I confess it is an odd thing to have a hero. My first was Peter Osgood the Chelsea Centre Forward when I started supporting the team at the beginning of the 70s. In those days I was an intense little boy with a taste for books who liked nothing better on a Saturday evening than to arrange football trading cards on the floor as I sat by our electric fire (with real flame effect) scoffing my Findus Crispy Pancakes. Life was dreary then and Peter Osgood was stylish. He was stylish because he had an easy athletic grace. He was stylish because he had sideburns, a wave in his hair and a dashing smile. He was rakish. Although he didn’t know it, he and I were linked. He was Chelsea and I was Chelsea. He wore the blue shirt and so did I – nagged from my weary mother. Each time he scored; each time he acknowledged the Chelsea fans I felt that he was somehow making it clear that he was doing it for me. Not just for me of course, but in part for me. When he played for England I was as proud as a little boy could be.

In 1998 I met him for the first time. P and I had travelled to Copenhagen to see Chelsea play Helsinborg. As we took our seats I saw him. He was just a coule of seats furhter down our row. I began to hyper-ventilate.

M: P … it’s him.

P: It’s who?

M: H … him … Pe … ter … Os … good

P: Who?

M: M .. mm .. my … hero

P: Go introduce yourself

M: Can’t … can’t … c .. c

P set off and introduced herself.

Osgood was utterly charming. I had assumed that all celebrities reacted to being pestered by strangers in one of two ways. Either they wore hats and dark glasses and shouted “fuck off” at fans while driving over them in tinted windowed 4X4s or else they lapped it up until thier egos exploded in a shower of drug abuse and sexual deviance. Ossie had a way of thanking you for being his “biggest fan” and sounding like he meant it. I told him he was the reason I supported Chelsea. He told me it was proud to hear that. I told him being a Chelsea fan (at that time) had been 20 years of pretty much uninterrupted misery and I held him accountable. He decided that my stuttering red-faced inanity was intended to be funny, gave me the benefit of the doubt and conferred a little laugh. Had my wife not been sat on his lap I would simply have fallen in love with him there and then.

Ossies’ money, it would seem, vanished into the usual crazy business schemes and in latter years he made money on matchdays working as a “matchday host”. His job was to be “Ossie”. He would mingle in the Executive Entertainment areas adding some sparkle; allowing chubby business men to meet a hero over their steak and veg. I resented this apprent indignity. Ossie, so far as I could tell, did not. When times were hard financially at Chelsea, Ken Bates made him redundant. That must have been humiliating but again when I next saw him he was sat in the bar at Chelsea surrounded by men trying to buy him drinks and calmly dispensing the stardust. What a hero the man was. I miss him.