The 1973-74 season started with the invasion of Highbury by Manchester United fans, hell bent on letting everybody know they were the top dogs in the football hooligan league table, the one that really mattered in the lads world back then.

I’d just taken my O level exams a couple of months before and thought I was all grown up by working a summer job as a building labourer ahead of deciding what my next move would be, once I’d discovered whether I’d managed five, six or seven passes. I got two.

That made me feel like life amongst the lads on the terraces would be my calling and I was in the Gunners pub as reports of how many United fans had been spotted at Euston.

We were informed by the scouts that there were “Fousands of ’em”, we were a generation brought up on the film Zulu.

The wonderful old stadium looked a picture, beyond compare with a full house, when suddenly hordes of United fans charged straight down the pitch towards us packed on the North Bank.
Arsenal lads emerged from all sides to stop the invasion and drove them back.

The 3-0 win for Arsenal was but a sideshow to this adolescent and a mouthy United fan getting a pasting on the train home seemed a fitting finale to that day.

Fast forward twelve months and I was to have the same anxieties as I was given bottom of the barrel camera kit from the photo agency that I was now working for and dispatched to Orient v Manchester United in Division Two. My protests that it would be a huge story and an experienced photographer should attend were sneered at by photographers who didn’t want to be seen at lower league matches.

Yes folks, I’d got a job in a darkroom in October ’73, as my pride wouldn’t let me retake the exams and I’d somehow stumbled into a job with Sporting Pictures agency in Holborn. £12 for a six day week but something about it screamed ‘adventure’.

Anyway the United fans once again ran amok but this time I was supposed to capture it all through the lens of an antiquated camera. I failed miserably.

One week later, I was put back on to film running duty at Highbury for Arsenal v Manchester City, an altogether more peaceful prospect.
The deal was, as soon as the photographer had a decent photo, he would unwind the film, give it to you and you’d head down the Piccadilly Line, run to the darkroom and get the film developed, printed and run around the Fleet Street picture desks.

I hadn’t completely given up hope of making it as a photographer and I sat behind the other guys, with an old Nikon F with a 50mm lens, hoping for something.

Brian Kidd scored early on and the photographer for my agency, Joe Mann, was confident he’d nailed the goal ( no looking on the back of the camera for affirmation back then). However, this was a time before choreographed celebrations, nothing else was expected and as Kidd’s momentum took him behind the net, Joe Mann cooly rewound the film to hand to me. Only I wasn’t there.

I’d decided to follow Brian Kidd behind the net where he picked up a police sergeant’s helmet and inexplicably plonked it on top of his own head. The fans went wild and I took just the one frame on that roll of film. The result is shown here.

To look back now, exactly forty-five years this Saturday, and figure how I’d gone from standing on that terrace to becoming somebody who got a picture used on the back page of nearly every Sunday newspaper, is hard to describe. It was never going to be me out there on the pitch but capturing it through a lens, has run it a close second.

Forty-five years, no wonder my back is aching.