It was Oscar Wilde who said that life imitates art far more than the opposite. It was Steve Bruce who told Big Chris Samba to go for a warm-up. “Be a good lad, go on ’n win us a couple of balls up top.”
It was the opening day of the 2017/18 season in the Championship, and it was also my 19th birthday. Aston Villa were down in the doldrums, and truth be told, so was I.
In the years that have followed, I have come to view that afternoon as something of a metaphor, a shorthand to tell the story of a great, historic football club full of promise and potential, a football club backed to the hilt by an undying, long-suffering support, and also the story of a teenage boy—promise, potential, support and suffering likewise.
It was our second successive season in the Championship, the second season of my lifetime spent outside the top flight. We were drawing at home to Hull City, the score at 1–1 with six minutes of additional time left to play, and a 20-year-old Jarrod Bowen had scored his first Football League goal on the hour mark to cancel out an early opener from Gabby Agbonlahor.
I’m not sure which is the clearer indication of the state of the club at that time. That we were still somehow relying on Gabby Agbonlahor for goals, like relying on a clear sky for rain, or that we were doing so in front of a crowd of only 31,000, with an entire tier of the Trinity Road Stand closed for the duration of the season.
Things were not looking good. And Steve Bruce needed a goal.
Today, the Oxford English Dictionary defines art as “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination.” It’s the "imagination" there that sticks with me.
Steve Bruce needed a goal, and there can surely be no better example of the application of human imagination than being Steve Bruce needing a goal and turning to your substitutes’ bench with six minutes to play and deciding that somehow the answer to your goal-scoring woes lay in the form of a 33-year-old centre-half by the name of Christopher Samba—recently released from Panathinaikos—whose last senior goal was back in March 2015.
If Steve Bruce’s football was art, my life seemed dead set on imitating it.