In the absence of any Sunderland action this weekend one’s mind drifts back into football memories of the distant past and….was it a dream, or did I once tread the green sward of Wembley Stadium?

I was once sent off at Wembley. I’d strayed onto the hallowed turf while working there one day and the head groundsman ordered me off so I took the long walk back to the dog-track that surrounded it in those days. Those days were early January 1977 and at that time I was working for Extraman Job Agency in London. We’d roll up at their office in Cromwell Road SW7 at some godforsaken hour of the morning and wait around numbly to be assigned to various jobs before being whisked off in a Transit to wherever the factory was. It never happened to me but I did occasionally see someone being sent home without a job after waiting there a long time. As the sun came up and we raced along the M4 or the North Circular the other passengers, who were mainly Aussies and Kiwis, would often be dozing off last night’s session. On one such dark and gloomy morning a voice suddenly piped up from the back, “But this is ridiculous! This is the worst translation of Jean-Paul Sartre I’ve ever read!” I was stunned by this and finally managed to mutter, “Yeah?” but the rest of my colleagues offered no reply.

One Friday morning I was feeling decidedly numb myself after a drunken send-off to a guy called Sean whom I’d been working with for a few weeks in the stationery store of a warehouse in Acton. He told everyone else that he was going to work in Abu Dhabi but in reality he’d got a job in the factory over the road. We got so pissed that we ended up lying on the shelves of the store and tried to direct colleagues to the stationery items they needed. I later heard that Sean hadn’t even made it to the factory over the road as he’d fallen and broken his ankle as a result of that leaving-do. Anyway, as we drove though north London on that Friday morning I noticed the Twin Towers of Wembley looming up in the distance and then they got bigger and bigger till we finally entered the stadium through a large opened gate. Nobody had told us where we were going and so it was a pleasant surprise to find myself there. Our task was to get the dog-track into a decent condition after it had been badly ploughed up by the paws of numerous greyhounds.

There were loads of us from different agencies standing around like lemons and having nothing better to do I strolled onto the pitch, as mentioned. I’m not certain but I think that the groundsman who ordered me off was the same one who was featured in ‘Shoot’, the movie about the 1966 World Cup. There was an idyllic scene of him lovingly supervising the erection of the goalposts before the World Cup Final and attaching the nets as the sun shone and the Silloth turf glowed greenly on that day that will live in the hearts of Englishmen forever. I was thinking of this when I first realized who he must be but he rather shattered that pastoral image by pointing to a heap of soil and announcing, “Right, let’s get rid of this fuckin’ shit first.”

I don’t know who had organized the workforce that day but they’d got far too many of us and we spent the bulk of our time waiting around or playing with the huge roller that flattened down the track after we’d shovelled sand into the holes. I had plenty of time to wander about unsupervised and it was very strange to see the site of Sunderland’s great victory less than four years before in that deserted state. You could really see what a tawdry dump it was. My favourite bit of the old cup finals was always the gladiatorial entrance of the two sides from the tunnel and so I had to take a look down there. What a contrast it was to my expectations, though, as all that greeted me were two dirty whitewashed walls, with plenty of muddy marks on their lower edges, a large wooden gate at the end and a door on the right leading to the changing-rooms. There was no magic at all and it was rather like a farm. Back outside, a rare moment of excitement came when they were testing out the hare and a golden retriever that was accompanying a dodgy-looking bloke in a camel-coat caught sight of it and came hurtling past us in hot pursuit.

Apart from the immortal 5 th May 1973, when I’d been jammy enough to buy a cheap ticket outside at 2.50 and sit close to the goal-line where Porterfield scored and Monty made those saves, I’d attended several international matches at Wembley and had even joined in the applause for new manager Don Revie as he walked to his seat before the England v Czechoslovakia game in 1974. I have to say, though, that I’d never enjoyed them much and the last game I went to there was the Milk Cup Final in 1985, which is best forgotten. My final visit was in the spring of 1987 to see Bowie on his Glass Spider tour, which put me off stadium rock for life as I didn’t see the point of paying good money to see a tiny figure on a distant stage flanked by huge screens.

Thankfully my Extraman Job Agency days are long behind me and I don’t think I’d bother to watch England if they were playing outside my front window so the only thing that would get me back inside Wembley would be the appearance of the Lads or, of course, a Sunderland player in an England shirt.

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