by John King
The gates were closed as the Shed was full and we ended up standing in a paddock to the right of that great place, and as I looked over I saw thousands of shaven-headed youths pushing up and down the steps, swaying and clapping in time. This was where the Chelsea boys gathered and sang and chanted throughout the match, police officers going in every so often to pull people out and eject them from the stadium. I was hooked. The Shed was where I wanted to be.
Fast forward to 2015 and a Russian oligarch owns Chelsea FC and football at the highest level is in the process of being socially cleansed. Today, a ticket costs more than £50. The first season I went to every home game was 1976–77 and it cost £10.50 in total. These days, supporters are told how to behave by corporate types, exploiters who hide their actions behind layers of false decency. The peaceful majority are lectured about equality, yet football is one of the most integrated areas of life. Trouble inside grounds had more or less faded away by 1990, the shock of Heysel changing the mood, along with stadium disasters in Bradford and Sheffield. Hooliganism still exists, but it has been separated off, as this book shows.
In 1996, the gentrification process was starting to take place and Tommy makes his opinions clear. Again, this reflects what is happening in the wider society. Since then the beady eyes of the surveillance cameras have become all-seeing. The establishment continue to cheapen words, speak another language to the general population, unable to grasp the nuances or deeper meanings of the Anglo-Saxon/ Celtic/Viking masses. Governments sell off what is morally ours. The welfare state is in their sights and the EU makes a chunk of laws as it moves towards the superstate Hitler could not manage.
The insults directed at the likes of Tommy have intensified and so those feelings of powerlessness and anger expressed in The Football Factory keep growing. Today, the pride that people have for their history annoys the controllers, as it gets in the way of globalization, and so it is attacked from new angles. The European Parliament reportedly plans to begin its main exposition at its House of European History museum with an EU “year zero” of 1946 as members of the Parliament could not agree on what took place in the Second World War, a conflict still regarded as The One Just War by a large number of British citizens. Old heroes are portrayed as little more that the high cost of healthcare by those in power. This is not what Bill Farrell and his pals and Doreen and Mary fought for, and that means Tommy Johnson is still raging.
John King
London, 2015
COVENTRY AT HOME
Coventry are fuck all. They’ve got a shit team and shit support. Hitler had the right idea when he flattened the place. The only good thing to come out of Coventry was the Specials and that was years ago. Now there’s sweet FA and we’ve never had a decent row with Coventry. The best time was two years ago in Hammersmith with a bunch of Midland prototypes looking for a drink down the high street. About fifteen of them. Short cunts with noddy haircuts and tashes. Stumpy little legs and beer guts. Looked like they should be on Emmerdale Farm shafting goats for a living. They clocked us coming the other way and took off. You could smell shit over the petrol fumes, which is saying something in Hammersmith.
It was a stupid move. They should’ve piled in the nearest pub and sat tight. We weren’t looking for them. We don’t expect Coventry to perform. We were on our way to King’s Cross to meet Tottenham coming back from Leeds. Saturday night battering yids. But the Diddy Men were running into the precinct and when you see something run you follow. Pure instinct. They were moving fast as their little legs would carry them. Red faces reflected in shop windows along with the hi-fi gear and baked beans special offers. We were right behind as the bloke at the front took them into the car park. Like those sheep who lead the flock to slaughter. You’d think they’d smell blood and hear the knives being sharpened. Not this lot. Straight into the car park with the last of the Saturday shoppers standing aside to let us through. We had them boxed in and gave them a hiding, working fast because someone would’ve called the old bill. We had the numbers and kicked them into next week.
Harris was there and opened up some cunt’s face with his hunting knife. Said later he should’ve signed his name, so if the bloke ever managed to get his end away his kids would know the old man had been to London. That he wasn’t just a goat fucker. But he was joking. That’s just the Harris humour. He’s not one of these sadists you read about who torture kids and give them chemicals to loosen their arses. Time was short and we were in and out of the precinct. Straight down Hammersmith tube before you could chant Harry Roberts. The Coventry boys would know next time. Don’t walk around taking the piss. If you want a drink after the game, fuck off out of West London.
It’s one o’clock and we’re having a pre-match pint. It’s been a hard week at the warehouse and the lager gives me a kick-start. Stacking boxes five days solid takes it out of you. Cardboard rubbing against your hands eight hours a day takes away the feeling. You go into remote control and the brain goes numb. Worst of all are the forty-footers full of pressure cookers. Four thousand of the bastards and you sweat your life away for three hours stacking pallets for Glasgow Steve the Rangers fan driving the forklift. A tall, thin bastard who spends his days shouting Fuck The Pope as he buries each pallet in the racks. He’s one of those Ian Paisley Rangers fans who talk politics all day and wish they’d been at the Battle of the Boyne. Thinks he’s King Billy. He’s got a sense of humour and comes down Chelsea sometimes now he’s exiled from Ibrox. Says Chelsea are a good Protestant team. Doesn’t know any of the names but comes along anyway. Not with me though.
It’s a closed shop round this table because since the old bill got serious with all those undercover operations you have to watch yourself. It’s not like the old days. Not like when I was a kid sitting in front of the telly watching football riots with Jimmy Hill or some faceless cunt giving us a commentary and slow-motion replays. Today there’s surveillance gear and you have to remember the cameras. But it’s all a bit of a joke, because pitch invasions and riots for the cameras never compared to the trouble away from the ground. Your actual nutters do damage miles from the stadium in a tube station or down a back street, not behind the goal with a telephoto lens shoved up their noses. You don’t stop that kind of thing. You can’t change human nature. Men are always going to kick fuck out of each other then go off and shaft some bird. That’s life. Mark’s always going to get his end away.
—That bird last night was well dirty, he says, scratching his bollocks for emphasis. I got back to her flat in Wandsworth and she gave me a can of Heineken, then told me to go sit down in the living room. I’m sitting there with the telly on pissing about with the remote and she walks in tarted up in suspenders and crotchless pants. She’s only shaved herself and walks straight over, kneels down and takes my knob out.
He looks at a couple of lads as they walk in the pub. Jim Barnes from Slough and someone I don’t recognise. A tall bloke with a silver earring who looks knackered with a bruised right eye and cuts along his knuckles. Must’ve had a good Friday night.
—She starts sucking me off and there’s this bald presenter on the box talking to a sex therapist. One of those stuck-up slags who’ve probably never had a decent shag in their lives. Talking about safe sex and how queers are taking the blame for AIDS.
Barnes goes to the bar and orders. There’s a few of his mates on the piss and he gets lumbered with a round. Takes it in his stride. Slough’s well the drugs town but it’s a Chelsea town as well. Shit hole basically, but a Chelsea shit hole. Croydon’s another new town with Chelsea credentials. West Ham have Dagenham and Spurs have Stevenage. They’re welcome to them.
—There’s this bald TV head nodding up and down as he listens to the woman and this bird’s head banging up and down giving me a blow job. A bald head and a bald cunt, and I’m sitting there with my Heineken resting on her shoulder. The TV personality is making a couple of thousand quid, but I’m getting the business off some dirty old slapper from South London.
; Mark’s a mouthy bastard and who’d want a bird sucking them off with a sex therapist on the screen watching? Those studio experts are ugly cunts and if Rod’s description of Mark’s woman last night is anything to go by then she was no oil painting either. Rod had to make do with a hand job and a large donner from the kebab van off the Hammersmith roundabout. Just down from the Palais where the freaks and niggers hang around. All those stroppy little cunts acting smooth in one of those fun pubs where a pint of lager’s only worth the price if you’re looking to get your end away fast or make do with smacking up a few kids. Rod wasn’t impressed with Mark’s bird. Reckons she was a bit dodgy. Off her head he says. He walked her mate back round the corner.
—She was only on, wasn’t she? Rod’s aggrieved. We go back and she lives with the old girl near the flyover. We’re sitting there waiting for her mum to go to bed and when she finally leaves I think right, I’m in now, but the mouse was in his hole and she just tossed me off over the couch. She got angry when I shot my load over these cushions with pheasants on them. Indian she said. Bought them down Wembley market. I couldn’t be bothered with all that bollocks and she stunk of blood. I just told her to leave it out and walked off. I mean, why hang about when you’ve dumped your load? I went down the van and nearly got in a ruck with these Shepherd’s Bush raggamuffins. Chains and leather jackets and patterns shaved into their heads. They were young enough, but I thought next time you fucking black bastards. You’ve got to watch it on your own. Any of them could’ve been tooled-up and I’d be dead now and you lot would be listening to Mark, believing he pulled himself a stunner.
—Fucking did mate. Why waste time with pig meat like that bird of yours last night when you can get some woman dressing up for you and buying the rubbers. She had her bedroom kitted out with a mirror and all these different condoms to choose from. Not that I bother usually, but all the packs were open and she takes out this gel and the tube’s half empty so she’s been a busy girl. If we’d been playing someone tasty today I’d have left after the blow job and got a decent night’s kip. It’s only Coventry so I put myself through the grinder. She was a dirty cow. Swallowed it like a trouper. Not a moment’s hesitation. The only downer was she kept biting me. Put big teeth marks into my arms and back. Bloody painful it was. Woman needs to go on a diet.
I go to the bar to get a round in. The service is always slow and you’d think they’d get more staff in when Chelsea are playing at home. It never changes. It’s a captive audience so they make us wait. The lager tastes watered down and they serve it in plastic pints so no-one gets glassed. It makes sense I suppose, but the plastic means the lager smells like piss. It’s another fun pub and it got done up after Chelsea and West Ham clashed a good few years ago now, during the peak of the original Headhunters.
Eleven o’clock in the morning and the ICF are turning up in Chelsea pubs. It was a golden age back then. West Ham hate Chelsea like we hate Tottenham. They reckon we’re all mouth. That East London is the real London. That Chelsea’s mob is full of wide-boys and new town delinquents. They come in, get a warm welcome, and we’re lumbered with an amusement arcade. They all think they’re related to the Krays. Bill Gardner with your cornflakes and Sun. They’ll be down here again in a couple of weeks. Tottenham one week, West Ham the next. You couldn’t ask for better.
Dave Harris stands at the bar moaning about the six-month sentence handed out to a mate for fracturing a copper’s cheek down in Camberwell. Says he didn’t know the bloke was old bill because he was off duty outside a club. When he started acting cocky his mate nutted him. Thought he was a cockney Yosser Hughes. Broke the bloke’s nose as well and the old bill made the effort to find him. Wouldn’t normally have bothered. They take care of their own. Six months isn’t a death sentence but it’s long enough. Harris says the bloke’s Millwall. That he’s sound. There’s grudging respect for Millwall and a few names have been known to grace Chelsea in the past, but when we play them it’s war.
Funny how it works. It’s like blacks. People say they hate niggers but if they know one then he’s okay. Or if he gets stuck in then he’s a Chelsea nigger. Or like when you watch England away all the English get on, although there is occasional trouble, between Chelsea and West Ham say, because some riffs run deep. Generally you’re broken down into people rather than mobs so somehow the whole thing works. But no-one gets on with Tottenham because they’re yids and the scousers are all thieving little cunts. Talk to a Man U fan and they’ll tell you about scousers.
Harris turns to me as I wait to be served. He’s a nutter, but friendly with it. His head’s together which is something you can’t say about one or two of the blokes who hang around this pub. He’s got a brain and uses it to good effect. Runs a roofing company, or something like that. Must be in his mid-thirties and he’s been around.
—It’s half-eleven in King’s Cross for Tottenham, he says. Flash yid cunts coming down here last year having a go at our pubs. It’ll be worse than usual next Saturday. You don’t come down here and take liberties like that. You lot will be there, won’t you? I’m running a coach to Liverpool as well, so tell me if you want seats. We’ll stop in Northampton on the way back. It’s a good town to go on the piss in and you can get back to London in an hour or so on the motorway. We’ve got a bog and video, and the driver’s an original Shed skin from ’69 so he’ll hang around till Northampton closes down. Quality travel and we’ll be getting tickets lined up. Let me know. Fifteen quid for the coach and the price of the ticket on top if you want one.
There’s a lazy cunt behind the bar serving and some of the lads are getting pissed off waiting, telling him to get his finger out. Coventry never pull a big crowd and the pub’s half full, but still they take their time. Try and make the punters wait. We’re only football fans after all, but if we decided to turn the pub over they’d get it sorted quick enough. But you don’t piss in your own lift. Or if you do, you’ve got to be a bit slow. Finally a bird with black hair in a pony-tail serves me. She looks at the glass she’s filling or over at the wall the whole time, as though I don’t exist, so I just stare at her tits so she knows I’m alive. She goes all red, the dozy cow. I take three pints of lager back to the table and Mark’s into one about the Liverpool game.
He’s got a cousin Steve who lives in Manchester and says we can stay with him after the match. Manchester sounds better than Northampton if you’ve got somewhere to doss and you don’t have to worry about the trip back to London. We’ve been to Old Trafford and Maine Road enough times but not seen much of the city centre. That’s the way with football. Unless you get it organised and get there early you just see the train station or coach park, the old bill waiting to escort you to the ground, and all the local slums. The natives do their best to have a go at you and, if you’re smart, you get away from the escort and find them. Usually that’s about it. You go up, see the game, have a punch-up if you’re lucky, then get out.
Old Trafford’s a smart ground and when they write about Man U being a great club you know deep down they’re right. Going to places like Old Trafford and Anfield gives you an extra kick. Football’s all about atmosphere and if the grounds were empty and there was no noise, there’d be no point turning up. Chelsea have had some good rucks in Manchester. Piling out of Maine Road when the old bill haven’t got it together. Running fights along the side of the ground. Last year, walking back to the coaches, a mob of Moss Side niggers started lobbing bricks and we were straight after them. They just ran further down the road, then started chucking more bricks. We’d chase them again, but they’d just move on. We had to give up in the end because we were out of breath. There was only twenty of us by that time and they could’ve been leading us into a trap. There’s a lot of ways and places to die but hacked up by Man City fans in Moss Side isn’t a chart topper. Niggers don’t fuck about. They can’t afford to and if you see one in a white mob you know he’ll do the business.
—If we take the Harris coach up we can get a train to Manchester fro
m Liverpool, says Mark. Or if my cousin comes to the game get a lift back, have a wash and some mushy peas and go into town. Steve says it’s more than just Coronation Street. Some of those places are mental. You can get a cheap pint and northern birds are friendly. Mind you, that bird last night was friendly enough with her mirror shaking as I gave her one from behind. Banging her head into the wall waking the neighbours. I had to shut my eyes after a while and think of England, because the way the street light was hitting the mirror it looked like I had my cock wedged into the wall. One day that mirror will come unstuck and there’ll be two dead strangers found shredded in Wandsworth.
Coventry at home is always a bit of a letdown compared to Man United and Leeds. There’s a lot of boring home games but you turn up because what else are you going to do? We sit around a bit hungover from last night, then at twenty to three drink up and leave. There’s a crowd building up along the Fulham Road heading for the ground. We wait for the traffic to stop at the lights and avoid the police lined up outside Fulham Broadway. There’s the smell of horse shit and hamburger meat, coppers on horseback telling the crowd to go separate ways when they get to the gates.
A van full of coppers moves slowly, eyeballing everyone under the age of forty. Outside the church hall tables sell fanzines and souvenirs. Kids with blue and white scarves hold the old man’s hand. More vans are positioned outside the entrance to the North and West Stands, though fuck knows what they think’s going to happen. A pissed up old geezer stumbles off the pavement and three coppers go over. They’re young and mouthy and if there was a decent sized crowd and there weren’t those fucking cameras up on top of the flats maybe they’d get the kicking they deserve. But they’ve got uniforms and overtime and they nick a harmless drunk. Bundle him into the back of the van well over the top with their attitude.