Articles of Faith

by Russell Brand

  At full-time I was approached by a club official who informed me that Di Canio was present and had asked to meet me. Through the vestibules and corridors I sweated and fretted the anxious journey that would lead to an audience with an icon. In the flesh, though flesh seems inaccurate as he is all sinew, muscle and passion, Di Canio is a force. Forever on the precipice of declarations and tears he converses how he played with captivating intensity and awesome commitment. He spoke of West Ham with such love and respect that I quite forgot myself.

  At one point I touched his shoulder with my hand and it was as if it were connected to the Earth’s core, such was the throb of innate potency. He referred to me and West Ham as ‘You’, e.g. ‘You are a great club, you deserve the best’ and when he looked into my eyes it was as touching and as visceral as his volley against Chelsea or when he caught the ball to allow Everton keeper Paul Gerrard to receive treatment rather than score. The feelings were all too powerful.

  ‘He’s so passionate,’ I thought, I wanted to join in, ‘I’m going to say something passionate.’ After the umpteenth agonisingly sincere handshake I blurted ‘I want to thank you for all you gave to this club.’ I nearly wept. ‘No. Thank you,’ retorted Paolo, far more at ease with this manner of discourse. When he departed I reflected with some relief that no one who saw me watching Di Canio leave the room could ever seriously think I’d be interested in their girlfriend, my heart belongs to Di Canio.

  38

  Enthralled by a giddy mist of climactic hysteria

  It’s the last day of term. School’s out. It’s the final day, la finale grande as they say in Euro Disneyland Paris. We think it’s all over – it nearly bloody well is. ‘Can we bring in toys and forego uniforms?’ – ‘No, that doesn’t really apply here.’

  Ah, the lunacy of the season’s climax, the excitement, the suspense, the drama – is there anything quite like it? No. The Apprentice? Well, yes, maybe. This season it’s more enthralling than usual as there is much to be decided, either Manchester United or Chelsea could be crowned champions this weekend and two from Bolton, Fulham, Reading and Birmingham could be relegated – though Bolton would be remarkably unlucky and, as at the top, their demotion would be due to ‘goal difference’.

  Perhaps it’s this elevation of minutiae, goals conceded and scored potentially deciding the future of fans and players and managers that has produced this giggly mist of climactic hysteria that appears to be affecting everyone from super-agent Pini Zahavi to Manchester City owner Thaksin Shinawatra.

  ‘I’ve never been one for the ol’ prejudice, thinking it a pointless restriction on potential sexual partners’

  Shinawatra has sacked Sven-Goran Eriksson, more beloved to the people of Manchester than Noel Gallagher or LS Lowry, on the flimsy basis that City didn’t qualify for the Champions League. The Champions League only has a limited number of places; these barmy (human-rights abusing?) magnates from around the globe are at some stage going to have to acknowledge that fact. Unless it becomes simply a league in which any team can participate, with mixed gender sides that have scarcely played before or even met, there will always be some tycoons who finish the season empty-handed.

  My mates who are City fans are right browned off about Sven’s sacking; in fact it’s taken this for them to register even a smithereen of disdain for Thaksin. ‘He may be an abuser of human rights you know,’ I’d say. ‘Who cares? We’ve got Elano,’ came the reply. ‘Here, he’s sacked Sven…’ ‘What?!?!?!?! Someone call Geneva – you can’t treat people like that.’

  Zahavi has piped up on the topic of human rights claiming that the antipathy towards his client Avram Grant could be rooted in antisemitism. Hmm, I hope not, I always thought it was because he had replaced the world’s most twinkly, sparkly, arseachingly attractive Rat-Pack refugee José Mourinho. I don’t think his religion is a factor, personally when I learned of his Holocaust day pilgrimage and the murder of some of his family at the hands of the Nazis it made me like him more but then I’ve never been one for the ol’ prejudice, thinking it a pointless restriction on potential sexual partners.

  Not that Avram Grant was ever in my sights as a lover nor am I suggesting that he’d have me – he seems very happy with his wife, who, as we all know, drinks wee-wee, a boon for any marriage. Mourinho on the other hand? Why, I’d follow him across the globe as diligently as Didier Drogba for just a whiff off his neck. Drogba incidentally takes second place in my ill-advised Russell Brand Glasshouses Award for Rubbish Haircuts, behind Arsenal’s Emmanuel Adebayor who wins because his shift from corn rows to box top as well as looking less cool coincided with a dip in form and almost total cessation in scoring whereas Drogba’s ‘do’ just looks daft. I know, I know – that’s why it’s called the Glasshouses Award.

  Will Chelsea’s fans take to Grant even if he completes an unlikely double? Will they sing his name? Alan Curbishley doesn’t get his name sung at Upton Park – he too replaced a manager who was popular with fans, Alan Pardew, who, by no stretch of the most elastic and LSD-doused imaginations, is a match for José Mourinho.

  It can’t be much fun not to feel loved by your crowd. Now hang on to your hats because I’m about to drop a name so heavy you might piddle yourself with envy – here goes…Jimmy Tarbuck once said to me: ‘They like ya kid, and that goes a long way.’ He cited the example of the lovely Bob Monkhouse who he said was a brilliant comic and a lovely man but who didn’t have the same rapport with an audience as Eric Morecambe or Tommy Cooper. He went to great lengths to point out that Monkhouse was great and delightful but needed to work to get an audience onside.

  I suppose this is Grant’s dilemma but then Sven was no Sammy Davis Jr and the Eastland’s faithful are holding a march to protest his departure, because he got results. In 48 hours it’ll all be over, heroes will rise and fall but the game goes on. Adulation, to a point, can be earned but for some it’ll be gifted – look at Kevin Keegan, while we still can.

  39

  United to win – the Gods’ll never work this one out

  I feel bound to mention that I am writing this article on a flight from New York to Los Angeles having just been on the Letterman show. I bring this up because there is currently turbulence and it might be my fault as I left this laptop turned on, ignoring the announcement: ‘All electrical items must be turned off,’ which I’ve always assumed to be a needless imposition of authority rather than an aviational necessity.

  ‘It may interfere with the instruments’ – yes, well, it may not interfere with the instruments; then I’d look rather foolish, groping around in those inexplicably lofty cupboards trying to switch it off – all nervous like a Nan or Dennis Bergkamp. Assuming you’re reading this all must be well; unless my laptop has been plucked from the wreckage along with the black box – ‘Are there any survivors?’ ‘Never mind that, there’s Russell Brand’s smoking computer – just pray he had time to save his Guardian column. Thank God – then all was not lost.’

  ‘Giggs’s record would not be more stupendously commendable if he’d won more wars than Churchill’

  In that morbid spirit I shall make some teary predictions for the season’s climactic fixtures – bear in mind of course that when making predictions one must consider the possible negative influence of the prediction itself. For example, if I predict that West Ham will win the league next season this will infuriate the Gods, who will punish me by condemning West Ham to relegation, thus I must trick the Gods by predicting outcomes that would displease me. However the Gods are not stupid, they are, after all, omnipotent deities, so I can’t just predict the opposite of what I want – the Gods’ll see through that in an instant, so I’ll mix it up a bit.

  First the FA Cup. I believe the Hammers were the last club outside the top flight to win this tournament (in 1980 against Arsenal) an honour I would hate to see overturned by Cardiff, particularly as I recall with fury a visit to the Millennium Stadium where the home support taunted the Claret and Blue Army with an a capella version
of the Steptoe and Son theme tune ‘Old Ned’ which was bizarrely sarcastic and demeaning and West Ham capitulated; I think out of a Harold Steptoe-style sense of inadequacy and the futility of trying to improve. Also Harry Redknapp leads Pompey and I love him and consider him to be the last representative of the ‘speak yer mind’-type English football managers. So…I predict Cardiff will win.

  The Champions League final is interesting. It would be nice for Avram Grant to get some recognition or alternatively to see what means people would employ to continue to deny him credit in the face of such an awesome triumph – ‘The players won it themselves’ or ‘It was a fix’ or even ‘Abramovich released spores into the stadium whilst fertilising eggs his wife had lain under the pitch which rendered the United players impotent with maternal envy.’

  Victory for the Red Devils would bring Fergie closer to his ultimate, recently revealed aim of surpassing the achievements of Liverpool. I think it was Roy Keane who let this info slip and it makes sense to me. I think Sir Alex is one of the greatest living Britons and to fulfil this objective he’d need at least two more seasons as United’s manager.

  I enjoyed seeing Ryan Giggs equalling Bobby Charlton’s appearance record as it gave me a sense of living through history; Bobby Charlton is an evocative figure and his name is so laden with significance that Giggs’s record would not be more stupendously commendable if he’d won more wars than Churchill or been more serene than Ghandi. In this instance then, I predict United will win. Them Gods’ll ne’er unravel this code – it’d baffle Dan Brown with its complexity.

  Finally the Championship play-offs. Hull City versus Bristol City. I’ve a very dear friend, Gareth, who supports Hull; I feel a deep fondness for folk who follow unglamorous clubs – West Ham, even when relegated, retain a sense of Cockney pizzazz, barra boy razzmatazz, but Hull? I am not speaking out of blind prejudice, I went there once to do a gig and I saw three separate brawls in the street. These outbursts of unrest were not I assure you related to my performance nor the floods that at that time blighted the city. Locals informed me it was simply the high-spirited horseplay that accompanies every Friday night’s last-orders bell.

  When my mates and I discuss football – we all follow Premier League clubs with rich histories, The Irons, United, Liverpool, even Spurs – Gareth must meekly proffer a titbit on Dean Windass or a trip to Palace. I’d love Hull to be next season’s Derby; the biggest win I ever saw was West Ham 7 Hull City 1. To which end I hope the Tigers overcome Bristol but predict the reverse. I must go, this turbulence is becoming unbearable and a sky marshal is threatening to have me interned. Even Nostradamus couldn’t’ve predicted that.

  40

  One little slip and happiness goes out the window

  ‘On what little things does happiness depend!’ wrote Oscar Wilde in The Nightingale and the Rose. He was referring to the heartbreak endured by a student who needed to get a red rose to impress a professor’s daughter. Actually it turned out that the professor’s daughter was a bloody idiot and didn’t deserve the red rose that was only secured through the agonising death of a lovely nightingale; he should’ve just written a request for fellatio on the back of a bus ticket and stuck it to her forehead – and insisted on the return of the ticket.

  For the want of little things like three titchy little points and John Terry’s balance Chelsea’s season has expired without glory. It seems ridiculous that the difference between historic triumph and aching disappointment was a wet pitch and a penalty slip from JT, as sure-footed a man as has ever pulled on a boot. Once it becomes a spot-kick showdown irrationality takes hold and on Wednesday I think this was more in evidence than usual; playing in Moscow on a flown-in pitch at 1am after 120 minutes of football and Didier Drogba’s green mile strut out of the English game in the pouring rain, no wonder the players were tired and confused.

  ‘Sad that Drogba should depart under a cloud – the last action stains the retina and informs the legacy’

  Sad that Drogba who, diving and whining aside, has graced the Premier League with such excellence should depart under a cloud for a feeble slap. Events like that linger – Zinedine Zidane was one of the modern game’s finest practitioners yet it is now impossible to think of him without recalling his World Cup final headbutt and subsequent sending off. The last action stains the retina and informs the legacy.

  Were I to stage an impeccable concert, an hour and a half of ribticklers and humdingers then, after my ovation, as I left the stage jauntily kick the choice lady right up the privates those in attendance would unlikely recall the well-structured anecdotes that led to the physical assault, the gig would become known as the fanny-kick night.

  If the Queen on her death bed darts onto the balcony at Buckingham Palace and piddles onto the assembled press below people will no longer talk of the death of Diana as her darkest hour, they will say ‘the Queen let herself down there, with the ol’ death bed micturation fiasco’ and rightly so.

  Cristiano Ronaldo is lucky that his penalty miss was rendered irrelevant by United’s victory, otherwise the season where he has metamorphosed into the world’s greatest footballer would become known as a cock-up. Manchester United will not be queried when people look at the record books, how close they came to finishing the season without a bean will not be recollected; they are champions of Europe and England and Sir Alex moves closer to the summit of sporting achievement.

  How Avram Grant will be remembered still seems a little less clear. Abramovich was present for his side’s narrow defeat and typically you would imagine that a squad that came so close to success would be applauded and nurtured but I imagine in this case that the players will scatter around the globe and that Grant will quietly shuffle off into a den of bureaucracy – which will suit him all the better, he never looked happy on that touch-line.

  The incident that for me was emblematic of his reign came in the second leg of the Champions League semi-final when he attempted to retrieve a ball that had rolled towards the dug-out and was battered on to his arse by Steven Gerrard who was undertaking the same act of retrieval with considerably more gusto. It was a bit sad. He looked a bit like a mugged geriatric sat there all confused. The other folk on the Chelsea bench offered no chastisement of Gerrard and no comfort to Grant but just stared ahead and he was forced to do the same but you could see he was all shook up by the encounter and that his heart would’ve been racing.

  The triumphs of Sir Alex Ferguson will be what define this past season but numerous other sub-plots will linger in the mind, among them Grant’s doomed stewardship, Liverpool’s failure to make a title challenge in spite of the acquisition of a truly great striker in Fernando Torres and the return of Kevin Keegan.

  A troubling contradiction for English football comes in the form of our dominance of the Champions League and our inability to qualify for the European Championship – it’s a bit gloomy that after this astonishing campaign we must now endure a major international tournament in which we shan’t be represented. By mid July I will’ve forgotten the sense of superiority that I had in May and will be consumed once more with post-colonial doubt.

  With no home nation to root for I might yield to xenophobia, yelping at the jinxing foreigners that dart across my screen, blaming them for depriving Englishmen of top-flight football with their talent and their diets. But the truth is 10 English blokes contested that match on Wednesday and this season has shown Sven-Goran Eriksson to be a brilliant manager, unjustly sacked. Football does not make sense.

  Also by Russell Brand

  My Booky Wook

  Irons in the Fire

  Copyright

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  First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2008

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  © Russell Brand 2008

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