Carrow Road memories: My stint as a Carrow Road cleaner

The old South Stand at Carrow Road - I swept every row of it back in 1993

Ever wondered who cleans up after games at Carrow Road? Back in the summer of 1993 I was about to start my last year at school and saw an advert in the EDP placed by a cleaning company to supply part-time cleaners at Carrow Road.
With dreams of free tickets to games, mixing with the players and probably having a say in Mike Walker's team selections, I headed off down to Carrow Road on a mid-August Friday before the first game of the season against Manchester United.
As a I brushed past Chris Sutton (two years older and probably on slightly more than the £2.50 an hour I was coining in) in the car park, my dreams were slowly starting to be realised.
They were soon shattered when I saw the motley crew of a dozen others who had also turned up outside the River End to start work.
Our first job was to take a bucket and sponge and clean all the seats in the South Stand and River End which wasn't too taxing. On the following Monday after each game we all assembled at 7am and swept the terraces for 6-7 hours until they were clean.
The joy of being at the ground on a Friday was immense, there was a real buzz about the place and I got to go all over the stadium and sit in places I'd never sat in before which was great. Duncan Forbes, who was working for the club at the time, used to come over and chat to us, we got free tea and biscuits on our morning break and sometimes a glimpse of some players on the pitch.
Alas, as the summer turned to autumn and then winter, it wasn't so good. A dead pigeon spent most of that autumn towards the back of the River End lower tier and every fortnight I had to sweep rubbish around it.
Fans that tore up huge sections of the Yellow Pages before a game and threw them like confetti when the teams came out were the bane of my life as the Carrow Road wind that swept around the ground every post-matchday Monday made the clean-up job nigh on impossible.
The upper and lower tiers of the Barclay and the upper tier of the River End, which had been purpose built with seats, were easy to clean, the lower River End which had seats placed over the original terrace was harder. The South Stand with its hotch potch of red and blue seats was a nightmare. I must have snagged my trousers on a damaged seat on a weekly basis.
There were the joys of finding a programme and I started to pick up used match tickets and the occasional 20p or 50p. One of my co-workers found a purse one morning which sparked a big debate among us as to whether he would hand it in or trouser the cash inside.
The absolute highlight was the day after Bayern Munich had been at Carrow Road for the big UEFA Cup, which was live on BBC1. It was a Thursday morning, November 4 1993, and I was supposed to be in a sociology lecture.
Rather than sit and listen to the theories of Karl Marx and Auguste Comte, I headed down to Carrow Road and started work on getting that River End terrace spic and span.
Suddenly a camera crew from Anglia TV turned up to film the tempoaray TV studio being taken down and to do some general ground shots for that night's reaction to the match.
I was called over and they asked if they could film me sweeping up. Wary that I should have been at school I directed them to put the camera on the terrace and I swept into it and urged them not to film my face.
The clip made the news that night and, realising that it wouldn't get any better than that, I quit within a few weeks to concentrate on my A-levels!

Book review - Got, Not Got

League ladders, World Cup Willie, Subbuteo, World Cup stamps, Sport Billy, inflatables, fanzines, Corinthian figures - whatever was the football fad that accompanied the era that you got into football, you'll find it all revisited in the wonderful book Got, Not Got.
With an alphabetical layout featuring the biggest 50 or so teams in English and Scottish football, there's a pretty good chance that a piece of memorabilia that means something to you or your team will be photographed and recalled in a superbly designed book that's feels like flicking through a massive 224-page football programme rather than a serious football text.
The book harks back to that golden era far away from Twitter, kick-offs being moved for TV, court cases and obscene wages, when Mark Lawrenson was just a Brighton defender and Gary Lineker worked on his dad's market stall.
The authors are big Leicester City fans and there's plenty of Foxes memorabilia across the pages. Norwich fans will be excited about page 132, half of which is dedicated to City's finest match, the 1993 win against Bayern Munich in the Olympic Stadium.
Before the Premier League and the wall-to-wall coverage of Sky, before mobile phones and tablets gave us goals around the clock, there was a time when the beautiful game was harder to access - a time when it didn't just flow over everyone and fill every corner.
That time when you had to go to a game to follow your team, you had to buy a programme, read a magazine or phone a Clubcall hotline to get your club's news, a time when the game we all love had collectable items that meant something to every young fan and a time when catching a five-minute glimpse of your team on television was a once-a-season event.
It's a great book, every page has a throwback memory for any football fan over 30 and you'll dip in and out of it for months on end as I have done.
Even though a lot of the references and pictures are slightly before my time, I still loved it and, hey, any football book with a picture of Brighton's Steve Foster in his early 80s headbanded glory will do for me!