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| Where is the Sunkist Trophy now? |
"I hear you missed a penalty at
Wembley last night." That was PE teacher Mr. Baxter's snarky putdown of
schoolboy international Gary Hargreaves in an early episode of Grange Hill, when Hargreaves had been
acting all cocky with his mates. This was a fine touch of Phil Redmond script-writing,
because nearly all young male viewers would have known that England schoolboys played midweek at
Wembley. The June international on a Saturday afternoon, meanwhile, was one of the few live games shown on TV in
the 1970s.
Better still, our school organised an
annual outing to the game, including a visit to London Zoo in the morning. Our
own version of Mr Baxter growled at us before we left one year: "This will
be my 12th visit to the zoo, and frankly I'm sick of it. So if I catch anyone
misbehaving, don't expect me to be in the best of moods."
True, the zoo was just the warm-up act
ahead of visiting the national stadium, but it was a crucial part of the day's
ritual. If you go all the way from Lincolnshire to London for the day, you have
to do something else besides watching 90 minutes of football. But why the zoo every year? Perhaps it was considered
much easier to keep us
