The Pie At Night

by Stuart Maconie

  Back in the 1980s I remember reading an earnest newspaper article that predicted the rise of a new golfing generation drawn from the urban unemployed, who would hone their drives and short game at municipal clubs during the almost limitless leisure hours afforded them by Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies. We still await, however, our first Open Champion called Darren from Chorley. Similarly there are periodic efforts to make the game hip and funky rather than something for accountants from Stevenage to fall asleep in front of on Sky Sports 4. In 2004, former lad-mag stalwart Tim Southwell and my old NME colleague Iestyn George launched a magazine called GolfPunk, designed for a trendier new golfer. It was, ultimately, a brave failure though that may be due to the downturn in magazine publishing rather than the publication itself. (It survives online.)

  Cricket is a tricky one and apt to bowl you a googly. Like golf it looks and feels like a posh pastime. There is costly and awkward equipment and club membership to negotiate, it takes forever to play and, as far as the sport’s establishment goes, a prevailing aura of flannels and panamas, tea breaks and Tanqueray. Status division rears its head with every delivery though, with the squire and the blacksmith bringing class struggle to the village green. A political reading of the infamous Bodyline series of the 1930s between England and Australia casts working-class bowler Harold Larwood as doing the dirty work of the aristocratic and (literally) imperious team captain Douglas Jardine. Larwood was furious when he was asked to apologise for his aggressive bowling, pointing out he had been ordered to do so by Jardine who loathed the upstart colonials.

  The contradictions in cricket are part of its lore, and maybe even its vague claim to be our national sport. It can stir passions that are more rough than refined, and surprisingly regional. Brian Sellers once remarked of spin bowler Johnny Wardle, ‘He may be good enough for England, but not for Yorkshire.’ And here’s something from a Guardian TV column by Martin Kelner.

  ‘We were invited … to reassess two great northern monsters, in ‘Myra, The Making Of A Monster’ on Five, and ‘The Real Geoff Boycott’ on Channel 4. A key difference between the two programmes was that obviously it was easier to find people prepared to speak up for Myra Hindley than it was to find anyone with a good word for Boycs.’

  In the summer that I was researching this book, England’s cricket team lurched from mishap to mishap under the beleaguered stewardship of the ineffectual Boy’s Own figure of Alastair Cook. The few bright spots came with a couple of drubbings dished out to the Indian cricket team. This was widely seen though as evidence of how poor the Indians had become rather than any great resurgence on our part. Here again was evidence that our working lives impact and shape our leisure time. The Indian historian Ramachandra Guha observed in his book A Corner of a Foreign Field that

  Cricket fits in easily with the rhythms of what is still – in its essence – an agrarian culture, accustomed to thinking in calendric rather than clock time. Indians have no difficulty aimlessly filling up the hours … Five days or 30 hours: an unconscionably long time for an industrial and industrious American, but a bare wink of eye to the Indian.

  Some speculated then that Indian cricketing decline as a test playing nation – but improvement as a one day and limited over side – was down to the fact that the thrusting and aspirational young and growing middle classes of Delhi and Mumbai were working harder and faster in order to escape their rural, poverty stricken past and become more American. Similarly, the decisive, results-driven American society finds itself baffled by the languid, labyrinthine nature of test cricket. As the New York Times put it:

  Americans have about as much use for cricket as Lapps have for beachwear. The fact that elsewhere in the civilised world grown men dress up like poor relations of Gatsby and venture hopefully into the drizzle clutching their bats invariably mystifies … And the notion that anyone would watch a game that, in its highest form, could take five days and still end in a draw provokes widespread disbelief …

  Tennis remains a literal private club as far as most working-class people are concerned. In theory, there’s no reason why this should be the case. The equipment is basic and relatively cheap, but until well into the twentieth century the courts were almost exclusively in private, genteel clubs and the sport thus did not catch on among the workers. Tennis and cricket was also riven for decades by absurd division between ‘gentlemen’ and ‘players’, i.e. people doing it skilfully and properly for money, as in the latter, and poshos mucking about, the former. Fred Perry, our greatest ever tennis champion, was a working-class lad whose dad was active in Labour politics, and who learned the game on the public courts near his family’s terraced house in Stockport. Because of this, he was shunned by the tennis establishment and treated disgracefully. When he won Wimbledon for the first time, the administrators couldn’t bring themselves to congratulate him and left his winner’s tie on a chair in the dressing room. Understandably, sick of the snobbery and ingratitude of the so-called All England Club, Perry moved to the USA and became a naturalised American.

  There are some pastimes that feel emblematically, definitively, even comedically, working class. I’ve never kept a racing pigeon; nor has anyone in my family or anyone I’ve ever known. If they are, they’ve been doing it pretty furtively and hiding it marvellously well. But as a teenager I did used to take part in the other great proletarian time killer – coarse fishing. Again, class runs like a fissure even through the gentle world of Izaak Walton and rod and reel. Coarse fishing has always had a faintly socialistic cast (sorry) and early coarse fishermen would call each other ‘brothers’. By contrast, fly or game fishing was and is clearly for the likes of tweedy aristo J R Hartley. My mate Nigel had a creel (the little wicker manbag thing fly fisherman wear at the hip) and would sometimes cast his lure – always unsuccessfully – on some sleepy trout stream. But then his dad was a telecoms engineer and they lived in a bungalow in the nice bit of Shevington. So he was practically from Downton Abbey.

  I didn’t go fly fishing. I would go angling with another mate, John, in pursuit of perch, tench and carp in canals, gravel-pits and the like across Lancashire and Cumbria. Sometimes we would go straight from Bluto’s night club in our best post-punk finery and arrive at the water’s edge just as it was coming light. Then, around nine, we would fall fast asleep on the bank and wake up hungover, sunburned and starving in the early afternoon. We would make nocturnal visits to dark and silent Lake District tarns (after closing time) to catch eels, and then silently take them back through the woods to cook them up for campfire breakfasts when to be honest we’d have preferred a bacon bap or a Pot Noodle.

  Eel fishing was great fun to participate in but would have been deadly dull to watch. The essentially static/somnolent/furtive nature of the angler’s art has meant that it has never been a great spectator sport either live or on telly. Now, though, the proliferation of niche channels and the need to fill them up has meant that you do get the occasional fishing programme. This largely consists of Robson Green and a man in a beany hat going ‘Isn’t she a beauty’, while disgorging a hook from the enormous, blubbery, frightening mouth of some cold-eyed denizen of the deep.

  One activity more than any other though epitomises division in British leisure. In 1895, an iron curtain was drawn across the sport of rugby, creating a class and regional split that endures. Essentially, working class equals rugby league, middle class equals rugby union. North = league, south and Midlands = union. (Don’t bring Wales into it. It confuses matters.) Just before the turn of the twentieth century, a body called the Northern League threw off the yoke of administrative bullying by an elite who’d run the game since William Webb Ellis first ruined a perfectly good game of football at Rugby School by picking up the ball and running with it, according to the sport’s creation myth. Even before the schism, the game was largely working class in the north, middle class in the south. But matters came to a head at the end of the 1800s, with the sport now drawing big crowds in industrial Lancashire and Yo
rkshire. The players however were denied any of the benefits of this burgeoning sport. They were forbidden from being paid by the ruling body’s ban on professionalism. They lost wages taking time off work to play and they had to pay their own treatment bills for frequent injuries.

  So, 22 clubs got together in the George Hotel, Huddersfield, and in effect told the boss to shove it. Rugby league was born and over the next few years evolved into a different sport; faster, less reliant on kicking and mauling, generally more skilful and entertaining. But then I would say that. I’m from Wigan, one of those 22 original rebels and, of course, the greatest club side in the history of the sport.

  So here’s an illustrative vignette from my own largely nonexistent rugby career. At primary and junior school I played rugby league, badly and at scrum half if memory serves (it was a bit of a concussed daze). This was perfectly natural. Not only was I growing up in the sport’s capital and powerhouse – with all due respect to Leeds, Widnes, Castleford, etc. – but my school, St Jude’s, was a feeder club for the pro side, with a crack amateur team which fostered many future England internationals.

  Then I passed my 11-plus exam and went to a grammar school on the outskirts of Wigan run by the Irish Christian Brothers. There, in line with its slavish adoption of the trappings of a minor public school, such as daft little caps and housemasters, and out of step with the culture and history of the town, we were forbidden to play rugby league and forced to hoof it up in the air and collapse on each other union style. It didn’t help that my dad brought me up with an ingrained lack of respect for union, believing that 30 people was an absurd amount for one pitch and union was essentially devised to occupy as many public school boys as possible on a wet Wednesday afternoon.

  Rugby league – fast, violent and skilful in equal measure – can baffle even people who call themselves sports fans. Sometimes it baffles even me, who grew up with it. I settled down in great anticipation to watch last year’s Grand Final, featuring my team Wigan Warriors against deadly rivals St Helens. Held at a packed Old Trafford, it was to be a grand occasion. Except that within a few minutes of the kick off, Wigan’s Ben Flowers was sent off for punching Saints’ Lance Hohaia twice in the face, the second time after his opponent lay stunned and prone on the deck from the first blow.

  It was one of the most stupid and malicious things I’ve ever seen on a sports pitch, maybe even anywhere. It ruined the game, and our chances of winning. Flowers was banned for six months and at one point almost faced criminal charges. I’d have sacked him on the spot, making sure he never played for Wigan again, so badly had he let down the town and its people. I still feel like that. Worse, maybe, it reinforced a prejudice held by many in the sporting elite and the media that rugby league is a game for thick, aggressive proles while union is for gentlemen. Nothing could be further from the truth. But thanks to Ben Flowers, that message is just that little bit harder to get across. (As I write, Flowers is set to return to the game. The Wigan Coach has enjoined him to ‘be more aggressive’ this time. You could not, as they say, make it up.)

  My dad still watches league, though these days not from the terraces he took me to as a youth, but from the comfort of his armchair with a whisky; largely thanks to Rupert Murdoch, who seemingly is good for something. In 1996, he pumped £87 million into the sport in return for TV rights and sizeable control over the sport. It changed from a winter to a summer game and some muttered darkly about a clause that gave Sky sway over who played for who and the nature of player contracts. Teams were rebranded with silly US sport style ad agency names. St Helen’s resisted this (for which even this staunchly rival Wiganer respects them) and Bradford, with its links with the woollen trade, nearly went for Bradford Sheep before settling on Bulls. Purists and sections of the press were sceptical, not to say hostile, but that soon dissipated as the game thrived. There are many reasons to dislike Rupert Murdoch. But Super League is probably not one of them.

  For all Sky’s money, the game is still rooted in the industrial heartlands of the north and the support of the working classes. They even end the games with a factory hooter for goodness’ sake. Many of the original professional clubs, like Castleford, had mill owners and other local entrepreneurs as early patrons. Lindsay Anderson’s bleak movie of David Storey’s novel This Sporting Life, in which Richard Harris undergoes a sexual and existential crisis in Wakefield, has further enshrined the idea of the game’s quintessential grimness. But the slick new names are an attempt to bring some transatlantic razzmatazz to a sport that is still wreathed in smoke from factory chimneys, winter fog and stinging rain on raw November evenings in Halifax. Wigan are now Wigan Warriors. Keighley are the Keighley Cougars. Oldham are the Roughyeds, which is brilliant, and Wakefield Trinity are now Wakefield Trinity Wildcats, which is just stupid.

  Warrington are the Warrington Wolves. Another change for the Cheshire club – although nothing about Warrington is Cheshire excepts its map co-ordinates, it should be said – is its move a few years ago from the beautifully named Wilderspool Stadium, the club’s home for over a century and which once boasted a Kerry Katona stand that burned down, to the Halliwell Jones Stadium, named after a local car dealership. If the new name is less evocative, the new stadium is a huge improvement on its decrepit predecessor from which I was once chased by some Warrington bootboys in the late 1970s after one of our fiercely contested, on and off the field, local derbies. Conjure a rugby league club owner or chairman in one’s mind and the picture will be of a fat, bluff man in a car coat; someone pompous and aldermanly, a civic grandee or the boss of a discount supermarket or plant hire firm. It will probably not be someone like Simon Moran who owns Warrington Wolves. Warrington born and bred, and a life long fan of the club, he took charge shortly after their move to the new stadium. I first met him (I’ve just worked out, appalled) a quarter of a century ago when, at the height of the ‘Madchester’ music fad, he could always be found backstage at local gigs, either as fan or promoter. I have relied on my ‘SJM Promotions Access All Areas’ sticky pass or laminate to get me backstage, on tour and into all sorts of scrapes with the Happy Mondays, New Order, James, The Charlatans, The Beautiful South, Inspiral Carpets and many many more. I’ve watched him go from indie kid hustler to the man the Guardian called ‘the most influential music executive of the Noughties’. So when I decided that I should pay my first visit to rugby league in Warrington since I was a terrified teen, I knew who I was going to call.

  I am one of a few thousand passing through Warrington Central station on this warm autumn evening, here for a top of the table fixture between Warrington and Huddersfield, or Wolves against Giants if you insist. I ask the community support officer, a small, unsmiling blonde girl with a ‘Wigan facelift’ (hair pulled back so tightly that blinking is impossible) where the ‘new’ rugby ground is. Tersely, without making eye contact, she tells me she doesn’t know, which causes me to wonder which community she’s supporting and in what way. Fortunately, the Scouse ticket collector is more helpful. ‘Just follow the shirts, love,’ she says, and I do. I follow a river of blue and white that flows and surges down Mike Gregory Way, named after a Warrington and Great Britain stalwart who died tragically young of Motor Neurone Disease.

  The two main pubs by the ground are The Rodney and the Kings Head, and punters have spilt out of their doors to enjoy their pints in the evening air. From the colours, it seems that most of the home fans go to The Rodney and the away ones to the Kings Head, nearer the station. But there’s much mixing. You could throw a glass from one to the other, but no one will. Rugby prides itself hugely on not being football or doing things that football does, a game for overpaid nancy boys, and this includes hooliganism. This is not entirely accurate and we should be careful. As mentioned above I got chased several times at rugby league games in my youth, and at one especially violent Boxing Day fixture between Wigan and ‘Wires’, my mate Brownie was thrown over a ten-foot wall into an industrial bin. That was the seventies though, when sporadic hand
-to-hand fighting used to break out during Songs of Praise.

  A word about that nickname. Warrington are known as Wires or The Wire because of the town’s wire-pulling industry. That craft became the centre of its economy after the decline in its previous staple, sailmaking. I have no real idea what wire pulling is, so I look it up online. The first site I come to begins ‘Have you ever seen a wire-pull become a disaster? This doesn’t need to happen. Several wire pulling tools and methods exist, but ‘pull by fishtape’ is the most common.’ So that clears that up.

  I meet Simon in the new stadium reception, where he sweeps in straight from the London train to Warrington Bank Quay. Simon’s big new project of the autumn is the Kate Bush comeback concerts at the Hammersmith Odeon, her first since 1979. Everyone in ‘the biz’ is in a flap about it. I loved Kate Bush’s early albums, but she seems to have disowned these in favour of her slicker and for me less interesting later stuff which is all she plays at the shows so I don’t bother even trying to get a ticket. I keep this to myself though, as pretty much everyone I know has become Moonie-like in their gush of approbation.

  It’s quite a day of contrasts I imagine for Simon; afternoon rehearsals of hippie drama tableaux with Kate, and then an evening on the terraces watching Warrington and Huddersfield play rugby league. Of his time in London, Simon is too discreet to give away much in the way of gossip beyond saying that Kate likes spaghetti bolognaise. He asks immediately for a copy of the Warrington Guardian which carries an ‘open letter to Simon Moran’ and has some mild criticism of him. He tosses it aside with a laugh and we head upstairs to the Platinum Lounge where we are surrounded by glitzy Warrington ladies sipping Sauvignon Blanc before we make our way through the backstage ‘corridors of power’. Simon introduces me to a young man in a smart suit called Stefan. ‘Hey Stuart, Stefan’s from Wigan too. We just signed him from under your noses.’ Stefan isn’t playing tonight and in between chatting about pubs and streets we have in common – he’s from Pemberton, about half a mile from where I grew up and an old stamping ground of mine – he tells me about his injury. He’s torn the muscle that ties the rib to the ligament. ‘I get bloody knocked out and knocked about all the time and I do this just stretching for summat.’