The Football Factory

by John King

  Flies around shit, those Norwich farmers saw us standing out and gave us a kicking like they were tenderising some of their pigs. We were mugs and it hasn’t happened that way since. It’s all a bit of a laugh, because if you’ve got a good firm together you can turn a place over and generally walk away without too much damage. Of course, things can go wrong, specially against big clubs, or when it’s an important game. The locals make an effort and you turn a corner and find yourself up against a thousand psyched up Northerners determined to send you straight to Emergency. You shit yourself inside but the rush is so good you love it more than anything. You push yourself through the fear and you’ve done something that’ll last you the rest of your life. They say it’s adrenalin and that may be true, but all I know is that nothing compares. Not drugs, sex, money, nothing.

  One day I’ll be an old geezer pissed on a couple of pints and fuck knows what kind of world I’ll be living in. I’ll have some crippling disease and get mugged every time I walk out the door. There’ll be no more pensions and I’ll just be sitting around watching an endless stream of soap operas waiting to die. But at least I’ll have lived a bit while I had the strength. And I won’t be paying for my own funeral either. Dignity in death? Fuck off. I’ll have stories to tell anyone bothered to listen and the kids will be surprised there was life in the good old days. They’ll look at me a bit different.

  I’ve done it myself. Listened to old geezers ramble on about their youth. But if you stop and listen it’s not that at all. People are impatient and call a slow delivery rambling. The old people hanging around bus stops and libraries, the pub if they’ve got a bit of money spare, looking for something to do with their time, those are the ones who teach you about history. They can tell you about football riots. Or sex. Or drugs. Or anything you’re into. Nothing’s new. They just laugh and tell me we’re nothing these days. That London’s gone soft.

  Nothing’s changed. We’re just more global and the village idiot gets a documentary made about him by all those people who want to be John Pilger. Everyone’s in front of the screen watching everyone else. Listen to a pensioner and there was plenty of football violence in the old days. Look at Millwall. They were closed down enough times and nobody’s seriously telling me that those boys didn’t get stuck in on a Saturday afternoon. I’ve heard a few stories and I believe them. There’s never been a golden age of love and peace. That’s just down to the papers and television. Public exposure. Entertainment for the masses. One big fucking peepshow.

  Despite the kicking we got at Norwich, I still enjoy watching them play football. A team’s tradition gets handed down through the years and every club has its own approach to the game. It’s the same as inheriting your dad’s violent tendencies. Not that my old man got up to that much, or at least not as far as I can make out. Seems to have played it safe most of his life. Kept his head down and done his duty. But we’re talking football teams and Norwich like to knock the ball about and entertain. Every football fan respects that. Whether it’s your nutters concentrating on the movements of the opposition, or programme collectors guessing a player’s vital statistics. I look over to the Norwich fans and wonder if those blokes who did us are there. I wouldn’t recognise them and expect a few have fallen by the wayside through the years. Got married and stitched up with kids, mortgages, visits to the in-laws, whatever. But odds are there’ll be at least one or two of the blokes here today.

  Funny, really, I don’t feel any hatred for Norwich. Not even those pig fuckers who gave us a kicking outside Carrow Road. They’re just shapes without faces. I know it’s nothing personal. It’s all a dream now, like it happened to someone else, as though I’m watching it on a video with all the slow-motion replays and still-frames you could want. It’s so long ago, but just yesterday when you think of the memories the Chelsea Pensioners must have sitting in the East Stand.

  They line up in the middle tier, up the back, and you can just see this row of red jackets across the ground. White blobs where their faces should be. Same as the Norwich crew. It’s a bit frightening thinking those blokes go back so far, the First World War probably. Don’t know if there’s any of that lot left now. Must’ve been kids at the time. But who’s the mug? A handful of poor old sods get to sit behind the directors and politicians, but when half-time comes and everyone else is off for their drinks in the bar, the old boys are still there in their seats. Makes you laugh. A nation fit for heroes and they’re the lucky ones because at least they’ve got a home and the chance to watch Chelsea play.

  Then you think of their mates who didn’t make it and ended up getting their heads blown off. Or fucked up with mustard gas. Bitten and infected by rats. Drowned in mud. Slaughtered by machine guns. It’s a nightmare and my granddad told me stories about that one. I mean, I don’t reckon I’m a coward or anything, but there’s no way I’d have gone over in the First World War because some stuck-up cunts ruling the country thought it was a good idea. King and country and all that shit. If I want a punch-up I don’t have to go and sit in a trench for a year up to my knees in diarrhoea. Making do with French whorehouses where every other British army cunt’s been dumping his load. Beats me how they could let themselves get conned.

  It’s different times I suppose. The pressure must come when a war gets going and you had those women sending out white feathers to try and shame the sensible blokes who wanted to stay at home into wrecking their lives: A lot of them must’ve thought it was a bit of an adventure, but more probably they just didn’t want to stay at home and have their lives made a misery. Everyone looking at them thinking they’re bottle merchants. Better to die in the trenches than at home eaten away and tormented by vermin. Can understand that, but on my own terms. Sit in front of the TV watching war films and drama series, or get out and find your own excitement. Let everyday work and play grind you down to a dribbling video game boy, or open the front door and put yourself on the line.

  With football you make a choice. It’s no easy option. You don’t want to bottle out in front of your mates, and the more your reputation develops the more pressure there is to perform. Still, it’s freedom of choice because I’m doing it for myself, not because the wankers in power tell me. That’s what they don’t like. When it really goes off the show’s so far beyond their control it’s unreal. The fat bastards who think they’re in control realise how much power we have. Mob-handed we can do whatever we want. That’s why they make a big noise about it all. Spend millions on cameras and police bills.

  Look at a war and they kill millions, but how many deaths have you ever had through football? Not from fences or wooden stands, but from the fighting that goes on between rival mobs. Everyone says look at Heysel, but if you get the story from scousers, blokes who were actually there, then according to them it’s a lot different to what you’re told back in England. Nobody wants to see people die at football matches, nobody, but at the end of the day they reckon Heysel was an accident. There was trouble inside the ground, it can’t be denied, and anyway, so what, but the way it’s painted is a con. The Italians have their own nutters and anyone who knows anything about football knows they’re a bunch of knife merchants. Just like niggers, they’re always tooled-up, and when you talk to scousers, like I do occasionally at England games, you hear that Liverpool fans were getting slashed before the game.

  Add that to the match in Rome a year before when Italian mobs went mental attacking anyone English—men, women, children—anybody that supported Liverpool, something that the papers and Government conveniently forgot, and what do they fucking expect? Of course the scousers steamed in, but the dagos who were having a go when the numbers favoured them should take a bit of the blame. From the telly it even looked like there was a fence between the two sides. But who gets killed at the end of the day? It’s all the people there to see a game of football who aren’t interested in causing trouble. It’s like everything, it’s always the bystanders who get slaughtered. The old bill went mad trying to identify the scousers in
volved. They had the video evidence so why not check out the Italians as well? Because it’s all down to public opinion, which is dictated. The whole thing’s political, but people are too thick to understand. Talk to a Liverpool fan who was there and they’ll go on about it all night.

  Funny thing is, people look at football fans and think they’re scum. But your regular football supporter, right across the board, from young kid to old man, nutter to trainspotter, has seen the propaganda machine in action through the years. Firsthand knowledge. You can go to a game and see a bit of trouble and then when you get home and read the papers, or turn on the TV, you think it’s happened somewhere else. The amount of time and effort they put into minor outbursts, the way they exaggerate, makes you think seriously about what’s true and what’s a lie. The great thing is, though, that it’s us lot, the scum, especially the major firms, who understand it better than most. We know the truth because we’ve been there.

  When I was younger I was at games where there was supposedly major aggravation. While we enjoyed it, and it did get out of hand at times, it was generally more show than anything, happening as it did inside grounds. But the way it was painted you’d have thought it was an alien invasion. The truth gets twisted. There’s always someone messing things up. Worse that that, your average person likes to believe the lies. Saves them making the effort. People don’t think for themselves. That’s why politics is such a load of wank. It’s all about mindless prats standing in line obeying their masters.

  There’s this bloke Big Bob West, goes down the Unity regular as clockwork every Friday night, and every Friday night, regular as clockwork, he gets pissed. I’m not talking pissed as in drunk, I’m talking pissed as in out of his fucking tree. Gets as much beer down his throat as he can without puking then hits the double whiskies. Doesn’t get wound up or sad, or anything dramatic like that. Just sits in silence by ten o’clock and you don’t know what the fuck he’s thinking. Everyone else is generally pissed by that time as well, so to notice him acting unusual means something.

  Big Bob served in the war against Iraq and reckons he saw enough sights to make any one of us sick. Says us lot back home know nothing about what went on. That tens of thousands of Iraqi kids got wiped out by the weapons we’ve been told to respect. It was high-tech warfare and the Iraqi army was useless. Conscript village boys and a few full-time soldiers trying to keep them in line. Says the Allies bulldozed thousands of bodies after the Iraqis abandoned Kuwait. That they slaughtered them as they withdrew. Shot the cunts in the back. Says the yanks called it a turkey shoot. Formed big queues in the sky lining their planes up. Everyone wanted to get in on the kill. Says we’ll never know the truth.

  First time he started going into one some of the lads in the pub were getting a bit narked. They knew he’d done the business and wasn’t one of these pacifists, but still didn’t want to hear news like that. I was the same. I mean, Hussein was a cunt doing what he did, even if he got started with British backing, but deep down you want to believe in all that bollocks about strategic weapons and smart bombs and fuck knows what else. It means you can have a couple of cans of lager, sit in front of the box and enjoy the special reports and newsflashes they put on TV. It makes it more like a film than anything else, and even though you’re not there and it’s got fuck all to do with your own life, you get a bit of a thing going because they convince you it’s you and yours involved.

  But Bob never bottles out. I look at his eyes when he gets going and they don’t shift around like he’s trying to impress people. He isn’t one of these cunts you see who wants everyone to think they’re different, or care about their fellow man, or something special like that bloke I did in Manchester. He talks to himself more than us. Isn’t gutted or spaced out. Nothing emotional. He’s just realised a few truths. Some of the blokes in the Unity were pushing it a bit first time, and I wondered if Bob was going to go all the way to Kuwait and come back with his health intact, and then end up getting glassed in West London. They were getting the idea he was a traitor or something, but I understood a bit of what he was saying when I got over my first kneejerk reaction. Maybe it was my granddad telling me about being a soldier, but more than that it was going down the football.

  I know how the media distorts everything. I’ve been around when the law’s making things heavy. But now it’s supposed to have changed, as though you change anything in this world, and that’s the ultimate revenge. They’ve taken away the shine but now we’re so far underground they haven’t got a chance. They say the harder cases from the eighties grew up and built new lives selling drugs and running other petty scams. But there’s always new talent coming through and a lot of the older chaps are still around anyway. When there’s a big match familiar faces come out of the woodwork. Standing in the shadows using their experience, beating the cameras. A big black cross marks the spot. You do your time and who knows, in another five years I might have burnt out and be content to sit back and let the younger blokes have their say. But I’ll still be down Stamford Bridge. That won’t change.

  Norwich hit a beautiful long pass that cuts through the Chelsea defence and the farmers bury the ball in the back of the net. We swear and tell the bastards to fuck off back to their cabbage patch as if they can hear us. Harris sits with Black Paul and Martin Howe shaking his head. Rod shouts abuse, talking about Wellington boots and the art of pig fucking. A copper’s looking his way but leaving it alone. We all admire the goal, the forty-yard precision pass and the forward’s instant control, then the first-time shot into the roof of the net, but you don’t stand up and clap the other side. There’s no room for that kind of behaviour. No chinks in the armour. You have to stand firm and dedicated, always loyal. Present the world with a united front.

  Sometimes it can mean hiding your feelings, but not that often, and never to any serious degree. True, it’s a good goal. Worth seeing. But none of us have any desire to be fair. We get no pleasure from the goal even though we recognise the skill involved. We’re Chelsea and that’s that. There’s no place for indecision or dissent. It’s something that doesn’t come into the equation and as the Norwich players celebrate we’re telling them to get on with the fucking game, illiterate pig-fucking farmers’ sons. They can’t read and they can’t write, but at least they can drive a tractor. We all laugh.

  Half-time comes and I go for a piss. There’s a queue of blokes pushing their way in, lager held back. Nobody wants to go for a piss during the game and risk missing any of the action. Happens to everyone, of course, that moment when you think it’s a safe time with nothing happening on the pitch. Then you get there, whip it out and feel that orgasm of exploding piss, and suddenly there’s a roar that sends your bollocks shooting up into your body like some Millwall bastard’s foot has just made the fatal connection. Chelsea have scored and you’re a cunt missing it, and the pleasure you get from having a postponed piss is ruined and you hurry back with your jeans wet from a serious lack of concentration. When you get back your mates are calming down and having a laugh at your expense because you’ve missed out. It happens to everyone sooner or later and then you spend the next year holding on for half-time before you dare take another risk. Then it happens again. It’s sod’s law.

  I get a cup of tea and go back to my seat. Mark and Rod are talking to Harris. He’s telling them about Liverpool. How they had the coach windows put through by some scouse juveniles. Coach was making its way out of Liverpool and five or six kids came running out of nowhere and lobbed an axe through the window. The glass broke its flight but it still ended up in the side of Billy Bright. We laugh because he’s just lost his job and things usually come in threes. What’s next? The bloke had better keep his head down for a while.

  He lost his right hand in woodwork class as a kid, but tells the lads he had his fist wedged up some black bird and she started contracting on him telling him what a fucking stud he was. Says he started pulling out because she was coming off and he had to remember his fascist principles. Didn
’t want to give pleasure to the inferior black race. But he pulled out too quick and was a hand short. The story always gets a laugh. Billy never says it when Black Paul or John are around.

  Mark decides to have a bit of fun and rub salt in old wounds. He asks me if I remember that time at Norwich. When me and Rod got a pasting. I nod my head and he tells Harris the story. How Norwich sorted us out. Rod’s a bit red in the face feeling embarrassed and I hope the blood’s not showing itself with me. Mark knows he’s winding us up. Harris is laughing out loud and so is Martin Howe behind him. They’re laughing because Norwich are nothing. What a place to get a kicking. Insulting more than anything. Done by a bunch of farmers. It’s a story that will spread quickly. I feel a bit humiliated. Tell Mark he’s a cunt and try to laugh it off. Tell him that at least I was fucking there.

  HAPPY EVER AFTER

  Albert was going to be late for his appointment. He was due at the social in ten minutes. He had to get to the bus stop, wait for his transport to arrive and make the journey. If things went well he would only be fifteen minutes after the appointed time. He put on his coat and combed his hair in front of the mirror, then scrubbed his teeth and washed his hands. He dried them on a towel. He was ready to leave and checked his watch. Went into the kitchen to make sure everything was turned off. He looked at the taps. Counted them. ONE, TWO. Checked the knobs on the cooker. ONE, TWO. THREE, FOUR. All turned to OFF. He examined the knob for the oven. OFF. The control read HIGH. But that only mattered when the oven was ON. He couldn’t smell gas. That was the confirmation for which he was looking.

  Albert left the kitchen and put on his jacket. It had been expensive when new and he always made an effort when dealing with authority. It was part of his upbringing, something inherent in his generation. It made him feel clean and gave him added confidence. A person could never have too much confidence. He did up a button and walked into the bathroom. He looked at the taps on the sink. ONE, TWO. Both OFF. He wanted to tighten them but the plumber had already changed the washers because Albert tended to turn them too tight. He looked at the bath, squinting his eyes. ONE, TWO. He waited for the hot tap to leak. A lazy drop of water built up and fell. There was a vague sound.