Brian Viner: Perfectly timed cosmic through ball lacks only a dream finish

In the hours following the arrival into this world of my firstborn son, while others busied themselves with fripperies, frankly, such as cutting the umbilical cord, I attended to the important business of registering him as a Junior Blue.

I was prepared to grant him a measure of choice in which football team he supported, but at the same time I wanted him to start life with the advantages I never had, namely a fighting chance to become the mascot in a home game at Goodison Park. It was a good job I wasn't dyslexic, else I might have accidentally left out three letters and put him down at birth for Eton, ending up having to teach him the Eton Boating Song rather than the altogether more uplifting "Davie Davie Davie Moyes, Davie Moyes, Davie Moyes".

Anyway, time passed. Joseph spent his first seven years and three months living in London, exposed to such pernicious influences as Thierry Henry and Gianfranco Zola. It was Ignatius Loyola who said "give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man". But not for nothing does Loyola rhyme with Zola. Joseph's best friend Roman was a keen Chelsea fan; Joseph started telling people that he supported Chelsea at school and Everton at home. Soon, I felt, he would only have eyes for Chelsea. I began to understand how a devout Sikh must feel, emigrating to England from India and then despairingly watching his children become assimilated into an alien culture.

But, to extend the analogy, I just about managed to keep Joseph's turban on, or at any rate his Everton bobble hat. And last summer we moved away from London, which helped. But he had yet to attend a match at Goodison, which I hoped would be the clincher. When I realised sometime last year that his eighth birthday, on April 19, 2003, would fall on a Saturday, I wrote to Everton to ask if he could be the club's mascot at whatever game, home or away, happened to be played on April 19. Please God and Dixie Dean, I thought, let it be a home match.

When the fixtures were fed into the Premier League computer, by some perfectly timed, cosmic through ball, April 19 yielded Everton v Liverpool.

I wrote to the club again. And back, eventually, came the joyous news that there would be three home mascots that day, and yes, Joseph would be one of them.

His eighth birthday, the Goodison derby, Everton one place above Liverpool in pursuit of a Champions' League place, Wayne Rooney in the starting line-up... it seemed as though a genius had written the script. But Liverpool won, damn them. The genius got the script wrong right at the end.

It was if Shakespeare had slightly screwed up Hamlet's soliloquy, writing: "To be or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a bag of Liquorice Allsorts."

Still, I have made my way home from Goodison and Anfield after any number of derby defeats, feeling utterly dismal. But on Saturday, as Joseph and I boarded the 17.32 from Lime Street, the dejection had not quite overwhelmed the exultation.

"At least my lad was the mascot," I remarked to a fellow disconsolate next to me. He brightened up. "Wow," he said, observing that Joseph therefore had something in common with Rooney, who was also once the mascot at a derby match." "Wow," I said. "Wow," said Joseph.

Joseph, in truth, had been terribly anxious about his adventure. His mother let me know in no uncertain terms that I was fulfilling my own fantasies rather than his, and I knew she was right. And in the dressing-room 90 minutes before the game, alongside such giants as Alan Stubbs and David Weir, he looked so tiny, so vulnerable. "Who's gonna win?" Weir asked him.

"Pardon?" said Joseph. "Who's gonna win today?" said Weir again. "Pardon?" repeated Joseph, his nervousness compounded by an unfamiliarity with strong Scottish dialects. I translated. "Oh," he said, and shrugged his little shoulders. "I don't know."

By five to three, however, after a couple of pep talks by the blessedly avuncular John Hines, the matchday official who looks after mascots, Joseph stood by the side of the tunnel, resplendent in an Everton away kit three sizes too big for him, looking as if he just might enjoy himself. And when the teams came out, and Weir took him by the hand and led him to the penalty area, where he scored a goal – regrettably not the only one of the afternoon – against Richard Wright, he carried himself as though he had been born to it. Which in a sense, he had.

b.viner@independent.co.uk