GOT, got, need. The unmistakable cry of the sticker collector, a being who exhibits behaviour strikingly similarly to that of the stamp collector, but somehow is infinitely cooler. There doesn’t appear to be a specific term, such as philatelist for those stamp dweebs, to describe someone who fills sticker albums, but given the price of the things these days perhaps simply it should be ‘mug’.
I had thought that my days of handing over my hard-earned money to Panini, or increasingly these days, to Topps, the makers of ‘Match Attax’ were over, but my eldest son is coming to an age where football has taken over his life, and that means I’m back in the land of doublers and ‘shinies’ all over again.
For those of you who don’t know what Match Attax are, they are basically the same as stickers, without being sticky, and as any parent of a child who collects them will tell you, they make a wonderful alternative for a carpet throughout your home.
The reintroduction of stickers into my life may have come in my thirties, but it turns out time has done little to salve the wounds of a traumatic experience in my youth, and as I handed over my fiver [I know, a fiver!] for the starter pack for my boy, it all came crashing back to me.
It was 1989, and I was seven, the same age as my boy is now. In those days, the Scottish leagues didn’t have an album of their own, but just to show how much of a bygone age it was, the Scottish Premier Division – as it was then – was given equal status as the old English Division One and the two leagues shared one album.
The book itself, which I can still see as clear as day in my mind’s eye, was a thing of beauty. It had a goalkeeper on the front who was casting a forlorn look over his shoulder as he dived for a ball he was never going to get near. But the true genius came with the ball on page one that was connected by dots to the next page, and then the next page and so on, weaving its way from John Barnes (sticker No.1 in the opening player of the year section) through each of the teams to Tony Fitzpatrick of St Mirren, sticker No.472, who stuck it into the net. Never in doubt, the bold Tony would probably say.
But those warm feelings of nostalgia are tempered by two words that still send a shiver down my spine. Stuart Munro. Remember him? The Rangers defender? I do.
As I was closing in on completing the album, costing my parents a small fortune in the process, it was with great excitement that I pulled one of the few stickers I still needed – a certain Ian Ferguson of Rangers – out of a pack one day. Or so I thought.
My elder brother was a Rangers supporter, and after placing the tough-tackling midfielder carefully into position, I rather smugly presented my album to him at the appropriate page.
“That’s no Ian Ferguson,” he said. “That’s Stuart Munro.” How could it be? It said it right there on the bottom of the sticker – Ian Ferguson. “Aye right,” I replied. Kids can be cruel, and my immediate thought was that this was some sort of sick-and-twisted joke.
Alarmed, I scampered to the living room to clipe on my brother for winding me up, only for my old man to confirm the worst. It was the wrong picture. It was Stuart Munro. How could this happen?
Letters to Panini went unanswered, and as the few remaining spaces in the album filled, my enthusiasm for the entire project waned. Disillusioned, I vowed in a spectacular tantrum that my sticker-collecting days were over.
Until now. It wasn’t the football cards invading my house like a termite infestation that got me, but the stickers in the lead-up to the World Cup.
At first, it was a mild curiosity, ‘research’ I told myself, ‘helping out the wee man'. But before long, I had elastic bands around my doublers and was passing advice on during the school run of what swaps we were needing. I’m hooked. The fact that I can’t afford to go the pub for any of the games due to my sticker outlay is by the by, we’re on the road to completing the album and nothing, not even Stuart f*****g Munro, will hold us back this time.
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