I’ve measured my life in soccer grounds. While my pals went clubbing I bought my kicks from away days at Halifax and Rochdale, writes OLIVER HOLT

My mum was an actress and in the early 1970s, when I was a kid, she sometimes went to pubs around Manchester to push down piles of pennies for charity with footballers like Lou Macari and Jimmy Greenhoff and Lancashire cricketers Harry Pilling and Farokh Engineer.

At one of those events, someone invited her to the Manchester derby at Old Trafford in April 1972. I was five and already football-mad by then and nagging her to let me stay up to watch Match of the Day because, after all, I was nearly six. I wanted to go to an actual game, too.

So my first visit to a football ground is a bit of blur, but a wonderful blur. I remember her pointing at someone on the pitch and telling me it was Bobby Charlton, I remember the red and the blue, the noise and the swaying, surging, raucous crowd, and that she supported United and was disappointed they lost, but I don’t remember too much else.

My second ground was Maine Road and I loved that place. That was my first proper taste of our football culture. Going with my mate, John, in his dad’s car and the kids in Moss Side running up when he parked and saying ‘can I mind your car, mister?’ and him giving them a pound and hoping for the best.

We were in the North Stand for the League Cup semi-final second leg against Middlesbrough in January 1976. When Peter Barnes scored the first, there was mayhem and the bloke in front of us inadvertently stubbed out his cigarette on John’s hand. Strange, the things you remember most clearly.

I still go back there occasionally, to the housing development where the centre circle used to be, just to try to remember. I used to go to the site of the old Victoria Ground in Stoke, too. It was a patch of wasteland next to a dual carriageway for years and you could still see the contours of the pitch and widowed flights of steps leading up to the ghosts of terraces.

Then, when I was 12, I went to my third ground. I saw in the newspaper that Stockport County were at home to Aldershot at Edgeley Park that evening and I nagged my dad, who had grown up in Heaton Chapel and was a Stockport Grammar School boy, to take me. It was the closest ground to where we lived.

We bought a programme on the corner of Worrall Street and moved through the crowds, past the Main Stand. I still associate the beautiful, rhythmical, relentless click of a turnstile with that evening, pushing through the entrance on Hardcastle Road and seeing the pitch for the first time and the little Cheadle End, which was about five rows deep then, away to our right.

Most of all, I recall people nodding at my dad as we climbed the steps to our seats and saying ‘all right, Tommy’. My dad didn’t particularly like football and it hadn’t occurred to me he would know anyone at the game. I had never heard anyone call him Tommy, either.

That hit me like a silver bullet. It was the first time I got a sense of a football ground as an integral part of a local community, as an extension of a town’s identity, as a place where you met neighbours and friends, a place where, if you stood on the terraces, you could lose yourself in the anonymity of the crowd, but also a place where you could belong.

I was hooked then, totally hooked. The next season I went to 20 Stockport home games. The season after that, I started going away, too. I went to Vale Park and Wigan Athletic’s Springfield Park and Bootham Crescent, York City’s ground, Gresty Road, the home of Crewe Alexandra, and the Shay, where Halifax Town play and where we stood on an open, shale terrace.

Those trips to Burslem, Crewe, Wigan and York were my rites of passage as a kid. They were my adventures. My friends were trying to get into the Hacienda or going to gigs and I was getting my kicks from getting the train to Mansfield and Rochdale or the supporters’ coach to Blackpool.

I watched Oxford United at the lovely, rickety, old Manor Ground for a few years when I was a student and when I was accepted on to a journalism course in Cardiff, I sat in my first press box at Ninian Park.

When I got my first newspaper job in Liverpool, it took me to Prenton Park, Goodison and Anfield, working at more new grounds and feeling the thrill of seeing another arena for the first time. I have always measured out my life in football stadiums.

I have wanted to complete the set of 92 league grounds for as long as I can remember, but as so many of our old grounds gave way to a generation of new-builds and magical stadiums like Highbury and Maine Road gave way to bowls with company names like the Emirates and the Etihad, I found my total was standing still.

Layer Road, the Victoria Ground, Roker Park, Saltergate, Upton Park, Burnden Park, the Baseball Ground and Gay Meadow all fell off my list, but as football began to change, the keener I became to finish the 92.

It has felt for much of the last 40 years as though visits to our lower-league grounds were a last chance to chronicle a disappearing world. Each one felt like a chance to soak in a part of our sporting culture under attack from the increasing commercial might and cultural myopia of the Premier League.

Men like Crystal Palace chairman, Steve Parish, supplied the most obvious example of that myopia five years ago when he talked of top-flight clubs as ‘supermarkets’ and lower-league clubs as ‘corner shops’ and found it strange when it was suggested one should help the other.

But in the last decade, a wonderful thing has happened. Attendances at lower-league clubs have enjoyed a spectacular renaissance.

It is as if supporters realised they were on the verge of losing something that was dear to them and important to their communities, as if they didn’t like what the top flight had become, and they stepped in before it was too late.

And actually, it is our Premier League clubs that are disappearing. Some of them are being stolen from us in plain sight. Many are becoming something that we do not recognise.

They are being repurposed as tourist attractions, because tourists pay more, and taken away from the fans who helped build them.

It was instructive that when Manchester United’s minority owner, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, unveiled plans for a new stadium recently, he chose to portray it as a venue that might rival the Eiffel Tower.

Supporters from Urmston, Sale, Monton, Eccles, Trafford, Cheadle Hulme, Stretford, Patricroft and Salford are of decreasing interest to billionaires like him. They are not where the money is.

I completed my 92 last Tuesday night when I went to watch Harrogate Town play Tranmere Rovers at Wetherby Road.

A couple of my mates, Jez and Neil, came along, which made my night. Football should be about going to a game with your pals.

In the first half we stood on the Kop, surrounded largely by teenagers who watched the game with unabashed exuberance, the way it should be watched, and turned the terrace into a surging scene from the 1980s.

In the second half, knees aching too much to stand any longer, we moved to the opposite end and sat down behind the goal.

The atmosphere was raucous and raw, the stadium was a beautifully eccentric mix of architectural styles, the loaded nachos were great, the beer was good and we saw Tranmere score two brilliant goals and miss a penalty right in front of us.

When the final whistle went and we walked out under the dim floodlight glare, I felt some satisfaction that this thing that had become a quest was complete but, most of all, I felt sad it was over.

That Tuesday was my mum and dad’s wedding anniversary. My dad died during the pandemic and my mum moved last year to a care home for retired actors and actresses. The morning after the game I went into Harrogate, bought her some cakes from Betty’s and took them with me when I went to see her the next day.

We went out into the garden and sat in the shade of a cedar tree and talked about old times and her childhood home in Urmston, opposite the Manchester United house where Dennis Viollet lived.

And she listened while I told her I had finished what she started when she took me to that game at Old Trafford all those years ago.