HLTCO: Football’s raw emotion and inspiring the next generation

Now, on the anniversary of that remarkable moment, the man better known by his online pseudonym 'HLTCO' talks passion, anonymity, disability and his next big project: inspiring the next generation.

To hear Dan Cook talk about David Hopkin’s famous winner is to get a glimpse into the juvenile glee he felt all those years ago.

“The line of commentary itself is iconic in the way it was spoken,” he says, explaining the decision to name his podcast after a piece of Palace history: 'Hopkin looking to curl one'. “It was a massive goal in a terrible game of football, and to score at Wembley with the sun beating down…

“The commentary is left up in the air. Sometimes commentators overtalk in those moments, but the way he says it as the ball is arcing towards the top corner... They didn’t go over the top, they let the moment breath.

“And the sun! I remember the sun beating down. For me, it’s a childhood encapsulated, with the old Sky Sports replays and everything.”

Cook wasn’t at Wembley on that fateful day, but rather watched with three generations of Palace fans back at home. Now, he is trying to inspire a fourth to join him on the rollercoaster journey that is pinning your colours to that particular mast – but patience is the key.

“What I really want is for my son to be the one who drives going,” he explains, describing how his four-year-old is yet to see Selhurst Park for the first time. “I want him to be like: ‘Can I go to the football?’

“He’s far more likely to get involved in it then. I don’t want him to go there and watch YouTube on his mum’s phone and not pay attention. I want him to want to go.

“I feel like if you’re going to get into football, it’s good to have a gradual increase. You watch Match of the Day, you read on social media. You see American fans now who get to Selhurst Park for the first time and they are blown away by it, because they build it up so much in their minds.

“I quite enjoy the idea of my little boy wanting to go because he is desperate to get there, because it will be even more special.”

Having been a Season Ticket holder for more than two decades and now firmly in the grasp of the incurable Palace bug, Cook comprehends as well as anyone the passion and dedication that goes into following a football team. One afternoon in particular solidified his understanding.

“I was 21-years-old when we played that game at Hillsborough in 2010, and I say it all the time: you can’t get a more raw emotion than everyone in the away end felt that day,” he remembers of Palace’s do-or-die battle with Sheffield Wednesday, when the club’s survival was on the line.

“To have three months of nobody getting paid, the jeopardy of the club potentially dying if we didn’t get a point that day... Players like [Nathaniel] Clyney staying because he was desperate to help, Darren Ambrose, Julian Speroni. The whole feel of the club was typified for me that afternoon.

“Wilfried Zaha started the first game of the next season, and he has been in the first-team ever since. It’s almost like that’s where old-school Palace ended and the new era began.”

This cliff-edge experience, the relief of having diced with death and emerged to tell the tale, is what gives Cook his ability to understand the emotional role football plays in so many lives, going far beyond the adolescent debates about statistics and transfers. It’s why so many fans of opposition clubs continue to interact with his social media accounts, despite his obvious dedication to Palace.

“I don’t appease fanbases, I just see shades of grey,” he says. “When that final whistle went on that day, I sobbed. It was pure relief.

“It sounds quite snobby and I don’t want it to come across that way, but if you are a match-going fan it takes up so much of your life that the prospect of losing it is like losing your husband or wife. It’s a huge part of your routine.

“You look at the fixture list, you build your year around it, you forgo social events. ‘Who have you got on Boxing Day, on the opening day, in the run-in?’ You try to schedule holidays for when the international breaks occur. This is all the norm for someone who goes to football on a regular basis.

“If you have the possibility of being left without that, the problem is far more than: ‘What am I going to do for two hours on a Saturday?’

“So I look at all different fanbases. I can see Manchester City fans who have been at Maine Road since being in Division Two and being beaten by Stockport County. It’s all about scale. Manchester United fans want certain levels of success and get told they are spoiled. But then we will get Grimsby or Bradford fans telling us we’re spoiled because we want to be in the Premier League.

“That all gets lost on social media these days. It’s just: ‘You lost at the weekend, so you’re ****’.”

For someone who makes a living in large part due to his large social media following, it is an unfortunate fact of life that Cook has to deal with the negative aspects of Twitter – especially since his decision to speak openly about his life living with cerebral palsy. While most of the reaction was supportive, it has opened him up to the darker sides of football tribalism.

“I did that video [about his cerebral palsy] at the start of January,” he says. “We’ve won twice since then, and on both occasions I have had people make reference to the fact that I have cerebral palsy as a dig.

“It’s water off a duck’s back. There is no insult you can give me because I have heard them all, but it’s mad that people think: ‘I will say that publicly to try to get a bit of clout’. My general way of dealing with it is that I will occasionally call it out, but I will only do it with humour. It’s very easy to play it off to make them realise that I am just not bothered.

“Other people feel protective and don’t want me to go through it, and it is nice to have that group of 100,000 people that will go into bat for you.

“I don’t want it to define me, to be honest. It’s why I didn’t mention it for the first 12 years of the Twitter page. I didn’t want to get given a space as a ‘disabled football fan’. I wanted to be a football fan, and that be an afterthought.”

Having 100,000 followers is some achievement, but for years Cook was able to go on with his usual matchday routine. His identity remained a secret – until recently. Now, he is having to adapt to becoming a recognisable face.

“People are a lot more nervous in person than they are online,” he laughs – and he is undoubtedly speaking the truth. “The first game I went to after [revealing my face] was Chelsea away. It’s two tiers at Stamford Bridge, and in the upper concourse you can stand there with a beer.

“People were coming up the stairs and doing a double take on me, but I wasn’t in the mindset that I might be a recognisable face. I thought they looking at me because they wanted aggro! I was thinking: ‘What is their problem?’ After about 10 minutes it clicked.”

There is a certain irony in that Cook’s Twitter name, HLTCO, was picked to reflect a specific piece of Palace nostalgia. “I didn’t want something generic with ‘red and blue’ or ‘SE25’ in it,” he says. And yet this niche memory has taken on a new life in his own success.

Supporters of teams at all levels of the English football pyramid are aware of David Hopkin’s Wembley heroics more than 25 years since he picked out the top corner.

Cook hopes that the current generation can inspire his son in the same way Hopkin inspired him. “He’s getting there. It’s difficult because four-year-olds are into all sorts of random stuff like dinosaurs, but he actively wants to get involved.

“We got him a Palace calendar, and he has remembered all of the players because they look like superheroes. ‘That’s McArthur, that’s Eze!’

“I look back on my childhood, and it’s only when you go to school and your classmates support different teams that it becomes social currency. I’m hoping that when he gets mates who are football fans too it will become the norm.

“When I got to nine or 10 I showed an interest in wanting to go. I got a Season Ticket in 2002, and I’ve had it for 21 years now.

“It will be the same for me until the day I die.”