I can remember like it was yesterday. The day in April 1976 when Pompey beat Fulham 1-0 at Craven Cottage.
Whatever time of year away games at Fulham were right up there with my favourite and this was no exception.
The stroll down Putney High Street, a few drinks overlooking the River Thames and a stroll through the picturesque park leading directly to the stadium.
And on this particular occasion my travelling companion up there was Chris Lawler who at the time was still famous enough to get nods, winks and points in his direction having so recently performed for Bill Shankly’s Liverpool side and England.
Literally he was sitting on the train that drew into Havant bound for Waterloo in the days when trains still had single travel compartments. We got chatting though he wasn’t the most chattiest of guys and he even brought me a couple of cans of beer opening a wallet that possessed more money than I had ever seen in one hit.
It may not seem like the most stunning of revelations now but at 17 I was still in that stage of revering professional footballers from afar and this was the most high profile I had had ever come across in the flesh.
Only a few years previously I had swapped a Terry Yorath card for his in the school playground to progress my Soccer Stars 1968 sticker album.
Like every other player in that album he was just another untouchable superstar who lived in a parallel universe which I would never enter. A soccer sticker album was the closest I would come.
So sitting in a train compartment sipping a can of beer and chatting to him on the way up to London was somewhat surreal. Even more so when standing on Embankment Tube Station as a cluster of autograph hunters flocked round him and mistaking me as a team-mate sought mine too.
Though quite honestly even at 17 if I anyone mistook me as a professional athlete they must have also concluded why perhaps Pompey were marooned at the bottom of Division 2.
I had lasted with him this long as he had no idea how to get to Craven Cottage by foot so I was his guide which was another risk on his part having to pass so many pubs on route. But having safely negotiated train, tube and park we arrived and he beckoned me to wait only to return with my first ever complimentary ticket. It was the first and last time I ever spoke to or saw Chris Lawler that close but I have never forgotten the day so revolutionary was it.
The icing on the cake also was a rare away win courtesy of Norman Piper so when I got back to The Star Pub Havant later that night I could only reflect on what for me was a momentous day.
Norman Piper was another of those untouchables, perhaps not quite as high profile as Lawler but nevertheless someone I had been hero worshipping since he first ran out in Pompey Blue six years before the Fulham game.
The second time I ever met him in the flesh was a year after the Fulham game on a Thursday evening in The Black Dog Pub in Havant which sadly is no longer there. I say second because the first had been a few years earlier in 1973 when I interviewed him in Frogmore Road for a school project.
Somewhere at home I still have the colour photo of him taken with a Kodak camera that day standing there with long dark curly hair and chequed jacket. In four years and as a late developer I had transformed from a gangly, cherubic 13 year old whose voice was showing no signs of breaking to a gangly 17 year old with spots and bum fluff who drank pints of Brown Ale. So naturally he wouldn’t have made the connection even if he had remembered that first meeting which he didn’t.
I mentioned I would be travelling up to Port Vale with the legendary Dogmeat Jones two days later and hey presto I got my second ever complimentary ticket. Oh for the days of British Rail when it cost something like £7 for the journey to Staffordshire via the tube etc.
It was a game that marked Norman’s 300th Pompey appearance but ended in a depressing 2-0 defeat in what quite honestly was a depressing period as the team plummeted downwards through the Football League-as we now know not for the first time.
Years later I would stay with Norman in the San Diego apartment he shared and do you know what he couldn’t remember me from either of the previous occasions.
He certainly does now, as on a daily basis I emptied his shared fridge of beer and woke him, and the rest of the block, up one night in the early hours after misplacing the key.
Laughs aside as he ferried me around California in his car I had to more than once pinch myself to comprehend that this was the guy I had once worshipped as untouchable.
Because that was the sort of impact professional footballers had on impressionable kids and though no longer that I know it is still the same today.
When I watched Piper make his home debut against his old side Plymouth in a League Cup tie I was on the verge of the nerve-racking and unsettling experience of transferring to secondary school.
Never then could I have imagined that all these years later our lives would become entwined in this way. In the past years I have walked down Goldsmith and Frogmore Road with Bobby Charlton before having a drink with him in my office. Had a drink side to side with the late George Best at the Boardroom bar in the pre Gaydamak days when they actually possessed one. And spoken to the late Bobby Moore in the Fratton Park press box.
I first watched Charlton in black and white as he helped tear Benfica apart for Man Utd in the European Cup Final. Likewise Best. And though too young to remember 1966 live the vision of Moore picking up the 1966 World Cup with Charlton not far behind him is engrained around the world.
All these untouchable highly unlikely liaisons over the years have one common defining link. Portsmouth Football Club.