MORE THAN a GAME

by Sylvester Young

  Horace McIntosh filled his chest with air and as he exhaled he gave a silent prayer of thanks. ‘Support? Heh, you t’ree guys are playin’. Right, let’s get back in de bus, we ’ave breakfast to get an’ den we go mek ’istory!’

  He and Frank Grant exchanged proud smiles: against all odds Sabina Park Rangers would field a full team for the final – and they would indeed make history.

  Epilogue

  It’s a pity that I cannot end this story with the line that Sabina Park Rangers made history and leave it at that – but I did promise to tell the whole, never-told-before truth. Those of you who like happy endings I would advise to stop reading now. But for those who are a little more hardened to life’s adversities, or just curious, here is what happened in the final and what befell the members of Sabina Park Rangers Football Club following that historic match.

  Once everyone had got on board the minibus they headed for a Caribbean restaurant just off the Soho Road in Handsworth, Birmingham, after ensuring the three new members of the team had boots to play in. Because of his undoubted ability, the presence of Danny Rankin heartened some members of the team, vexed others – especially Buckshot when he asked about his sister – and, unfortunately, emboldened Nestor Riley. Danny and Nestor had gone to the same school and Nestor immediately felt they had rekindled their friendship when Danny sat down next to him. The idea that somehow he now had the protection of the Rankin brothers led him to start passing comments over breakfast about secret photographs, suppressed sexuality and the like. Most of those who were listening thought he was making assertions about Desmond and Jas and took Desmond’s laughter as more evidence that he was off his head. But like Desmond, Cecil Grant and Bryce McBean knew to what Nestor was actually referring and were silently fuming. They decided then they’d teach Nestor a hard lesson the first opportunity they got and in doing so they’d also prevent him from leaving town too soon.

  That opportunity came within the dying minutes of the first half of the final. It was one-all, thanks to a brilliant individual effort by Mark Beckford, and Sabina Park Rangers were holding their own against the team from Oldbury’s Rubery Owen engineering works. That was until Cecil Grant slid in, with all studs showing, and committed a hideous foul that had the guy he’d tackled heading for hospital with a suspected broken ankle. Cecil only stayed on the pitch because the player he’d taken out of the game was Nestor Riley. The baffled referee was convinced by his argument that it was an accident – as he was hardly going to do that to one of his own side, in the cup final, on purpose, now was he? With the clock running down to halftime, Horace McIntosh came on as substitute – as it was a choice between him and Frank Grant – and with his first touch he gifted a ball to an opposing striker, who then slotted it past Courtney Wright in goal. It got much worse in the second half. Danny Rankin was proving to be a liability as his play on the pitch reflected the way he lived his life: selfish and undisciplined. Out of sympathy, when Buckshot got the ball he would not pass it to Horace, and out of principle he wouldn’t pass it to either Norman Longmore or Danny Rankin. Consequently, he was trying to make a lot of difficult cross-field passes that were intercepted by the opposition more times than not. In a public show of his disapproval of Desmond’s domestic arrangements, Norman would neither make a pass to him, nor even call for the ball when it was in Desmond’s possession. The Brown brothers, who had been magnificent in defence, began to flag. They had been without sleep for over thirty hours and while future generations of ravers had the use of amphetamines, all these guys had to keep them going were almost unnatural levels of stamina and the coffee they had drunk with their breakfast.

  At four-one down his side’s team spirit gradually evaporated, as Horace McIntosh pushed his fifty-six-year-old body well past its limit of endurance. With twelve minutes to the final whistle, his body decided to disobey any further command his brain gave it – even to stay upright. Horace had been trying to chase a man at least thirty years his junior when he suddenly fell face-first to the ground. The referee blew his whistle immediately. At first it was feared that he’d had a heart attack, or a stroke, but thankfully it turned out that Horace’s collapse was due to exhaustion – of both body and mind.

  Horace McIntosh was taken off by stretcher and, along with Nestor Riley, was to spend the best part of the next forty-eight hours in Selly Oak hospital. Perhaps it was only right that Horace was not there at the game’s end. His team had indeed made history – by losing 8 – 1, which was by far the biggest margin of defeat in the history of the cup.

  On their way back to Wolverhampton, the team called into the hospital and though they were not allowed to see Horace they were assured that he was not in danger. The only team members who bothered to check on Nestor were Cecil and Bryce – and that was only to threaten him again. It was as they tramped back out to the minibus that the recriminations began. Over the years the personal differences within Sabina Park Rangers had been put aside for the good of the club but now it was as if every player sensed there was no longer a team. It was Norman Longmore who started it off by castigating every performance but his own and telling everyone they had let down the entire black population. ‘Is that jus’ of Wolverhampton or of the whole world?’ asked Courtney Wright. This only prompted Norman to launch into a diatribe about what was wrong with black people in ‘Hinglan’ before he fixed his stare onto Desmond and returned to his rant about the money he wanted back. ‘Cha,’ said Buckshot, ‘I ain’t listenin’ to this all the way back to Wolves. I’ll see you guys later, ’cause I’m catchin’ the train.’ Courtney pulled his bag from the bus and said he was going with Buckshot. Later that evening, Agnes McIntosh found her husband was inconsolable as he lay in bed amongst the tubes and wires to the monitoring equipment. He had once hoped that this game would be a shining beacon of achievement for local amateur black football but now he could only hope that the press would repeat the mistake of publishing the wrong photograph alongside the match report. Or failing that, he wished some catastrophe would occur before he returned to Wolverhampton in order to divert people’s attention away from the result, for he knew that his fellow Jamaicans, in particular, were not averse to revelling in another person’s misfortune.

  Horace would have done well to remember that his mother in Jamaica had used to warn him to be careful what he wished for in case he’d get it; for catastrophe was awaiting back in Wolverhampton. By Saturday afternoon, around the time Sabina Park Rangers had conceded their sixth goal, a mob had turned up at the door of Desmond Palmer’s home. Word was going around that Steve Patel had left town and they wanted to hear Desmond tell them that their money was safe. When they saw Desmond’s smashed up BMW they thought the rumours had to be true and that another mob had beaten them to it. Jas was back in his blouse and skirt and had the presence of mind to wrap a towel around his head as he heard the pounding on the front door before it crashed open. Luckily for him, the horde in the hallway believed he was a woman and after a few gropes of his batty permitted him to flee before they wrecked the place.

  Now the mob’s blood was well and truly up, some of them were even willing to take on ghosts as they headed for Steve Patel’s funeral home. In a strange twist of fate it was at that same time that a carload of skinheads had made the mistake of coming into Whitmore Reans looking for a black or Asian person to attack. They were just about to set upon a twelve-year old black boy when the group of well-vexed West Indians rounded the corner. There then followed a lot of cuss words and quite a bit of bawling as a few swipes of a ‘mash-ate’ slashed the tyres of the skinheads’ car to make sure they weren’t going anywhere very quickly. A big guy named Rodney (a cousin of Carl the goalkeeper) had forced one skinhead onto his knees, where he, rather touchingly, cried for his mother – just as a police van rounded a corner. With its siren blaring and lights flashing, the van screeched to a halt and the cops spilled out – only to, just as rapidly, retreat back into the van under a barrage of missiles. The skinheads took full advantage of th
is diversion; they piled into their car and left the scene amid the rumble of bare metal rims moving rapidly over the tarmac. The cops’ appearance on the scene had added only hatred to the rage prompted by the skinheads’ arrival, which in turn had amplified the vexation of those who thought that they had all been skanked by Nestor, Desmond and Steve Patel.

  Steve’s father still had a shop on the Newhampton Road and it didn’t take long for the minds of the well-vexed to collectively figure out that most of the stock rightfully belonged to all those innocent people his son had defrauded. The shop was completely ransacked before the police got there (as they had been implementing their plan to completely seal off the roads into Whitmore Reans in order to contain the long-expected uprising). But as night fell the rioters returned to burn it to the ground, along with several other business premises.

  The cops weren’t the only ones to have planned for this eventuality and when the minibus carrying the players of Sabina Park Rangers was prevented by a roadblock from returning to the YMCA, Cecil and Bryce told Desmond they would postpone their business with him until Monday. They had plans of their own which involved electrical goods stores and empty lockup garages.

  With so much going on in the town, Horace McIntosh did not have to worry about his team’s defeat attracting any sort of widespread ridicule. When the match reports were published, they were, in the main, generous enough to use phrases like ‘unfortunate’ and ‘brave’ about Sabina Park Rangers’ performance. But in truth, the reporters were describing Horace and paying tribute to his efforts rather than those of his team.

  Desmond Palmer returned home to find that Jas had gone, and as he surveyed all the damage the police turned up to tell him what had happened and, almost as an afterthought, that his father Mervyn was dead. He tried to hide his excitement when in answer to his question, the cop told him he was the first next of kin to have been informed: he knew that somewhere in his father’s house the old bastard had hidden thirty-five thousand pounds. With the exception of Norman Longmore, Audley Robinson and Mark Beckford, Desmond returned the money to his teammates – and because of the damage done to his home he also reimbursed the handful of vengeful types who he thought he would not be able handle on his own. As a matter of policy he would not consider refunding Christians, females, the old or anyone he figured did not pose a physical threat. He was still left with seven grand from the money he had found behind the skirting board and reckoned what he had given back was a good investment as he needed to move around freely and without fear of attack if he was going to conduct any sort of business. He did find Jas a few months later and discovered he had an arranged marriage lined up. But as the years went by their previous master/slave relationship became a friendship; Jas would come and service Desmond’s cars and walk around in a dress for a few hours, which was something he was unable to do in front of his family. Jas often talked about stuff he could not share with anyone else – and Desmond not only liked that but perhaps he also understood.

  That Desmond had given back any money at all also gave the impression that he was a totally innocent party – unlike Nestor who had discharged himself early from hospital. Nestor ignored the pleas of his mother to stay for the sake of his dying child, and fled to London – which was also, by coincidence, the place where Steve Patel had gone. But London is a vast city and they never did meet again, although the two of them did go to prison around the same time twelve years later. Nestor was sentenced for savagely beating a Jamaican woman who was smuggling cocaine in her body’s cavities for him; and Steve was sent down for his conspiracy to import cocaine, but in fact it was a Customs and Excise ‘sting’ that had taken him in.

  In order to pacify his uncharacteristically angry flock, (they had wanted to expel him until it was revealed that he owned the building that housed the church) Rudolph Naylor had to sell up some of his other properties, including the workshop Buckshot rented from him. Buckshot was relieved to have the excuse to leave Wolverhampton and set up a garage business in Stafford. Shannon’s return had complicated a lot of things. Buckshot thought if he didn’t get himself far away he would be dragged into the maelstrom that had engulfed his sister – and anyone else who got too close to her. To his great pleasure, some years later he was to read about Norman Longmore’s suspension from his teaching post for allegedly racially abusing his Asian pupils. It was reported with unalloyed glee by some sections of the press that a black teacher had been suspended for racist behaviour and it served as the pretext to attack ‘the politically correct thought-police’. Norman eventually returned to work more than nine months later when it was accepted by his local education authority that ‘coolie’, like ‘cha-cha man’, was a Jamaican term of endearment for people whose origins lay in the Indian subcontinent and ‘damn coolie’ was even more affectionate. The experience unsettled Norman and he returned to Jamaica with Euphemia and their daughter in 1990 but, discontented with what they found there, they came back to England. A few years later Norman got involved in local politics and was eventually elected as a councillor.

  Courtney Wright remained affected by Shannon’s addiction and once heroin started to be sold in the same pub from where he conducted his ganja dealings he decided to leave that life behind. With the support of Lynette, he eventually became a qualified youth worker and it was only when he set up a football team of his own that he fully understood the frustrations that Horace McIntosh must have experienced.

  The police’s containment of the riot in Whitmore Reans had thwarted the plans of Cecil and Bryce to get into the wholesale supply of stolen electrical goods but another opportunity came along two months later when a more widespread insurrection erupted in the town; as it did in Handsworth, Southall, Bradford, Toxteth and Mosside to name just a few other places. But even then, Sabina Park Rangers still managed to get a mention in the local headlines when Audley Robinson was charged with going equipped to steal petrol and was remanded to HMP Winson Green. Audley was eventually found not guilty and Cecil and Bryce were never even charged for all they had got up to at that time. For the next few years they periodically carried on with their careers of armed robbery, and big Carl Hooper continued to steal cars for them, but after his mother and his dog Eastwood died, Carl seemed to be in prison more than out. He was last arrested while driving a stolen car to Stafford to show Buckshot his new puppy. As time went by, and testosterone levels dropped, Bryce left all criminal activities behind after finding himself a good woman to settle down with. Cecil, on the other hand, found God after a car crash that left him in a coma for several weeks. As he came to, the face of Jesus appeared in some mashed potato he was about to eat and so began a journey which culminated in his becoming a minister. The hospital refused on hygiene grounds to preserve for him that sacred helping of mashed potato.

  But while Cecil was undergoing one of the greatest conversions since Saul on the road to Damascus, Mark Beckford was gradually losing his faith. Yet, after all his own mistakes, he did try to keep true to the bit about ‘not judging unless ye be judged’ and became less of a sanctimonious pain in the backside. Understandably, Rachel did make him crawl for a period but she took him back before the first of their three sons were born – and true to her word, none of them played football, except at school. They moved house shortly after their first addition to the family and their marriage thrived despite Mark being made redundant, and even after Marcia Yuell threw herself from the window of her seventh-storey flat with her young daughter in her arms. She did not leave a note to say why she had committed suicide and taken Tania with her but the more people found out about her life the more reasons were put forward for why she had killed herself and her daughter.

  Ian Beckford never got to sign for Aston Villa, or any other professional club. He took his A-levels, went onto college and eventually became a physiotherapist. He was around twenty-three and living in Leicester when he received a letter that had come via his parents’ address. It was from Ruth Martell. She wrote that over the ensuing years s
he had been driven almost insane by the guilt of what had happened to him and confessed that she had been divorced and very lonely from that very first time she had seduced him. She had made up the story about her husband being away at weekends because she did not want to come across as so desperate. Somehow she’d fallen hopelessly in love with Ian, so much so that she could not bear the thought of him leaving. Ruth had never been married to any of the men who had burst into her bedroom, she had hired them as part of a crazy scheme to prevent Ian from having a football career and leaving her all alone. Ian often thought about writing back to Ruth to say he had forgiven her but, unsure if that were true, he never got around to it.

  Following his first complete rest for over a decade, Horace returned to his barber shop a week after the final. He found that Frank Grant had painted the place and removed the press cuttings that had surrounded his mirror for years and put them into a scrapbook he’d bought. Frank reckoned that after witnessing the fight in the minibus before the final, Cecil’s assault on Nestor during the game and then the – match arguments, that there was too much bad feeling running through the team for them ever to play together again. He handed Horace the scrapbook. ‘You ’ear Mervyn dead?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, me ’ear,’ said Horace.

  ‘Well, cha, we all dead one day an’ when me see you fall me thought you were dead too. You know dat team finished, don’t you, dat dem never play again?’

  Horace began to look through the pages of the scrapbook. While lying in his hospital bed he had tried to reconcile himself to the thought that the team he had built had reached the end of the road. It had been a long and arduous journey and he had hoped the final destination would have been a more glorious one. And yet, he couldn’t bring himself to answer Frank’s question. ‘So Mervyn garn,’ he said, ‘it won’t seem de same widout ’im.’