowing, told-you-so smile. “You’ll just have to take her with you.”

    “Fine. Then I will.”
   
    My father, the eternal martyr, dejected, beaten again by my mother’s logic and calm.

I was trussed up in layers of clothes before he could change his mind. This had been a long fought battle and I wasn’t about to blow it just when I was on the verge of securing victory.

    My mother was right, as usual. It was his own fault I wanted to go to a rugby match. If he hadn’t made it seem so mysterious, then I probably would have let it pass over me, just as my younger brother had. But I liked mysteries and I was determined to solve this one. I had to discover why Dad shouted at the television on Saturday afternoons.

    Some Saturday afternoons in the winter Dad’s friend, Merv, would waddle his way down the road armed with a wicker-shopping basket of beer cans. He’d slip off his worn brown hush puppies, pad his way into the front room, positioning the basket carefully in front of the TV as if it were a shrine. An offering to the benevolent God of Rugby to help Wales to victory. God’s taste in beer obviously changed in the Eighties. Then, as Merv crouched cross-legged on the floor and my father settled into his black leather swivel chair clutching the remote control, Mum would close the sliding doors to the front room as carefully as possible and usher my brother and I into the cold February garden.  

    Even from the garden we could still hear the shouts and groans and that’s what intrigued me the most.

    “Why is Dad shouting at the television?”

    Mum sighed, muttered something about men being boys and that it was only a game after all. She never was very good at explaining things.

    Now here I was, at the age of eight, about to find out. I was going to my first rugby match at Pontypool Park. It was November, bitterly cold, my cheeks, ears and nose were stinging but my heart was pumping hard from excitement and trying to keep up with my father. He isn’t a tall man but was fit then – he had been a PE teacher – and he hated being late. Punctuality is one of his vices. He meticulously plans routes so that we always arrive exactly when he says we will. He drives into town at eight in the morning to get a parking space and then sits in the car for half an hour waiting for the shops to open. It irritates my mother intensely. She’s exactly the opposite of him - a Scottish highlander incapable of being rushed. However, she wasn’t with us today as we’d left her rooting around in her beloved flowerbeds. So dragged firmly along, I scampered towards the painted fairytale park gates and stumbled down the wide steps until we had to slow down with the jam of people crossing the troll’s bridge into the main park. The stream, swollen with rain, tumbled over the rocks deafening me and convincing me that we were late.

    My father pulled me on through the crowds of coats and whiffs of greasy hair. We stopped briefly at a faded green peeling paint hut where he bought a programme. We stopped longer in a queue of coats and I could hear the murmur from the ground for the first time. Now I know it as the hum of friends meeting up in their usual places on the terrace. Two tickets secured and I insist on clutching my own as we enter the ground. My father puts me squarely in front of him, hands on my shoulders and manoeuvres me through the crowd until we reach a metal support close to the halfway line. He props me against one of the uprights and slips under the crossbar and behind where I am standing to stop me getting crushed if the crowd moves forward, he explains.

    The murmur has grown and I pick up fragments around me – talking players, work, wives, kids, hospital trips, and the current cold spell. There is a buzz in the ground as the players take to the pitch and my father leans forward and explains we are playing in red, black and white. Good, I think, that’s the strip I prefer out of the two on the pitch. I love the vibrant hoops of the Pontypool strip and the goal posts. There seems to be colour all around me from the coats and scarves of the supporters to the trees and hills surrounding the ground. The last of the autumn colours cling to the broad trees in the park and, on the hills above, the weak November sun rests fleetingly on the heather. This place is magic, I whisper to Dad. He laughs and says the only magic he wants to see is on the pitch.

    The whistle blows and a muted thud as the ball floats into the air. It falls to the ground and bodies thump against each other. An all-pervading smell of muscle rub comes my way with a breath of cold to pinch my cheeks. We have the ball. Among the chants, I  hear my father’s own warm tones and see red, black and white pushing relentlessly forward. Come on, I say to myself. Come on, Pooler, says a strange raspy little voice. It’s mine but doesn’t feel like it. I join the chanting “Pooler, Pooler” as the jumble of red, black and white drive on and on and on. It collapses under the posts and the referee’s yellow arm shoots into the air as his whistle peeps. The terrace roars and the blank scoreboard shakily hooks up a four.

    I feel all tingly but it’s not the cold. Above me my father is talking rapidly, laughing, joining in the banter of those around us. I smile and lean back into the support. As the teams run back to the halfway line ready to restart, I am still smiling.

    I know now why my father shouts at the television.