From Cup replays to 3pm blackouts, our game’s great heritage is under attack, writes OLIVER HOLT – thankfully, the action packed Boxing Day calendar is still going strong

It was Christmas night in 1991 when I drove down from Merseyside to London in a Morris Minor for my first working trip that involved a night away. The first working trip, in fact, that involved a journey any longer than the tunnel that connected Liverpool and Birkenhead. 

I checked into the Ibis hotel next to Euston Station, feeling as if I had made the big time, and on Boxing Day morning, I made my way over to Shepherd’s Bush for Liverpool’s midday kick-off against QPR in the First Division. 

I didn’t care that the match finished 0-0. It might not have been the best game but it was another chance to see Ray Wilkins play and he had always been one of my favourite players. Clive Wilson and Roy Wegerle were in that QPR team, too. They were a decent side. 

And I was still pinching myself about being a football reporter, standing on the concrete concourse outside the press room at Loftus Road, talking to Graeme Souness with the rest of the press pack after the match and grabbing a few words with Jan Molby. 

Doing this for a job felt too good to be true then, just as it does now. I loved Boxing Day football anyway. I loved the way it was an excuse to get out of the house on a day that always seemed like an anti-climax. 

I loved the fact it marked the moment football regained control of my life after the holiday hiatus. And I loved the tradition of Boxing Day football and what it had originally stood for. For many working people in the early decades of the 20th century, its designation as a Bank holiday and the fact that it was usually a day off for domestic servants meant it might be one of the only occasions they got to see a game. 

Many teams used to play on Christmas Day in the years that sandwiched the First World War but when that began to be given over to family-time, games were shifted to Boxing Day, when clubs were also guaranteed bumper crowds. And so our Boxing Day fixture list feels like a comforting ritual. Going to the football on Boxing Day is as much part of Christmas for a lot of us as eating turkey and stuffing and opening presents under the tree. For many, it’s the best part of Christmas escapism. 

It’s an annual restating, too, of the importance of football in our national culture and of the wonderfully obsessive loyalty of supporters in this country. In the United States, there are two NFL games and a clutch of NBA matches on Christmas Day. At the kernel of the Christmas holiday in Britain, we go to the football. 

It’ll be the same this year. Boxing Day is likely to be dominated by the compelling narrative of the ongoing fall of Manchester City, who are at home to Everton in the first match of the day as they try to arrest their dramatic slide away from the summit of the Premier League. 

Lose to Everton and the unthinkable idea that Pep Guardiola’s job as City manager might come under pressure will seem that little bit more real. Not because City would ever sack him but because Guardiola may become ever more disconcerted, distracted and dejected by the collapse of his champions. 

That story alone will ensure football’s prominence at the heart of the Christmas holiday. Let’s face it: as the assault on the traditions of English football accelerates, driven by the greed of the Premier League and the rapacious demands of the broadcasting companies, Boxing Day football is one of the few nods to the past we have left. 

FA Cup replays have been sacrificed. So, too, the idea that the FA Cup final should kick off at 3pm on a Saturday and the tradition that the Cup Final should be the last act of the domestic season. The television blackout for 3pm kick-offs is next on the chopping block. It all makes Boxing Day football seem even more precious. 

Other countries look at us and think we are strange to have such a heavy schedule over Christmas and New Year but it is part of our culture and part of what gives our game identity. There are not many points of difference in our homogenised world but playing professional football on Boxing Day is one of them. 

I got to a point some years before that when I became obsessive about watching football and the holiday fixtures presented an opportunity to indulge that obsession more than any other time during the year. 

On Boxing Day 1983, I went to watch Manchester City play Oldham Athletic at Maine Road in the club’s first season out of the top flight following their famous relegation at the hands of David Pleat’s Luton Town the season before. I looked at the front cover of the programme again last week. It’s a picture of the manager, Billy McNeill, pulling a giant Christmas cracker with his assistant, Jimmy Frizzell. The design made it appear as though they were standing inside a giant Christmas pudding, garnished with a sprig of holly. 

For those who try to pretend now that City are a club without history or loyal support, it’s worth noting there were more than 35,000 fans at their 2-0 victory over their neighbours that day. 

They struggled to get past the trauma of relegation that season and even though they beat Oldham that day, I associated that side that had Jim Tolmie as one of its advanced players with the mediocrity that had fallen over City. 

They finished fourth in the Second Division that season, just outside the automatic promotion spots taken by Chelsea, Sheffield Wednesday and Newcastle United, one place higher than Grimsby Town. 

I’d managed to persuade myself, until I actually checked, that I’d been to see three games that Boxing Day but it turned out that, not for the first time, I’d been exaggerating. 

When I went through the old King’s School Macclesfield exercise book that I’d commandeered for my lovingly kept record of matches attended, the three games were spread over two days. I was at City-Oldham on Boxing Day, Manchester United versus Notts County on the afternoon of the 27th and Stockport County versus Hereford United on the evening of the 27th. 

I didn’t see two games in a day again until the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. United blew it against Notts County when they allowed Justin Fashanu to score two late goals and salvage a 3-3 draw at Old Trafford, but Stockport won 1-0 in front of 2287 fans under the lights at Edgeley Park.

I loved that County team, just like we all love sides and players we associate with our youth. Micky Quinn, my all-time County hero, was up front. Quinn had scored a hat-trick at Crewe earlier that season. For a Stockport striker back then, that was as good as it gets. What a Christmas that was in 1983. The feast was in the football.

I wonder if today’s Premier League managers, who moan about the festive fixture list, realise that back then, Division One teams played on Boxing Day and then again on the next day, December 27th. All of them.

United had played at Coventry the day before they drew with Notts County. Arsenal hammered Spurs 4-2 in the North London derby on Boxing Day but could only draw with Birmingham City on the 27th. It was the same for everyone, all the way through the league. 

I don’t recall complaints about the workload back then but maybe my mind’s playing tricks on me again. I do know that I’ll be at Chelsea-Fulham this Boxing Day, relishing the privilege of seeing Cole Palmer play live, and at Arsenal-Ipswich Town on the 27th to see if Arsenal can revive their title challenge. 

Just the two games this year but the thrill of the Christmas holiday fixture list remains the same.  

If you wanted to, you could make it to three games this Boxing Day. Forty years ago, I would have tried. You could do City-Everton at lunchtime, dash over to Salford City’s 3pm kick off against Barrow at Moor Lane and then head to Merseyside for Liverpool-Leicester City at 8pm.

 t seems right that it should be Liverpool who bring down the curtain on the day this year. The league leaders were magnificent in their 6-3 romp with Spurs at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on Sunday and they will be favoured to hand out another trouncing to Ruud van Nistelrooy’s side. 

To watch them play, to see one of the club’s all-time greats, Mo Salah, at the peak of his powers, to witness the ball-playing genius of Trent Alexander-Arnold and the imperious defending of Virgil van Dijk, will be the perfect nightcap at the end of another wonderful day of competition and sporting artistry. 

It’s worth saying it again: on Boxing Day, the feast is in the football.