The Pie At Night

by Stuart Maconie

  But in among the dour and drenching nights, there were moments emblazoned on the mind like salvos of forked lightning. Like the game against the aforementioned Goole when Jimmy Savage scored with a volley from the halfway line. All 200 or so of us danced for joy as ‘Latics’ went on to hand out a six-nil drubbing to the Yorkshire team. ‘Drubbing’, by the way, like ‘adjudged’ and ‘equalised’ is one of those words that’s only ever used in conjunction with football.

  Jimmy Savage’s goal came back to me suddenly and vividly on two occasions when I watched the Latics, as we abbreviate them, in later life. I remembered it as I sat in the stand of their new home, the JJB (now DW) stadium for the opening game of the 2005–06 season and watched Frank Lampard, Joe Cole, Hernán Crespo and Shaun Wright-Phillips, aristocrats of the mid-noughties game, warming up in front of me, as newly promoted Wigan Athletic played Premier League champions Chelsea in their first game in the top flight of the world’s richest, most glamorous football league.

  Grander still, I thought about it as I leapt from my seat in the Royal Box at Wembley Stadium when the final whistle went at the FA Cup Final of 2013. Forty years earlier, I’d gone to Maine Road to watch little non-league Wigan Athletic almost pull off an upset against mighty Manchester City of the First Division in the Third Round of the FA Cup. Now we met again, but this time we won, at Wembley, in the final of that fabled tournament. Wigan Athletic had won the FA Cup, something that would have seemed unthinkable when I stood dwarfed and deafened by the swaying, jostling crowd behind the goal on that terrace in Moss Side half a life before.

  Those were our glory days and they didn’t last. We will begin the 2015/16 season in League One, the third tier of English football, having dropped through the league above like a stone. The fairy-tale of Wigan Athletic’s evanescent spell at the top table of British football is over, and the only noteworthy elements of the season gone have been embarrassing ones; chairman and manager (now both ex) were both investigated and castigated for making grubby, racist and/or sexist remarks that I won’t glorify with repetition.

  This might make me despair of football and the people involved with it, had I not seen a different, better, more joyous side to the game. On my travels for this book I fell a little in love with a football team called FC United and I’ll tell you all about that in a while. First I have some explaining to do to the readers who are, even now, thinking of hurling this book across the room, shouting ‘bloody football’, or even bitterer, angrier words to that effect.

  There are things you can, reasonably, leave out of a book about the leisure habits of the northern English. Reasons of space have meant that we have found no time for orienteering, amateur dramatics, go-karting, the growing of prize leeks, raffia work, home brewing, civil war re-enactments or the tango, and I hope readers will show some leniency here. But like it or not, and lots of you won’t, you can’t do the same with football and not have a pretty big elephant in the room, or to be more accurate, not in the room. We need to talk about football, for a while at least.

  Of the 12 founding teams when the Football League was established in 1888, six were from Lancashire and six from the Midlands. No sides from the south of England or London were involved, proof if it were needed that football as we know it, the world’s most popular sport, is a product of the urban English working classes. Whether it still belongs to them and why it doesn’t (since the answer is a resounding no) is a subject that dominates discourse in the groves of academe, the pages of newspapers and the saloon bars of pubs across the land. But as an entity, as a cultural force, as a national obsession, its roots are indisputably in the factory towns of industrial England and their workers.

  Open up a copy of J B Priestley’s The Good Companions – and if you haven’t yet, what a treat you have in store – and you will find in the first few dazzling pages not just the most wonderful evocation of the topography and soul of the north of England but perhaps the best piece of writing about football and the north anywhere in English letters. Firstly he describes the thousands of men and boys as ‘a grey green tide … of cloth caps’ flowing towards the match between Bolton Wanderers and ‘United’ from his invented West Riding town of Bruddersford. Then, having wondered aloud how these working men on their meagre wages can afford such an outing, he immediately answers his own question in what is a sustained poetic paean to the sport and its joys:

  To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink. For a shilling the Bruddersford United AFC offered you Conflict and Art; it turned you into a critic, happy in your judgement of fine points, ready in a second to estimate the worth of a well-judged pass, a run down the touch line, a lightning shot, a clearance kick by back or goalkeeper; it turned you into a partisan, holding your breath when the ball came sailing into your own goalmouth, ecstatic when your forwards raced away towards the opposite goal, elated, downcast, bitter, triumphant by turn at the fortunes of your side, watching a ball shape Iliads and Odysseys for you; and what is more, it turned you into a member of a new community, all brothers together for an hour and a half, for not only had you escaped from the clanking machinery of this lesser life, from work, wages, rent, doles, sick pay, insurance cards, nagging wives, ailing children, bad bosses, idle workmen, but you had escaped with most of your neighbours, with half the town, and there you were cheering together, thumping one another on the shoulders, swopping judgements like lords of the earth, having pushed your way through a turnstile into another and altogether more splendid kind of life, hurtling with Conflict and yet passionate and beautiful in its Art. Moreover it offered you more than a shilling’s worth of material for talk during the rest of the week. A man who had missed the last home match of ‘t’United’ had to enter social life on a tiptoe in Bruddersford.

  Of course, after such a passage, the keen temptation for a lesser writer is simply to give up on the idea of writing about football. One is never going to improve upon that. What Priestley has got right to the heart of, and it’s a truth as immutable now as it was back then, is that football provides a narrative that both mirrors working-class life and offers a joyous escape from it.

  ‘Narrative’, the intellectual’s version of the ‘journey’ of the TV reality show, is a vague, slippery notion that seems to have leaked into every part of modern discourse, but here maybe it earns its keep. Football matches have a narrative, a plot, set over a circumscribed place and time, just like a ballet or a night at the theatre. The play you get may be as dramatic and bloody as Macbeth, or as tense and static as Pinter; it may be a farce, a fairy-tale, even a whodunit, but it will always offer some kind of conclusion and resolution, even if that turns out to be as opaque as Godot, and to some just as unsatisfying.

  Your time at the football may offer you a joyous release from the indignities and defeats of work. The third round of the FA Cup may show you that the weak can overcome the rich and powerful. Or it may just confirm that the world is unfair. But for 90 minutes, football, in its riotous absurdity, offers unpredictability, justice and heartbreak for the price of a ticket or, increasingly, a TV subscription.

  That match in The Good Companions takes place at the end of Manchester Road, Bruddersford, which as he says ‘actually leads you to that great city, though in order to get there you will have to climb to the windy roof of England and spend an hour or two with the curlews’ (yes, Priestley was congenitally incapable of writing a dull sentence). He means of course that we shall have to cross the Pennines, and if we did just that, once we have crested the knobbly ridge of the backbone of England and dropped into the folded foothills, with their necklace of reservoirs, we shall find ourselves in Rochdale, where the football folk know better than most the cruel vagaries of the Beautiful Game.

  As an hors d’oeuvres for my football feast, I chose to go and see Rochdale AFC almost, but not quite, at random. Accepted to the Football League in 1921, they have never risen o
ut of the lowest two divisions and have won nothing in their 107-year history, the only team in British football never to have done so. They have spent more seasons in the bottom flight of English football than any other team, including a 36-year unbroken residence in football’s basement from 1974–2010. They also have the lowest average league placing of any team in the Football League – seventy-sixth. In 2014, the English National Football Archive (ENFA) compiled a ‘Long-Suffering Fan Index’ using data from the 220,000 results since the first Football League season in 1888–9. They ranked the current 92 Football League clubs by their lack of success, weighted by extra factors, like the size of their average home crowds, in order to find the least successful club and thus, their reasoning went, the most hard done to fans.

  Rochdale came out bottom… or top, if you’re a ’Dale supporter clutching for any kind of trophy. Yet the club’s support remains proud and passionate, if a little weary. ‘When people ask me who I support, I am always proud to say Rochdale,’ said one Adam Fleming interviewed by the Mancunian Matters website:

  We are a well-run club with the same regular fan base and a club going somewhere. I don’t feel I have suffered at all being a Dale fan … We are a club that other football clubs respect – when clubs play Rochdale they say we play football the right way. Yes, it would be nice to win trophies but I would not trade any amount of trophies for what Rochdale have and what we represent. At least we’re not skint, part-time or immoral.

  Another fan, barman Eden Bearshaw agreed adding, ‘Financial security is a reason we’ve had it good as ‘Daleys’ … Look at Pompey [Portsmouth]. Have they really had a better time than us?’ This last was a reference to the disastrous collapse of the once proud old south coast club who, thanks to financial mismanagement, plummeted from the Premier League and winning the FA Cup final to the foot of League Two (the lowest tier) in just five years, accumulating £145 million worth of debt as they did. So when I looked at the fixture list in the depths of a northern winter and saw that Portsmouth were coming to play Rochdale, I put it in the diary.

  Rochdale is steeped in organised labour and its history. As well as the pioneers of the international Co-operative movement that started here in 1844, Rochdale was also home to the great radical orator and campaigner John Bright. Today Rochdale’s Labour MP Simon Danczuk is a high profile voice on the left of the party and Rochdale born business secretary Sajid Javid is one of the Conservatives’ rising stars, regularly spoken of as a future prime minster. Rochdale has nurtured many a famed female voice from Gracie Fields to Lisa Stansfield to the chic chansonnière Barb Jungr, all of them born in the town. Rochdale Hornets were founding members of the rugby league and one of the oldest and proudest names in the sport. Rochdale is justly famous for many things, but football is not one of them.

  Everyone’s heard of the ground though. Spotland is one of the fine evocative old names of the game, reeking of Saturday teatimes and football pinks and the teleprinter. The sleek Metrolink trams carry you now from Manchester to Rochdale on the old Loop Line whose stations exuded a raw northerness: Failsworth, Miles Platting, Derker and Oldham Mumps. But I went the old and still quick way, from Victoria station, through a landscape that could have come straight from a Lowry – stark chimneys and little houses clinging limpet-like to indifferent hills, reservoirs behind bleak dams, the old mills lit against the darkening sky. Then into Rochdale itself, a tough looking town, its pubs like jutting jaws, bristling with charity shops and takeaways, Asian stores, cash and carrys and dark terraces spearing straight for the horizon.

  Entering the ground a steward, recognising me, jokes, ‘Why aren’t you in the VIP end?’ He searches my overnight bag and finds a can of deodorant. ‘You aren’t really supposed to take in aerosols … keep it hidden.’ I suppose this is in case you try and give an opposition fan a nice makeover.

  I head for The Ratcliffe Bars & Function Suite which is billed as:

  the official venue of Rochdale AFA … unrivalled facilities and comfort and with over 100 free car parking spaces … it’s the perfect spot for a drink with friends and fellow supporters and for any special occasion. All away supporters.. you’ll get a warm welcome from us at Ratcliffe Bars. Ice cold draught/bottled beers will be available along with a selection of hot pies.

  I’m not arguing with that. It’s full, which is heartening, and the Pompey fans have indeed been made welcome. They’re composed of all sorts, hard-looking middle-aged blokes with weathered faces; two big blonde girls in skimpy tops; a clutch of student types; and a large, densely tattooed, outlandishly dressed man with blue and white dreadlocks, yellow work trousers, heavy boots and a massive stovepipe hat. This is Pompey John or to give him his full name, changed by deed poll, John Anthony Portsmouth Football Club Westwood, perhaps the most recognisable football fan in Britain. He stands at the bar, unmissable, demolishing pints of lager and clutching a large bell and a bugle that will be much in evidence as the game goes on. (One of my spies and confidantes is a Pompey supporter and she tells me that, implausible though it may seem, by day he’s a rare and antiquarian bookseller.)

  One of the great pleasures of the smaller football grounds, as opposed to the vast stadia of the world elite, is that you are right on top of the action. Thus it was that watching Wigan Athletic play Chelsea at our compact DW ground soon after my book Pies and Prejudice came out, about the same time as Ashley Cole’s dreadful, self-pitying memoir, I was able to shout, ‘My book’s sold more than yours,’ pretty much into the Chelsea and England defender’s ear. Here at Spotland in the unreserved seating, I could probably have given anyone taking a throw in a quick freshen up with my contraband deodorant.

  It’s a freezing night but across the ground Pompey John – clearly visible at the heart of the Portsmouth faithful – is naked from the waist up, swaying and leading the team’s venerable rallying cry, ‘Play Up Pompey, Pompey Play Up’. You cannot help but marvel at the commitment of these 300 or so travelling fans. They have come almost the length of the country on a cold midweek winter night, probably leaving at lunchtime, losing an afternoon’s pay maybe, to watch a team who have been laid low, humbled, humiliated even, through no fault of theirs but because of the stupidity, greed and incompetence of those to whom the football club means nothing. I am reminded of some more words of J B Priestley’s from his fine book English Journey, a salutary reminder that it may have been ever thus: ‘Nearly everything possible has been done to spoil this game: the heavy financial interests; … the absurd publicity given to every feature of it by the Press; … but the fact remains that it is not yet spoilt, and it has gone out and conquered the world.’

  In our end, ‘Come on, Day-ul’ is the Rochdale chant sung to that refrain of ‘If I Had A Hammer’. I can’t help but think they’re missing a trick here in not adopting and adapting the ‘Banana Boat Song’ to their own ends like so: ‘Day-ul! Daaay-ul, Day-ull win and I want to go up’.

  It’s quite cosy in our stand. The woman in front of me practically has her head in my lap when she leans back to sip her Thermos coffee. But she may well have been sitting here for 40 years, so this is her patch. This close, the game is a different experience than observed via the multitude of camera angles, close-ups and replays on TV. Not necessarily better but certainly more intense, more inhaled than observed and of course you are spared all that wearisome nineteenth-hole banter of the ex-pros who still inexplicably dominate football discourse on telly. This close too, we get a good excuse to have a look at the player’s abilities and their facial hair. Neatly, one of the Dale favourites is called Dole and he looks quick and incisive. He is also luxuriantly bearded, as they all are these days. Footballers used to look like rappers or gang members or supporting members of boy bands; now they all look like the Unabomber or the elder of an Amish village.

  Rochdale run out three–nil winners and what is proving to be a fine season for them continues. Back in the bar, I talk to some Pompey lads, the indie studenty ones, who seem not unduly put out by having
come all this way for what some would see as nothing, except that that is to misunderstand the complex nexus of pleasures that football brings. A rueful, gallows demeanour has become a default position for many football fans, encouraged by funny, clever, non-partisan magazines like When Saturday Comes. Pompey John gives a few last valedictory blasts on his bugle and they are gone into the Pennine night – back down the length of England to beds that they won’t see till the small hours, in that old naval town on the Solent, haunt of one Horatio Nelson. He told us that England expected every man to do their duty, but the Pompey faithful have exceeded theirs tonight I reckon.

  When did football change? Because change it has. Look at those seventies games now and it’s almost unrecognisable, and despite what sourpusses and grumpy old men say, those changes have been largely for the better. The play is vastly superior, faster, hugely more skilful. The grounds are safer, more comfortable and with a seasoning of women and kids and different ethnicities to leaven the homogenised brutishness that lurked there. Some point to Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch and shows like Fantasy Football League, or records like New Order’s ‘World in Motion’ as the ushers of a new era and the gentrification of football. Whether they caused or just reflected that change is hard to say.

  Perhaps once football had reached its nadir in Britain in the mid and late eighties, with the Heysel riot, the Bradford fire and the Hillsborough tragedy, it could only go one way. Perhaps, seared and purged in some way by these ordeals, it found a new sense of purpose and humanity from such dark events. They were certainly dark times. Mr Justice Popplewell’s report into hooliganism in the late eighties suggested that ‘football may not be able to continue in its present form much longer’.