Charlton v Sunderland - 50 years ago today

'A grey, miserable and wet afternoon', says Brian Moore in his introduction to the highlights of this match which saw Charlton lose to league leaders Sunderland in front of a decent turnout of 22,000 fans.

For one nine-year-old boy that afternoon it was far from a grey and miserable experience. The result was immaterial. This was a rites of passage moment, his first attendance at a football match and the forging of a strong bond with Charlton Athletic and a closer relationship with his father.

His father, not a football follower, had suggested that they start supporting a local club and ignoring his son's suggestions that the club could be Arsenal or Fulham, plumped for Charlton. His reasoning was that given his job as a Thames River Pilot, he knew exactly where the ground was because he could see the flooodlights from the bridges of the tankers he piloted and he was confident that it would be an easy, quick drive from their home in Hartley. His son had never heard of Charlton.

The details of that trip and the emotions that the boy felt are lost now in the depths of Time - as impossible to retrieve as the faces of the crowd in the back rows of The Covered End on the grainy YouTube footage. But, he must have felt awe as he rounded the side of that stand and saw the vast concrete expanse of the East Stand stretching above him; he must have gripped his father's hand tighter and quickened his pace to keep in step with him as they negotiated the shallow steps down towards the front of the terrace; and he must have turned to look up at his father, when the bearded number 9 for Charlton scored at the far end, to share the joy.

'Please can we go again?' Of course, they would. The years passed, the boy's mother joining them in time. And then there came a time when the father began to lose his memory and the son would take his father's hand, hold it tightly and lead him carefully down the steps to their seats. And if his father could not remember by the time they reached home what the score was or what had happened, it hurt but what mattered more was that they were still going and every detail of the day from parking in the same familiar road, sharing a flask of tea and eating a Mars Bar, they all were safely preserved in his long-term memory and made those trips a welcome escape.

We skip forward in time and the shared trips are no longer and the former nine-year-old boy finds to his surprise that that first Charlton match was televised and that the highlights are available on the internet. He watches it several times, observing it all intently: the shaggy-headed boys pressed against the railings at the front of the stands, the advertising boards for Planters Peanuts and Worthington Beer, the 'blackboard' for the half-time scores, the strewn lengths of toilet roll at the pitch's edge and the bell-bottomed pitch invasion.

But what he looks for most is a nine-year-old boy and his father. Somewhere in the murky blur of the background, as he watches from fifty years in the future, those two are as alive as the players running on the pitch. He wants to step into the picture and find them, watch their reactions to the game and listen to what the boy said as they left the ground. It's surreal knowing that they are there and always will be and on today, the fiftieth anniversary, as there's no Charlton match where he could have celebrated the occasion, he goes and embarrasses himself by writing it up here and saying 'Thank you, Dad.'