Liam Brady, Juicy Fruit and the afternoon Arsenal gave me my first Coventry City game.

For me, memory is a strange thing when it comes to football, it refuses to remember scorelines and goalscorers, but hangs on to colours, smells and seemingly insignificant details for almost half a century.

I was five years old, a few weeks short of my sixth birthday, when I went to my first Coventry City game at Highfield Road. It was 25 November 1978, Coventry were playing Arsenal and I remember almost nothing about the game. I don’t remember Frank Stapleton putting Arsenal ahead. I don’t remember Steve Hunt equalising for Coventry. I don’t remember Liam Brady, one of the greatest players of his generation, doing anything in particular. What I remember is the colour.

I remember walking up the steps in the West Terrace and seeing the Highfield Road pitch appear in front of me for the first time. It was the greenest thing I had ever seen. Then there was the Sky Blue of Coventry’s shirts and the red and white of Arsenal. Perhaps football grounds are more colourful when you are five. Or perhaps, after the grey skies and November rain in Coventry that weekend, that sudden rectangle of grass, probably illuminated by floodlights, really did look impossibly bright. Whatever the reason, that is my first memory of live football.

But I wasn’t there because of the football, I was there largely because of Liam Brady. My dad had come to Coventry from Ireland in the early ‘60s. He watched Coventry City regularly during that decade, but by the late Seventies he had largely given up going. “They never came to see me when I was bad,” was his standard explanation. He did, however, make an exception once a season.

My dad’s friend, Geoff, from Kidderminster was a huge Arsenal fan, and was a regular at away games. Geoff was a family friend and one of those people who remains fixed in my memory exactly as he looked back then. He was always smartly dressed, had a strong Midlands accent and looked, at least to my young eyes, a little like Bobby Moore. And he always smelled of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit. Geoff always had a packet with him. He would chew it throughout the game and, even now, the smell of Juicy Fruit takes me back to football in the late Seventies quicker than anything else.

Whenever Arsenal came to Highfield Road, Geoff would stay over at our house and him and Dad would go to the game together. Arsenal held a particular attraction for my dad because, at the time, they were full of Irish players. Six of the starting eleven at Highfield Road that afternoon represented either the Republic of Ireland or Northern Ireland: Pat Jennings, Sammy Nelson, Pat Rice, David O’Leary, Liam Brady and Frank Stapleton. For an Irishman living in Coventry, there was plenty to identify with. And then there was Brady.

To Dad, Brady wasn’t simply a great Irish footballer playing in England. He was one of the greatest footballers in the world who happened to be Irish. There was an important distinction.

This was a player who seemed to possess something different, balance, imagination, that extraordinary left foot and the ability to see passes that other players couldn’t. In an era when English football was becoming increasingly physical, brutal even, Brady played The Beautiful Game.

Years later I heard Brady tell a story about how Coventry City had been one of the clubs trying to sign him when he was a schoolboy in Dublin. In one version of the story, Coventry even tried to win over the Brady household by offering his mum a washing machine. Arsenal took a different approach, sending the young Brady football boots and making it clear how much they wanted him. He chose North London.

It is one of those wonderful sliding-doors stories in football. Had things gone differently, the player my dad came to Highfield Road to admire in Arsenal red and white might have been wearing Sky Blue instead. Whether a washing machine really came close to changing the course of English football, I’m not sure, but it sounds exactly like the kind of story my dad would have loved.

So Arsenal’s annual visit to Coventry was worth breaking Dad’s self-imposed retirement for. What wasn’t planned was taking me. As Dad and Geoff were getting ready to leave the house that Saturday, my mum suggested that they take me with them. I’m not entirely sure Dad was thrilled by the idea. but Geoff was more sympathetic. “It’s about time he went to his first game,” I remember him saying. And that was that.

I discovered very quickly that going to football with Dad and Geoff involved much more than football. The match might only last 90 minutes. The day however, started early and often went into extra time. It would begin late morning in one of the working men’s clubs situated where we lived, usually The Vauxhall or The Edgwick. From there we would gradually make our way towards Highfield Road, with stopping points along the way. There might be a visit to The Angel, just off Foleshill Road. The final stop was often the AU Club, although the precise itinerary was never repeated. What didn’t change was the timing.

The object appeared to be to spend as long as humanly possible drinking before the game and then somehow arrive at Highfield Road at exactly the moment the match was beginning. Not five minutes early, and certainly not fifteen. Kick-off was a deadline to miss by as little as possible. So the leisurely progression through Coventry’s pubs and clubs would suddenly become a sprint with about a mile to go. I would be dragged along in their wake, reach the ground, be lifted over the turnstile by somebody Dad knew, and somehow we would take our places just as the game was starting.

This first time, we ended up high in the West Terrace looking down on that green. Almost forty-eight years later, I can still see it. The frustrating thing is that I can’t see Liam Brady. There is a temptation, when you look back at childhood, to improve your own memories. Once you know what happened, it becomes easy to persuade yourself that you remember it happening. I’d love to say I remember Brady gliding across the Highfield Road pitch that afternoon. I’d like to remember one of those passes with the outside of his left foot, or some small moment of brilliance that made Dad turn to Geoff and say, “Look at that. Irish.” But I don’t.

I know now that Arsenal took the lead through Frank Stapleton, another of their Irish stars. I know Steve Hunt equalised for Coventry and that the game finished 1-1. I know there were 26,786 people there. But those are things I have discovered since. They’re not my memories.

What matters to me now is another fact I couldn’t possibly have understood at the time. That afternoon was Liam Brady’s final league appearance for Arsenal against Coventry City at Highfield Road. The following season Brady wasn’t in the team, and the year after that he was thrilling the Italian crowds with his genius.

Brady left England for Juventus in the summer of 1980 and proved what my dad had been telling everyone. He wasn’t just one of the best players in English football. He was good enough to go to Italy, then the most glamorous and tactically sophisticated league in the world, and win consecutive Serie A titles. But the last time he played a league game against Coventry at Highfield Road, I was there. I just wish I remembered more of it.

I remember more about some of the Arsenal games that followed. Dad and Geoff continued their annual pub crawls and I went with them a few more times. Gradually I began to understand the football as well as the occasion. But that first afternoon taught me something about going to a game that I’ve never really forgotten. The football is only part of it. It is the journey, the people you go with, the places you stop, the things you talk about and the rituals that develop without anybody ever deciding that they are rituals.

It’s a man from Ireland who no longer bothers going to football making an exception because Arsenal are in town. It’s his friend from Kidderminster in a smart Mackintosh raincoat, looking a little like Bobby Moore and chewing Juicy Fruit. It’s a succession of working men’s clubs and pubs. It’s leaving the last one far too late. It’s running the final mile to Highfield Road. It’s somebody lifting a five-year-old boy over a turnstile. And then it’s walking up a flight of steps and seeing a proper football pitch for the first time.

Tonight Coventry City and Arsenal meet again, this time to open a new Premier League season. The teams are very different now. There won’t be anything resembling the special Irish contingent that lined up for Arsenal that afternoon in ’78, so I’m not sure the fixture would have held quite the same attraction for Dad. Although I suspect he’d have found a way to enjoy himself. There would have been a few bars involved. He would probably have left the last one much later than was sensible. And wherever he eventually found to watch the match, I suspect somebody would have been told, whether they’d asked or not, just how good that Arsenal team of the Seventies had been. Especially Liam Brady.

As for me, Arsenal against Coventry will always take me back to somewhere else. Not to Stapleton’s goal. Not to Hunt’s equaliser. Not even, unfortunately, to something magical performed by Liam Brady. It takes me back to a concrete staircase at Highfield Road in November 1978, and the greenest thing I had ever seen.