It’s time. After a period of reflection, I have decided to come clean. It’s taken 35 years. This will anger many, and I am truly sorry. I have taken significant legal advice, but I’ve ignored it. The weight of guilt has been on my shoulders for too long and I owe it to the nation.

I am the reason England lost the 1990 World Cup semi-final. Not Chris Waddle, Stuart Pearce, or Peter Shilton deciding a World Cup semi-final penalty shoot-out was the right time to practice his impression of a human potato. They were ‘as flies to wanton boys’. The die had already been cast, and I had tossed the nation’s dreams into the bin.

How could a 17 year-old boy be guilty of such national treason? I shall explain.

Summer 1990. For those of you under the age of 40, it is vital to remember that the England football team in the 1980s was, well, shit. Football itself was in the doldrums. Crowds were down, the football was often played in the air, and awful tragedies such as the Bradford fire, Heysel and Hillsborough had all contributed to a horrible negative aura around the game. Somehow, through all this, I had kept my love of the game.
Additionally, I had decided proper jobs were for mugs. In order to keep myself stocked up on fags and booze, and to keep my then girlfriend Julie (whom ‘friends’ at a recent get-together were unkindly enthusiastic in reminding me was miles out of my league) in the custom to which she was used to, I developed a nice little earner as the school bookie. I offered a very personal betting service to the naïve innocents in my school. No need for them to risk being humiliated and chucked out of Billy Hills round the corner, you could put on the bet you wanted with me. I even had a book of betting stubs to keep track. My ‘Honest Bookies’ branding was oxymoronically ahead of its time. My reinforced trouser pockets jangled to my knees with pound coins and 50-pence pieces.

It had been a good year. I’d taken advantage of the fact that most teenagers had no idea how betting odds worked. Take the betting price of ‘evens’ – “congratulations that means you win what you put on” I’d say, as I gave the winners £1 back for a £1 bet. It was like taking money from babies. Or teenage boys, literally.
The World Cup rolled round. The pre-tournament favourites were Italy and Holland, European Champions with Gullit and Van Basten. With the summer holidays just around the corner this was realistically my last chance to make big money. Everyone wanted to back England, but my pre-tournament price of 8-1 was judged far too stingy, especially when England warmed up with a home defeat to a poor Uruguay and only a last-minute Steve Bull header rescued a shocking 1-1 draw with Tunisia. ‘Don’t read too much into it,’ said Bobby Robson. Meh, I thought, England will never win this World Cup, and I know a way to make a fortune.

Obviously, with hindsight, offering hundreds of school boys the chance to bet their dinner money on England to win the World Cup at 20/1 was immoral, unethical and misguided. But news travels fast when people think a bargain is to be had, and within days I was taking Julie out to Il Restaurante Alpino, and paying in pound coins.
There are moments in everyone’s life when they realise they may have made a huge, tiny mistake. Not when England stumbled to draws against Holland and Ireland or struggled to get past Egypt. Not even when Enzo Scifo hit the inside of the post and Platt volleyed a last minute winner at the end of extra time. No, it was as England came back from 2-1 down in the quarter final against Cameroon with just minutes to go, that I began to realise not only that England were awful, but apparently incredibly lucky, but more significantly for us all, this meant financial horror might befall me. If England won the World Cup, I would be about £1200 down.
Even allowing for some of my ‘clients’ not finding my hiding place and the strict enforcement of Rules 2 and 4 of ‘Honest Bookies’ – “no ticket, no payout”, and “if you didn’t write the odds down on your ticket when you placed the bet you have the starting price (always evens)” I was likely to be down about £900. I didn’t have that kind of money. I’d spent their stakes on my Tuscan steaks and a nice merlot (The “Are you 18?” “Yes,” age-challenging back then had some flaws).

I had to stop this financial catastrophe, or the ‘Honest Bookies’ would lose the ‘trust’ of my ‘customers’ and I’d be in line for another big kicking at the rugby club merely weeks after my side hustle of photocopying their Friday Night Disco tickets and selling them at £1 off got rumbled. I had to control this problem, somehow.
Superstition can manifest as extreme paranoia. Just last week a manager in our league, Bod, realised that whoever he bought was clearly jinxed. Immediately after selling Welbeck, Bod’s hitherto underwhelming aged-striker scored back-to-back doubles and was the focus of inane phone-ins calling for him to be in the England squad. An Arsenal fan, Bod also blamed himself for Odegaard’s injuries, so sold him to aid his recovery, and sold his other Arsenal player to ‘get him out of harm’s way’. Bod, wisely, didn’t want Arsenal’s best chance of winning the league for over 20 years to be wrecked by his Fantasy League choices. Sadly, it was too late for me back in 1990: I desperately needed to ruin England’s World Cup chances before they ruined my life.

If you were asked how much you would pay to see England win the World Cup, I wonder what your answer would be? My answer back in 1990 would have been about £2.50. £1000 in 1990 was as out of reach for me then as a million now. I needed divine intervention: I needed to, in the words of Kate Bush while running up that hill, make a deal with God.

Chris Waddle’s miss, I realise now, was arguably not incontrovertible proof that God does exist, but for a 17 year old in the summer of 1990 it was as close as I was going to get. My memory of that moment is strangely different to everybody else not only in the country, but in the world. I am sorry for the heartbreak it caused, Gazza’s tears, Pearce’s mental torment only lessened by pocketing thousands from Pizza Hut years later, and that dreadful play about Gary Lineker. On the other hand, ‘Honest Bookies’ ran very successfully for another 12 months and I did have a lovely few weeks in the summer before Julie dumped me for some bloke with a car. So swings and roundabouts for us all.

I’ve since had years of therapy and am beginning to recover, you’ll no doubt be delighted to hear. My learning from this? When your team is underperforming, don’t make deals with God. Don’t believe the hype – apparently you do not have control over outside events, it is not your fault, and you changing the beer you are drinking will not mean Watkins scores a last-minute winner again, that was just a coincidence last year.
The real solution is pronoia, and I’ll tell you about that next time.