7 – GOLF AND WHY I AM CRAP AT IT
“How did I make a twelve on a par five hole? It is simple. I missed a four-foot putt for an eleven.” Arnold Palmer
Chances are that if you have played any form of sport you have been invited to play a game of golf as if in preparation for the moment when the inevitable occurs and its time to hang the boots up. This is not to say that golf is entirely the preserve of retired dinosaurs as one look at the professionals will see a game awash with athletic young men and women playing with unbelievable nerve and skill.
It is simply that golf has always had the image of a more sedate pastime although, speaking as a very occasional “hacker” this game probably ranks above any other in terms of levels of its ability to delight and frustrate almost simultaneously.
For some unearthly reason many of us who have played cricket seem to think we have a God-given right to be good at golf; surely it is only hitting another ball with a different shaped stick, is it not? Many current and former cricketers are indeed very good golfers able to make the transition with ease.
Regrettably, after years of torment, miles of aimless walking in search of yet another ball, more trees than a rain forest and digging in enough sand to cover Benidorm I confess to being crap at it.
It’s not as if I have not tried to be better at this game; it is after all another in the long list of excuses to seek bonding and beers. Once again, it was dear old Fred, my neighbour, who got me swinging clubs wildly in the back garden.
As with the coveted and cherished Gray Nicolls cricket bat, the golf clubs that Fred passed over the fence were similarly archaic; had I kept hold of them they would, by now, be in the Royal & Ancient museum. They were wooden shafted with dark iron heads and light years away from today’s sleek, carbon fibre shafts with hollowed out precision engineered striking plates; and what a golf bag!
It was a hessian fabric thing as saggy and grubby as a giant used condom. There was a token pocket for the odd ball –suggesting that the old timers were unlikely to lose that many balls as they would not be hitting them too far with these clubs.
To further hamper my progress – not that I am suggesting a brand new set of Ping clubs would have made a blind bit of difference – the clubs were right-handed clubs; as I was a left-handed batter at cricket this caused early technical difficulties.
I took to this new game vigorously but my swing was so rustic that on one occasion I brought down my mum’s clothes line with one of Fred’s wooden shafted relics entangled in my dad’s Y-fronts as I aimed an imaginary monster drive; then I went one better by firing a mid-iron through her kitchen window, inadvertently, striking the ball with rare precision.
This nearly had calamitous consequences as the heart attack my mother almost had as a result of the missile bursting through her kitchen window, would have meant that starvation would have been inevitable for my dad, brother and I as all of us were equally hopeless when it came to feeding ourselves.
There was definitely only one hunter-gatherer in our house and I had just nearly killed her. In terror, I sprinted down the drive and off to the cricket field using the club like a relay baton as my mother searched for a frying pan to batter her eldest and not so dearest.
To counter my “handicap” I adopted what is known as the “cack-handed” grip, essentially a left hand grip on right handed clubs – or vice versa. Clearly the portents were not good and a cack handed hacker with a condom for a bag meant that young Nick Faldo would not be losing sleep over my golfing prowess.
Often I would go into the back garden and swish and swish away, trying hard to avoid the clothes line again although often peppering the kitchen window with mud and in the process slicing the lawn to bits. By now Mum had banned me from using any form of ball and clearly I needed my own private driving range if only to save me from being strung up by my own.
Duck was also now into golf but as he was an only child his mum and dad could afford a shiny new set of clubs whereas mine had to feed and clothe Our Kid; somehow this did not seem fair, surely we could trade Our Kid for some new Pings?
It was not long before we decided to convert the cricket field into a mini pitch and putt course. We dug out a series of holes that confused the life out Browny, who was groundsman at the time, leaving him convinced he had a major mole infestation.
As the cricket field is bordered on all sides by houses we had to be careful, even at this early age, not to over shoot and pepper any windows but generally our ineptitude made sure that we never got close. That is until the day Richard Tattersall joined us for driving practice, ostensibly to show off his new set of clubs, smuggled back in a bale of wool from one of his dad’s Far East trips in his capacity as a wool merchant.
We still could barely drive the modest distance from Duck’s house to the changing rooms – roughly 100 yards – but, after a couple of plays and misses, very much like his batting, Richard finally creamed the ball with his gleaming new five iron and watched horrified as it sailed across the field like an Exocet missile, whizzed through a hedge like a bullet and was quickly followed by the explosion of broken glass.
Equally as quickly, Richard abandoned the sleek new five-iron and sprinted off in the direction of his dad’s house; it was left to the parental cheque book to broker a peace settlement and I had a new five iron tucked into the condom amongst the relics.
Once again we were on the move in search of new challenges but in those days golf clubs were steeped in snobbery and few encouraged new players. Duck and I eventually found a course that was both very welcoming and cheap; the only trouble being that it was a three bus trip.
Queensbury, a place bordering the outskirts of Bradford and Halifax, rivals the North Pole for climatic conditions. Still, it suited us fine and at least we could afford a round despite the bus fares and so in the summer holidays we would take off with our clubs for a day’s golfing.
One day, sat at the bus stop, I became a little too conscious of my grubby, extra large condom and, as the bus rolled up, I quickly grabbed Duck’s shiny set of clubs and hopped on the bus urging him to “Come on mate, get your clubs on the bus!”
The whole bus watched him clamber aboard with the stained bag over his shoulder and he rarely let go of them again. Most of my early golfing days were spent with Duck and our approaches largely reflected our approach to batting as well.
Generally Duck would play the percentages whereas, from my typical position in, up, or under a bush of some sorts, I would convince myself I could still reach the green just like the legendary Seve Ballesteros.
Inevitably, another ill-conceived attempt at redemption generally resulted in another tree, more rough stuff and the probability of carding a double figure score for the hole. I would have been better off with a chainsaw in my bag than most of the clubs I hauled around.
Even though golf continued to be a frustrating sport to get to grips with, there were many hilarious moments on the golf course, which compensated for our ineptitude. One of the funniest inevitably involved Duck who was always one step away from some form of sporting calamity.
I do not know of anybody who has spilt more blood than Duck, involuntarily of course, on a cricket field. Duck is simply one of those guys who lives on his nerves and you always knew where to find our him two minutes before a Villas innings was due to start – Duck would be on the crapper.
It was only nerves and no bad thing because it converted into a highly charged level of concentration and determination. So crucial was this preparation that, once when he discovered there was no loo roll and it being too late to run across the field to the bar for fresh supplies, he waddled back into the dressing room.
A comic sight with trousers down over his pads, he frantically grabbed our team mate, Spikey Wight’s “newspaper – The Daily Sport and, with some poetic licence, it saved the day.
So imagine the scene when we turned up for a dawn start one frosty pre-Christmas morning at Bingley St Ives Golf Club, seeking to get a round in before the festivities. Like many others we were queuing up in the early morning, fully aware that by the time we teed off there would be a bigger crowd watching than we had ever played golf in front of before.
Whether it was the biting cold or pure nerves, Duck’s teeth were chattering frantically, he looked paler than I had ever seen him and definitely in need of a quick visit to the loo.
Not that the rest of us felt that much better and secretly, I think we just all hoped and prayed to make some contact and get the ball off in the general direction of the first green. Given the number of people queuing and no doubt influenced by the time of year, there was a festive spirit as each four-ball set up to tee off; all we were short of was an R&A official announcing us individually as we stepped up to the tee.
I opted to go first on the basis of better to get it over with and although it was hardly my finest tee shot, a scuffed low contact sent the ball scuttling off up the fairway a respectable distance albeit using the dam busters approach rather than the beauty of unassisted flight.
The other two guys also managed to get away which, although Duck was easily the best player, had done little to soothe his nerves. By now he was shaking like a junkie in rehab as he stooped over the ball and, I admit, secretly the three of us could barely contain grins as you just knew this would not be good.
The backswing was way too fast and the follow through not much better as his club barely made contact with the top of the ball sending it fizzing across the turf only to hit the marker for the ladies’ tee, some twenty yards or so ahead.
The ball shuddered into the concrete marker, paused and then arched a long, slow loop into the air, sailing gracefully over us and the watching crowd, landing some fifty yards behind us. And so it was, with a gallery of dozens assembled behind an imaginary rope, that Duck played his second shot to the now enlarged hole. Thankfully he got it away to rapturous applause from the crowd and off we went without a backward glance.
Mike Adams was another keen golfer from our cricket team and as feisty on the fairway as when he was trying to knock batters heads off with the new ball. Mike had arranged a team golf day at his local club, Horsforth Golf Club, which borders Leeds Bradford International Airport.
We were halfway around and Mike was having a good day whereas Duck and I had more chance of hitting a Boeing 737 than a fairway. As usual Mike was telling a tale, this time about his prized three-iron, which he claimed he had had for over thirty years and had never played a bad shot with.
He settled on the tee wearing that mischievous grin of his and took aim. At the point of impact there was a crunch and a crack and the club head went off almost a hundred yards down the fairway as the ball limped off the tee and trickled down from the tee mound.
And there was Mike, still holding the remnants of his prized shaft broken into two with the end bit hanging limp and useless as the rest of us could barely stand up. Typically he took it all in his stride with a casual “I guess that’s fucked it then!”
One guy not noted for speed or grace is my old footballing pal, Alan “Big Al” Hardy, who is a golfing nut and would often join us on Villas’ Golf Days, sensing the prospect of a day of peace from the wife and a pint or two; all three attractions had equal pulling power for Big Al.
This particular year we were playing at Bradford Moor, set in a largely Asian area of Bradford, and a course that suited me in particular as it had generously wide fairways and not many trees. What trees there were concealed more threats than just a bad lie of the ball as Big Al was to find out.
That particular year he was struggling with his golf and not really looking forward to the game other than the later beers. As it turned out he creamed the ball off the tee straight down the middle of the fairway and turned to us all as if he had just won the Lottery.
Positively beaming, with a renewed sense of confidence and purpose in his game he went to pick up his tee only to see a little Asian lad pop out of the trees, scuttle across the fairway and pick up his ball before running like the clappers back to the trees.
Big Al was incandescent and, complete with golf bag over his shoulder, heaved his eighteen stone into action. The little kid must have been terrified at the sight of Big Al pounding down the fairway and shouting “come back you little twat; I’m going to kill you!”
Imagine that at St Andrews? Fortunately, the culprit narrowly escaped with his life and a new golf ball and Bradford was saved from an early race riot.
And finally, my own dreadful tale of woe picked from so many on the golf course but chosen largely for the resplendent setting of Moortown Golf Club, set in leafy North Leeds and home to the 1927 Ryder Cup between Great Britain & Ireland and the United States of America.
By this time I was working for Barclays Mercantile Business Finance and my boss was another golfing nut, Ian “Macca” McLean who was a member of Moortown as well. These were the days when a lot of business was still done on the golf course and Macca relocated his office most days, unofficially at least, to the club bar.
The upside was that our annual company golf day was at Moortown and it was such a glorious setting I was happy simply for a day off and a chance to walk the course. There was no way a hacker like me would ever normally get the chance to play this course as you generally needed a handicap certificate.
However, late withdrawals were commonplace and Macca advised me to put the bag in the car boot just in case. Sure enough, there I stood, trembling on the first tee at this historic setting and wondering which of my new half set of clubs, purchased only because the maker shared my surname and I liked the colour, I would choose to get it away.
Now if you have ever stood on a tee you may relate to this. Uncannily, if there is a potential hazard be it a tree, a pond or a bunker then you can bet your bottom dollar that the mind will focus on this and there is a good chance you will find the hazard with unerring accuracy.
And there it was; a rhododendron bush, no more than fifty yards away, only ten foot tall but it appeared to be smiling and saying: “think you can clear me punk?”
I tried to put the thing out of my mind; surely I could hit a bloody golf ball fifty yards in the air? Don’t even think about what happened to Duck!
I placed my new Barclays Bank golf ball on my new Barclays Bank tee, stood up to blow out a quiet, nervous fart and hunched over the ball. Head down, look at the ball, nice easy backswing, and smooth follow through.
It all went tits up as I tried to smash the ball out of its casing, my head jerked up and the ball rose from the tee as flat as my fart. It was like being on the runway at the start of a holiday sat on the plane urging it to “get up, get up, get off the ground you bastard!”
For a moment I thought I had just enough clearance and elevation but it was not to be and the ball crashed into the heart of the bush to be gleefully swallowed up never to be seen again.
There I was, being assisted by several people I had never met, starting my first corporate golf day with my arse hanging out of a bush looking for a ball that I could not care less about had I found it. Eighteen more holes to go… could it get any worse?
That’s why I can’t stand golf, because I am simply crap at it.
8 – ON TOUR WITH LORD LES
“The Games are just a nice, positive way to build friendships, camaraderie and, of course, self-esteem. Plus, the Games are a great opportunity for people to participate in sports who normally wouldn’t.” Greg Louganis
One of perhaps the most understated benefits of sport is the power it has to foster lifelong friendships often strangely spawned out of being in direct opposition to one another for many years. The Villas’ relationship with many clubs proved this.
Haworth Road Meths CC – The Road – joined the Bradford Central League from the Bradford Mutual Sunday School League and soon progressed to Division One to become annual tough opponents for my club. They have since moved leagues again to the Craven League but their home ground remains what was known to the likes of Haighy and Browny as “Taylors”, the name of the old textile business that originally played on this enormous, slightly square arena.
The Road and Villas squared up many times for several feisty battles over the years but off the field they were always great company and quick with the beers. If we had played them at drinking each season it would have been sensible simply to concede the points at the outset.
Although it is fair to say that Villas shaded The Road in terms of cricketing honours, games against them were always amongst the hardest of the season and often contained a bit of an edge because some of us were playing against mates. One such game probably summed it up as well as any could.
Villas were batting second and we were never really in the hunt this particular day so we had settled on grinding out a consolation point, gained by concluding our innings without being bowled out and, hopefully, boring the pants off the opposition in the process as well as winding them up by delaying their exit to the bar.
We had the right man for the job as our safety was entrusted with our skipper David “Tatts” Tattersall, an intense character and often a bit at odds with the more carefree, beer lovers of The Road.
At that time it is fair to say that the wicket at The Road was far from a batter’s paradise and suited the home bowling attack, especially the round-armed Mick Holmes who tottered in off a few paces even when he was in his twenties.
On a pair of dodgy ankles and knees, bowling nagging, accurate stuff that eventually just causes a batter to surrender through lack of anything to hit, he was a master of a form of mental disintegration. However, this particular day Tatts had dug in and, as is common with games that follow a similar pattern, he had copped a bit of the verbals in an effort to upset his concentration.
He grafted away regardless, holding off the opposition until the final ball of the day when, having only to block another straight one, inexplicably he shouldered arms expecting the ball to pass harmlessly by but merely allowing it to crash into middle and off stumps.
Whether it was Tatts’ inexplicable last minute surrender that day or simply a growing and genuine camaraderie between the teams, some of us were “rewarded” with an invitation from their Spiritual Leader – Lord Les Gudgeon – to the annual HRCC “road trip” to cricket’s Mecca…Lords!
There are thousands of characters like Lord Les who keep alive large parts of life that most take for granted but would not wish to be without. Typically, the likes of Lord Les will be one-club men, generally far from the best player in the club and often willing to dip into their own pockets when times get really tough.
Back in the Eighties, Lord Les also captained the team as well as fulfilling many other roles to ensure The Road survived from year to year albeit often on a shoestring.
For many years, their lifeblood in the form of the main fundraiser of the year, began on a coach and set off annually from Bradford Interchange at some ungodly hour for the first Lords Test match of the summer. Even though Lords is no longer the final destination, those “selected” understand to this day that the price includes a sizeable “donation” to the annual existence of The Road.
It is fair to say that many a wife remains deluded to this day as to the real cost – somewhere approaching a family holiday in the Caribbean – after including sundry costs such as beer, curry and gambling.
In those days Lord Les was rumoured to be on first name terms with the then all powerful Secretary of the MCC, Colonel Stephenson. Indeed he was rumoured to enjoy similar terms with most of the England selectors, the Yorkshire Committee, BBC Trustees and, some suggested, The Queen.
So he had no trouble each year in securing forty tickets for two days of beer swilling in St John’s Wood, London for a bunch of Yorkshire lads and, almost like a request from Her Majesty, it was indeed an honour to receive an invitation from the great man himself. One simply did not turn down Lord Les.
It was Thursday June 16th 1988 and I was about to embark on what would be the first of many visits to Lords before the trip was changed in later years to secure a closer destination, giving me the option to opt out on the grounds that it was “not Lords” but really to save me from annual liver failure.
We were barely out of Bradford Interchange when all of a sudden it was musical chairs on the bus, out came the cards and a symphony of the opening of multiple beer cans began…at five thirty in the morning. I looked across at Duck, himself a tour virgin, and we both knew we were doomed.
Further confirmation that we were novices was in our choice of drink as we had opted for a box of wine each in order to cram two days worth of butties into our cool boxes, clearly believing that London prices of sandwiches would bankrupt us both.
Mistake number two, was believing that a foil wrapped butty made on a Wednesday evening would somehow be palatable by the Friday afternoon; mistake number three was actually thinking that we would be eating at all.
However, our most catastrophic mistake was in taking two three litre boxes of wine and two straws. Try as we might there never seemed to be an end to the boxes and just when you thought you had got to the end of one yet more emerged from an air pocket and out came another glass full.
It was on this trip that I first came across Big Al, who played for The Road’s second team and lived in mortal fear of two people: Lord Les and to a lesser degree, his wife.
My first recollection of Big Al is hardly favourable; we were sat in front of the old Tavern Stand Bar and Big Al, not for the first time in his less than abstentious existence, needed a refill.
Rather than ask the whole row to sit up he decided to leg it over the back barrier. Big Al, as the name suggests, has hardly ever been noted for his grace of movement, indeed he bears an uncanny resemblance to Baloo from The Jungle Book.
From this effort, it was also safe to assume that the high jump and the Fosbury Flop had not been part of his school athletics’ programme. There was a cry, a thud and as we all peered over the edge, Big Al was laying flat on the ground having reached his dream burial place, a bar.
The trip was seemingly made for Big Al, tailored to fit like one of those holidays you see advertised on Expedia.com. He could not have dreamed it up any better with the exotic combination of two days on the lash (correspondingly two days away from the wife), cricket (when he actually watched any which was rare) and an on-site Ladbrokes’ tent (which is why he rarely saw any cricket).
Having recovered from his attempt to bungee jump into the Tavern Bar, I now began to see why Big Al loved these two days of his year so much. Indeed he was in good company on the betting front because most of the lads loved a flutter and so it was that we had regular sweepstakes, the most bizarre of all being how many pigeons would land on the playing arena in the two hour long morning session of play.
Giles, Rupert and Jeremy, several seats in front and trying to peacefully quaff their canapés and Moet, were clearly struggling with constant cries of “fly over”, “don’t land there” and “fuck off or I’ll shoot you” as the end to the morning session approached and those still in the hunt for the £80 plus jackpot got excitable over the comings and goings of the pigeons in St John’s Wood, London.
In later years several other Villas lads were invited by Lord Les onto the trip although strangely the offer was never extended to Tatts. Having duly advised their respective wives and partners that to turn down Lord Les would mean being barred passage through the town of Shipley for the rest of their lives, others such as Stuart “Abdul” Harris and Martin “Molly” Molyneux experienced the best days of their lives.
Molly’s finest hour was reserved for Lords on one particularly dull afternoon with several merciful interruptions by rain from cricket so tedious it made you wonder why you loved the game so much. One such rain break saw the players trying to continue in the drizzle as the umpires got tetchy and looked towards the dressing rooms, clearly bored and seeking a cuppa.
Quietly at first, Molly decided to lead the crowd in a rendition of “Singing in the Rain” aided and abetted by a forty strong male voice choir from Bradford, all duly pissed by this time mid-afternoon. To our amazement the entire covered stand where we were sat, joined in with our conductor, who, on reflection, looked like a portly version of the Go Compare man from the television adverts.
Largely due to the acoustics, but also Molly’s promptings, the noise began to attract the attention of the players and other spectators. Soon most of the ground was itching to join in, even the stuffed shirts in the sponsored boxes.
So loud was the noise that on our return my mum asked me “was that you silly buggers singing?” as even the legendary commentator, Richie Benaud, had commented on the rotund, somewhat pissed tenor in a flat cap leading the crowd in song.
Without doubt though, the funniest moment of all the trips took place one Friday morning in the new Compton Stand as we sat and nursed our hangovers, before peering into our cool boxes to find yet more beer and soggy sandwiches.
Big Stan Kasnowski, another stalwart of The Road, was tucking into the previous night’s untouched, well-preserved, stone cold Chicken Madras for breakfast; there was no need for muesli with Big Stan around. The crowd was just beginning to swell as the late stragglers found their seats for the day.
Now to be honest we all hate the orange-jacketed-morons that most sporting grounds employ these days in the interests of “security”, which broadly gives them total unfettered powers to piss you off having paid a fortune for a ticket and a lukewarm beer.
At Lords they were generally even more officious and took a particularly dim view of mobile phones. Very early in the morning session, off went a phone and, clearly having been woken up by its ring tone and having nothing else better to do, off went the steward in pursuit of the offender who duly apologised.
A few minutes later and off went the phone again to several jeers from a few Bradford lads with hangovers slowly clearing; once again the orange jacket administered a stark warning and the shamed culprit offered to switch his phone off.
A few minutes passed, Stan found a bonus – extra naan bread – and heads slumped in unison as sleep was sought…and then…ring ring ring! This time the orange jacket was incredulous, his face puce as he stomped down the stairs dismissing protests that the phone was switched off and threatening to eject the offender from the ground.
It was at this point that word spread that it was not the phone ringing but an amazing impression of one from a guy a few seats back. After a tense moment or two, not helped by constructive chants of “to the tower” and “off with his head!”, peace was restored.
Off lurched the orange jacket again, back to his vantage point for more sleep…and then…ring ring ring…even louder to massive cheers from all – most of whom – being several brain cells in front of orange jacket man, were in on the joke.
Down he came again, incandescent that on this, one of the few days of his life where his word counted for anything resembling authority, he was being defied.
Grabbing hold of the poor culprit he started hauling him out of his seat despite howls of protests from all around aided by the victim wrenching the battery from the offending phone; surely this would be the end of it? But we all knew what was coming and I swear the stand began to shake with laughter and forty blokes looked in danger of wetting themselves.
To a tumultuous roar off it went again and orange jacket man pounced down the steps like an Olympic sprinter hauling a baffled, confused and by now defeated innocent man from his seat. We were absolutely in pieces and orange jacket man would not have it till again it rang this time as he held the phone minus battery in his own hands.
Slowly, showing just why he wore an orange jacket, the penny dropped and an innocent man was freed to loud cheers.
The trips were fabulous for many reasons and the ones I was lucky enough to go on were seemingly from a different age. On Shane Warne’s first trip with that awesome Australian team, we were having a pint after the game only a few metres away from Warne and his fast bowling mate, Merv Hughes, in the local pub; it just would not happen these days.
Friday evenings were always marvellous fun as we boarded our coach for the journey back up North because, famous or not, everybody after a Friday at a Test Match is leathered and we saw some wonderful sights on very wobbly legs.
We also were lucky enough to see the Australian batsman Michael Slater score a magnificently carefree hundred on his debut at Lords and then calmly come out the back door of the changing rooms to chat to anybody and everybody.
And when the trip was over and we rolled out of London to fight with the M1 traffic heading North to escape the City for the weekend, there was still the promise of Toddington.
This tiny village just off the M1 out of London was our regular destination en route back home; the coach would park on the village green and we would clamber off bleary eyed with another night ahead of drinking. Anything during the course of the next few hours could happen and I suppose like many villages, Toddington had seen most of it, but you still sensed they knew when the Northern lads were landing again.
One year Duck was stripped completely naked and abandoned on Toddington Green. A group of the lads then decided to throw him into the village “pond” only for a local to point out that several locals had drowned in there so perhaps it was not a good idea?
We also set the record for the most number of people in a Chinese takeaway frightening the staff to death with endless renditions of “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling”. Never have I seen forty people served so fast.
And each year we would leave our very last pub with everybody on their knees walking out singing “Hi-Ho!” like forty dwarves.
Cricket, like many sports, is founded on friendships made either in unity or opposition. When I try to counsel kids entering their teenage years, their early enthusiasm confused by the discoveries of wine, women and song, I try to remind them of this unique prize in later life.
So many stop playing sport far too young, either because its gets a bit tougher for a while, or they fail to understand that sport gives you it all; exercise, physical challenge, friendships for life and a gallon followed by a tikka masala every Saturday night. And how else too would you ever meet Lord Les?
9 – SWING GATE FC
“The spirit, the will to win and the will to excel – these are the things that endure and these are the qualities that are so much more important than any of the events that occasion them.” Vince Lombardi
Life never got any better than this period of my life playing Sunday morning football with some of the best lads I ever knew. Anybody who knows the Swing Gate pub may not have a favourable opinion of it these days and, in truth, it looks shabby, neglected and a relic of its past self.
Way back in the good old days, when Wham ruled supreme, pastel coloured jackets were yet to be consigned to the fancy dress basket and hangovers did not last three days, I had some of my best years drinking at The Swing.
In those days the pub was run by a charismatic couple, John – the man with the only pony tail since primary school –and Pearl, assisted by their two sons and a daughter. The pub’s soul though came from John who ruled it in a very firm, but generally always fair manner.
He did what all good landlords should do by employing some great looking barmaids; if you are going to collapse in a heap then surely better to be surrounded by angels.
I had started to go drinking at The Swing in the early 1980s and by the middle of the decade it was my local even though it was a two mile walk. As I only started working in 1985, we always walked as taxis equated to wasted beer money; Yorkshire boys know the colour of money.
The football team was set up in 1986 by a group of lads who knew each other from the local St James’ Church with a few of them being in the church band, which, to me, seemed just like a good ruse to get closer to girls; perhaps a new twist on the phrase “getting the horn”.
I already knew a few of the lads and at this time I was playing for Mad Fred, who managed the nearby Cricketers Arms team on their Sunday crusades to start battles all over Bradford in the name of football. Imagine the Ricky Tomlinson football manager character on acid and you have Mad Fred – so a change was calling me.
However, the team was set up to effectively bar outsiders and as there was no way I was going to join a church choir or pretend to blow a trumpet to get a game of footie, the best approach I devised was to effectively drink myself to death the summer of 1987 and hope to bond with the “coaching” staff.
And so my pre-season training routine revolved around Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday at The Swing. As this was the summer I moved into my first house you will forgive me if the memory is blurred and perhaps the seeds of a miss-spent youth and future middle age were sown there?
Still I had shown some early promise and was duly admitted to the squad as the first “outsider”; liver failure permitting, I was selected on the bench for the first game of the new season, although it was not clear where I was to slot in or whose place I was chasing.
At this point I have to apologise for the wave after wave of nicknames I am about to assault you with as, in common with most sporting teams, everybody is known better by their nickname.
There were several main characters in the team but the star player by a country mile was Steve “Dayks” Daykin who, in my opinion could have made a professional career in football but instead he opted for the security of a career in the Fire Service and must qualify as the fattest lad ever to go up a ladder. Being rescued by Dayks must be like having a fat King Kong arrive at your window.
Not that he was always rotund as playing for us on a Sunday was a bit of a relaxation from a much higher Saturday standard. If ever we were in need of a goal to turn a game there were not many times he did not come up trumps.
However, there were certain things you needed to understand about Dayks, mainly, that expecting him to pass the ball to you was totally naïve. Maybe he was deaf, selfish or he just knew I was crap but most likely he knew if he passed it to me he would only have to go get it back again after I lost it or tripped up over it.
One particular game, after he had gone on what was clearly a mazy run just to amuse himself, leaving several defenders on their backsides and going back just to do it again, he found me up alongside him, in space, with only the keeper to beat. He just smiled, kept the ball and, having finished taunting the defenders whacked it into the top corner.
Never again did I waste valuable oxygen on a run up field in support of Dayks. He did have the odd moan with his constant chant of “get up to halfway” at us poor defenders, but as the lazy fat sod never crossed the halfway line anyway, he was always miles from us so we feigned deafness.
As I said he could have gone much further but, to be slightly critical, he was probably too nice and even when defenders tried to kick lumps out of him he would react by laughing at them.
So it was that one warm August morning in 1987 I was on the bench – well stood up actually as there is never a bench – waiting to impress not knowing when I would get my chance when fate delivered it.
Our centre half, Darren “Vidal” Haynes – cruelly named after the famous hairdresser because, even in his early twenties, his hair had all but vanished – went for a ball, heard a crack, let out a yelp and that was it. One broken ankle and I’m being asked by Big Al “can you play centre half?”
Now just as we have a minimum wage there should also be other minimums imposed to help keep an orderly society; we should have a minimum IQ before you are allowed to breed; we should have a minimum age before you can drive a Subaru; and Sunday morning footballers should adhere to certain minimum “standards” before they have to play centre half.
Most certainly, they should have already broken their nose, have free dental cover, be at least six foot tall and not be afraid of big, shiny black men. Had this been the case I would not have had to play in this position for the most of the rest of my career.
On I went to replace Vidal, who was being stretchered off and about to be taken to the local hell hole, Bradford Royal Infirmary, one step up on a Sunday from Kabul General. If you roll up on a Sunday morning even with a leg hanging off, just because you are in sports kit means they will get around to you about Monday so its good advice to take a novel or two.
I was playing alongside Big Al, at least in a manner of speaking, as he operated the Sweeper role which basically meant that I went for the ball when it was aerial, got smashed to pieces by somebody far bigger and Big Al “swept” up first the ball and then me. This went on for years and he kept bulling me up by claiming I was good at it.
What I was supposedly good at was lost on me, barring being a human target for some tattooed monster reeking of ale and curry, seeking to assault me. Sunday afternoons may have been a time of relaxation for many but for me it was prostrate on the sofa waiting for pain relief at The Swing a few hours later.
I have also got to say that Big Al was one of the laziest men I have ever played with. Always the last to come out of the changing rooms, especially if the dreaded nets had to be put up. This was a task nobody sought out as it invariably it meant being perched on a team-mates shoulders with biting winds numbing fingers trying to hook netting up with Big Al on his big fat arse in the warm changing room.
And he was never one to lead the charge to the halfway line a la Arsenal with the corresponding chant of “he’s off ref!!!”
He was, however, extremely good on the ball, with a composed and educated touch, helped by having an arse so big that you could not get near the ball anyway. Again he had played at a much better level than I could dream of, but if he was good on the ball he was equally supreme on the drink as well.
Big Al liked a beer as we all did but it was a foolish man that attempted to go pint for pint with the big man. It was good to play alongside him, joking aside, as when I was not getting smashed senseless by the opposition No 9 there was some great banter as well and you needed that in a force nine gale on the top of Queensbury in mid-December.
There were other great characters such as our psychotic left-back Jon “Trotsky” Whitehead, founder member of The Swing Gate Communist Party and Nigel “Winky” Winckles, a definite contender for slowest footballer on the planet at least until Andy “Tubbs” Taylor and his snapping hamstrings joined us in later years.
Winky was once playing full back and trying manfully to mark an opposition winger who was much too quick for him and, in fairness, most of us. What we did not know was that this lad had a false arm and so, when he flew past Winky one too many times, Winky instinctively grabbed his arm only for it to come off in his hand.
From that day on he never touched another opponent and adopted a growl if he was chasing a player, based on the Hill Street Blues character, Sgt Belko. Off would speed the opponent only to hear a growling noise from behind coming from a little breathless balding man and, totally confused, the opponent would generally muff his cross or simply stop all together; it was classic Sunday morning madness.
Up front alongside Dayks we had Paul “Topper” Topham a lad so pale and thin he also went by the name of Casper the Friendly Ghost. A more unlikely athlete you could not see. Pale, scrawny and bespectacled he would generally rival Big Al for last man out of the changing rooms, not out of any superstition but merely to ensure the wind and rain did not blow his pre-match fag out.
And yet he was a feisty, competitive and awkward proposition for the opposition scoring more than his fair share of goals. At the other end of the pitch we had Martin “The Cat” Binns who, in keeping with the necessary credentials to be a goalkeeper, had more than a few screws loose; more of him later.
The season was to end in glorious triumph with a league and cup double; we won the cup at nearby Eccleshill United FC, playing in front of a crowd of a few hundred and never have I been so nervous in my life. We got by that day on sheer team spirit and Trotsky put half the team up at his place, a couple of us sleeping in his twin boys’ bunk beds clutching our medals.
It was the best of times for a bunch of ordinary Sunday morning footballers battling the English winter, dreadful municipal facilities and, occasionally, psychotic opponents. The bonus of a few trophies was simply icing on a richly enjoyed cake and those days at The Swing were as good as it gets.
10 – VIDEO KILLED THE SPORTING STAR
“The atmosphere is so tense, if Elvis walked in with a portion of chips, you could hear the vinegar sizzle on them.” Sid Waddell
The title to this chapter may seem a strange choice but it is a subject that has puzzled me for many years; I believe we have shifted to becoming a nation of watchers of sport, rather than participants, over the decades. With the explosion of 24/7 sports coverage and the eye watering deals brokered by football especially, what has gone largely unnoticed is the dilution of the numbers of people playing sport.
Governing bodies will contest this vigorously, but then they have to, as any sport that cannot produce statistics to demonstrate increased participation levels is unlikely to fare well from the annual distribution of lottery funds via Sport England. The recent announcement of funding for sports up to Rio 2016 illustrates the case here.
And yet, whilst the very top levels of the main sports in the country have become awash with television cash, particularly since the arrival of Sky Sports, I do not believe there has been a fair redistribution of this funding down to the grass roots.
If sport is a reflection of society then those feasting at the top tables have gorged themselves stupid, whilst the rest of us have had to battle on with austerity. There has never been as much money floating around sport in the UK but that is not to say that it is put to best use.
There are many examples of this but one particular item caught my eye regarding the Olympics. An article I read in 2011 concerned the cost of modifying the transport system in and around London to ensure the smooth arrival of VIPs including the likes of FIFA’s chief crony, its President Sepp Blatter.
The initial cost of all this was put at £12m and it was impossible not to speculate on how much better it would have been to ferry Blatter and his corrupt sidekicks around in horse and carts whilst spending the £12m on school sport so that kids got what we took for granted growing up.
More pertinently, Sheffield could keep Don Valley open another twenty years at least.
There is a real parallel between the demise of school and, as a natural consequence, club sport, and the growth of the Sky Sports juggernaut. And, as a subscriber, I have in my own small way helped to fund this beast, although Sky’s slavish obsession with all things football has caused me to rethink in recent years and cull the subscription.
It would be interesting to find out the split of the typical subscription pro-rata as far as football goes, and I would suspect it would account for in excess of 80% of the entire sports budget at Sky. As a consequence, football can do no wrong and there is now no end of season at all with all year round offerings from all parts of the globe.
It struck me recently that if this addiction continues soon they will be rolling up to televise a Beldon Sports game; dear old Joe would be turning in his grave although the post-match interview would be priceless.
It is no coincidence that school sport has almost disappeared whilst during the same period the amount of sport available to watch, especially with in excess of 10m plus satellite subscribers, has exploded. Rather than experience the joy of participation, kids are now treated to sport akin to a television game show.
Most sports have bowed in some way to the demands of television, be it utilising technology as in rugby codes, tennis and cricket or in the introduction, especially in cricket, of a “fast food” version of the game. Even golf is tinkering with a shorter format for the television boys.
Bizarrely, only football seems oblivious to change barring its craving for as many end of season play-offs and penalty shoot outs as it can muster, almost rendering the previous ten months efforts worthless. So we have ever more competitions and, as a consequence, perhaps the biggest growth area in vocational terms in recent years; that of the pundit.
Take the ridiculous weekly pantomime of Soccer Saturday hosted by Hartlepool fan, Jeff Stelling, who from the warmth of a cosy London studio pledges his “devotion” to his team without having to stand on perhaps the coldest terraces in English football, suffering a whipping from the wind off the North Sea. Pundits with headphones attached shriek and moan like some low-budget porn movie as the afternoon evolves.
It seems anybody can be a pundit and if the government had dreamt of a jobs’ boost they could not have done better than punditry. Each game seems to have at least three in the studio to back up the two commentators; plus the touchline analyst who, if things get really desperate, will surely one day end up interviewing the ball boy to fill a few minutes, always assuming he has not been stretchered off having been kicked by a player.
Some – Garth Crooks springs to mind – spout their opinions as if it were a major world crisis to opine on rather than a bunch of over-paid cheats, thugs and fairies. Others, too many to mention, shout inanities with as much clarity as you would get at the local pub come closing time.
Many rely on their status as former players in order to pass on the insight of one who has actually been there and done it. Unfortunately, even though you may have been a genius with a bat or a ball, articulating an opinion to many not come as naturally.
Take Ian Botham and Bob Willis, two of England’s most successful test match cricketers without a doubt and also, without a doubt, two of the worst pundits going. I have never heard Botham utter one telling insight into a game he was either commentating on or offering his expert analysis on.
For such a thrilling cricketer his commentaries are pedestrian, stumbling and wholly unoriginal. Equally they keep dragging out old Bob who, at a stroke must have convinced generations of kids that cricket is only for whining old has-beens.
Both codes of rugby have not escaped and the standards set by the great Bill McLaren and Eddie Waring are a mere distant memory. We now have almost as many in the studio as back room staff for the team plus the token blonde on the touchline asking the most pointless and inane set of questions you could imagine.
This is presumably because some producer thinks this is all rugby players can cope with having spent eighty minutes being battered to a pulp. And if you think I am having a whinge about the modern day operators then consider this from Private Eye (August 2012).
“What we realise we have missed, after all these years watching Sky Sports, is the quiet professionalism of these old school commentators. These men and women do not tell you what you can see for yourself. They tell you other things, things you don’t know already.
This should always be the defining quality of the TV commentator, but Sky assumes a smaller IQ on the part of the viewer, dodgy eyesight and possibly an enormous amount of lager consumed before the TV was switched on.
For years we have been told, relentlessly and repetitively, that Sky has livened up sports coverage. Technologically that’s true, but the channel’s youthful brashness long since matured into a sort of institutionalised yobbery.”
This was followed shortly after by the premature death of legendary darts commentator Sid Waddell, who combined intelligence, wit, perception and warmth; thus he gave darts a standing way above its tap room roots and offered commentaries a world apart from more mainstream sports.
The demands of the television paymasters in their desires to fill ever-expanding schedules inevitably means the standard of fare on offer is woefully poor on and off the pitch. Too much football, too much cricket, too much of everything; games come thick and fast, often meaningless, played out by squad-based teams.
As a nation we need to get back to playing rather than watching. It matters not a jot our hosting the Olympics or any other major tournament, if the reality is that we are a nation with increasing obesity issues and kids growing up with opportunities to learn skills and the joy of being fit and healthy denied them.
Cricket is a sport that has willingly sold out to the Sky millions and, unlike football, faces problems in future years of remaining a mass participation sport. In recognition that cricket faced serious issues the English Cricket Board (ECB) launched its flagship Chance to Shine scheme in 2006/7.
Chance to Shine was designed to re-introduce cricket to primary schools at a time when the ECB’s overriding goal was world domination. Although the great and the good recently celebrated five years of Chance to Shine at Lords, with one million kids claimed to have been beneficiaries from some 3,000 state schools, there are around 27,000 state schools so it’s clearly a huge game of catch up here.
Cricket requires complex, technical skills coaching into the very young on a regular basis as well as specialist equipment. It suffers at school level especially with almost ninety percent of primary teachers being female. And yet it also suffers from being in the hands of Sky and almost invisible to millions of kids. I wrote the following in my first book – A Critics’ Corner – in 2010.
So, if we as a game cannot change the broader scope of society and, indeed, wait for it to begin to change, then we have to find a way to ensure cricket remains a game open to the masses keeping it alive for future generations.
Surely the ECB has to take a more inclusive approach and one way would be to open up Chance to Shine to any club that wished to participate. Switch the funding gobbled up by the administration and invest this in coaches. We have to get cricket back into the schools and fast.
Another hot topic at the moment is the Ashes and a mooted return to terrestrial television to boost the profile of cricket to a new generation. Brokering a deal with Sky to return some degree of international cricket to terrestrial television need not be devastating to the ECB coffers.
Sky has many free to air channels and they should be sufficiently confident in the excellence of their coverage that they could actually gain subscribers rather than lose out here.
If I could drop football from my Sky package I would do so in a flash, but I would not give up my subscription just because the odd test series was on free to air, nor, I believe, would the genuine cricket fans that still look forward to England’s winter trips. I realise that Sky pay a king’s ransom for cricket but, come on Mr Murdoch, show some faith in the quality of your offering.
Sadly the politics of self-interest continue to rule cricket and they will slowly destroy it. I cite the madness of the current season’s fixture schedule chasing the Twenty Twenty golden goose slowly being strangled by short-sighted greed.
Witness now the beginnings of the financial fall out at the top level of cricket as evidenced recently by Yorkshire, as counties have to invest massively to stay on the international fixture list. If the Sky money is so critical where is it all going?
Back to the Private Eye piece for a final telling paragraph or two and comforting to note they share the sentiments I expressed a few years previously with regard to cricket’s addiction to the Murdoch chequebook.
“The Olympics have suggested another way forward. If the BBC can find 24 digital channels for sport now, why not just one for the rest of the year? The corporation has been consistently outbid for everything Sky wanted and obviously does not want to lose face by having nothing to show other than international tiddlywinks from Trondheim.
But Sky’s sporting hegemony has done irreparable damage to some of the sports it has bought. Rugby league and cricket are but two whose souls have been chewed up and spat out again.
A sport whose administrators could see beyond the warm glow of short-term cash might realise that free-to-air coverage, for a smaller fee, might actually be more effective in the longer term than wholesale surrender to Sky.
A dedicated BBC sporting channel, branded and marketed as such, would therefore be the very definition of public service television.
It would also be a very much bolder thing to do than the BBC seems capable of at the moment. It would give us thousands of boring reasons why it wasn’t possible or desirable. So would Sky, and all its jolly friends in the papers – which is the best reason of all for doing it.”
11- THE JOY OF CAPTAINCY
“One of the advantages of being Captain is being able to ask for advice without necessarily having to take it.” James T Kirk
I always intended to reserve a chapter in this book for all of us out there who have been saddled with the joy of captaining an amateur sporting side, although, I must confess most of this is cricket based.
Even though I have captained several football teams, this only really involved being chosen to go toss a coin and, if victorious, take the less than challenging tactical decision to play down hill with the accompanying force nine gales at our backs. Even Sven Goran Eriksson would not have to add much to the obvious pre-match instruction to “get at least six ahead or else we will get pulverised second half”.
It seems to me that there cannot be that much to captaining a football team if the best the whole of England could come up with was John Terry. It is improbable that there will be an extension of the grey matter over tactical approaches to the “beautiful” game.
Most rugby sides too tend to be skippered by a forward largely, I would offer, because they are the big lads and none of the back row is likely to contest this. It is cricket where the cerebral challenge is most obvious, whether the game be a 20/20 slog fest or a test match spanning potentially five days. And in club cricket there are often as many challenges off the field than on it.
The club cricket captain should never aspire to be an Atherton, Brearley or a Strauss; after all how many of those actually had to bother about keeping the tea ladies sweet or the roller breaking down mid-pitch before the game.
There are numerous challenges that face the Saturday afternoon club cricket captain unbeknown to the elite and these seem to have mushroomed in recent years.
For instance, most teams now pursue the services of an overseas cricketer, preferably one that can bat, bowl and do the teas as well, but until we see them on the first icy April afternoon, we generally have no idea if they can actually play cricket at all. Flip-flops and an Aussie twang are no guarantee that the next Shane Warne has arrived.
Take our very first Australian import at the Villas, a leg spin bowler supposedly and, so he assured us, a very competent batter. To back this up Molly, our club secretary, had scoured the internet all winter talent spotting.
The deal was done and we duly agreed to provide air fare and lodgings plus a job at a local pub to secure our very first “pro”. I was genuinely excited when I drove to Manchester Airport to collect the guy that was going to bat and bowl us to heady success that coming summer. Would we finally hit the big time?
At the airport there were several officials from other league clubs and as each strapping, athletic, sun-kissed antipodean strolled through customs, I eagerly awaited sight of our big signing. So when this moody looking, mop-headed, weedy kid came through simply looking lost, I just knew our money had gone down the tubes already.
Blake the Fake, as he became known, proved to be barely worth a place in the second team and as skipper that year I had the pleasure of his sulks all season long. Now you could argue that Andrew Strauss will have done his fair share of baby sitting with Kevin Pietersen but at least Pietersen can actually bat and bowl.
No skipper in the long history of the game could have got this lad to actually hit the cut strip with his so called leg spin and, with regards to his batting as Our Geoffrey often says “me mum would ‘ave scored more!”
A summer I had anticipated being full of stimulating exchanges of opinions on the game of cricket as I chauffeured him – another key captain’s job – from game to game became like escorting a sulking three year old.
He was oblivious to the fact that he was lucky to be getting a game at all, given we had no third team, plus free board and lodgings for his agoraphobic, burger-addicted girlfriend who seemingly had come to England solely to eat and watch television.
I began to think that I had been conned by years of watching Oz Aerobics into thinking that all Aussie women were goddesses. It was a long, long summer and the experience was not one we were too keen to repeat quickly again.
Of course, leading by example is what most skippers aspire to do but you quickly and conveniently forget the days when, as a young and not so young lad, you spent the odd Friday night somewhere you should not and in a state that would frighten your mother; so much so that a Saturday afternoon on a cricket pitch can appear a touch daunting awaiting the pain killers to kick in.
As skipper you clearly erase those memories and have little tolerance for your opening bowler turning up with ten minutes to the start of play, looking dafter than usual and clutching a McDonald’s Happy Meal. One of the reasons why bowlers rarely make good captains is their need for an enhanced calorific intake, but the primary one is that they are barely one screw further on than the ultimate unstable lunatic: the wicketkeeper.
My first spell as captain, as I mentioned earlier, had not gone well as a 14 year old but several seasons in charge of the Under Eighteens had gone better with the additional bonus of a bit of silverware as well. However, when our First Team skipper, Dave Tattersall, resigned at the end of 1989, after what remains a record seven straight seasons in charge, the bookies hardly had me as their favourite.
When my dad rang me from the club to tell me they had picked me as captain for the forthcoming season I thought he was pissed.
Back in the off-season of 1989-90, once I had recovered from the shock, I do not think I made one phone call attempting to butter up somebody to come and play for us the following season. Although we had a decent season the following year, one was enough for me at that point in my life as I was 27 going on 17.
The prospect of another summer listening to Browny’s endless views on how the game was played when he “was a lad” was not getting my juices going. Any more tales of batters scoring at ten an over and bowlers bowling like the wind would have sent me seeking the care home a few decades early.
My second term, this time for three years, was from 1999-2001 and about when we started to see the side changing as the need for better players with the introduction into the Aire Wharfe League became apparent; so the role began to involve the odd dreaded phone call over the winter.
To be honest, I hated these calls simply because there are so many idiots out there trying to poach players and offering ordinary, journeymen amateur cricketers little envelopes of cash to play a recreational sport. As a result many think they are far better than they ever will be.
My final two year stint was 2005-6, a holding and rebuilding role following a disastrous pass the parcel in the three years since I last relinquished the role involving three different captains.
Generally the majority of lads in any team are great and simply get on with it but you only need one to upset the whole afternoon. I have seen some monumental sulks over the years and, sorry lads, the bowlers are generally the main culprits.
This is probably because as a batter the principal reason for sulking is your dismissal and often the mode of it.
However, apart from (a) staring at the umpire clearly believing him or her to be blind which, if this were the case, is obviously pointless or (b) abusing the bowler, which again, is futile as he has ten more mates and you are out anyway or (c) throwing your bat, pads and any other gear you can rip off as you walk back to the shed there is not much more you can do apart from smashing the dressing room door to pieces with your bat which again is a bit stupid because you may need that bat next week.
You could do what my opening partner, Lee Margerison, did one afternoon after I had run him out without him being in the photo finish after we had discussed the benefits of quick singles. Neither of us being of Olympian sprinting ability, the plan was doomed from the outset and the only question was who would be sacrificed.
Shedding his kit faster than a lap dancer, Lee stormed off to march around the ground – not a good idea as far too easy for opposition players to goad you once again – to go sit with his dad, John and glare at the culprit – me – until I disintegrated and got out too.
The key to all this – I really am explaining the obvious here just in case this is being read by the odd bowler so slowly does it lads – is that as a batter you are off the pitch and slowly you will calm down, as indeed even Lee did about three weeks later although he did get me back the following season, once again run out by a country mile.
I may have smiled like the team player I was trying to be but I too wanted to cave his head in for a few minutes at least. Who says we batters are not passionate? As a bowler though you may well be back in the thick of it in another few minutes and you still have to concentrate in the event the ball finds you in your moment of turmoil whilst fielding; which it does with uncanny frequency.
One guy well remembered at the Villas for his spectacular meltdowns was our opening bowler Rick “Slats” Slater, who one day was copping it, along with everybody else at Horsforth CC, at the hands of their opener, a guy called Ben Clarke, who smashed us for a massive ton.
Clarke had a simple approach to batting in that he tried to club the opposition into submission and it was not long before Slats was waving the white flag over the red mist coming from his ears. He was “off on one” and blaming everybody regardless of the fact that it was he who was bowling a pile of rubbish and not anybody else.
Then he launched into a universal attack on our combined efforts in the field – presumably because we had failed to find the ball time and time again – only to sulk off down to the boundary at Third Man and let the next ball that came to him, going slower than a tortoise, dribble through his legs for four.
Largely due to the fact that by now Horsforth were past 300 and the game was over, the only thing we could do was piss ourselves. There have been many other great sulkers over the years and one or two do spring to mind to test any captain’s mettle.
In truth, you have to risk losing the odd player if they cannot toe the line but as a skipper what you cannot afford to lose is a tea lady. In darker days we used to operate a rota where, not unreasonably, each player’s wife / girlfriend /aunty / grandma / surrogate mother was expected to do one tea a year.
You would have thought that, as David Cameron is so keen on promoting our Big Society, that this would be no problem at all save for the fact that you are relying on the female of the species to act rationally; frankly there is more chance of me appearing on Question Time.
There was one grim summer when we had more selection issues with the tea rota than the senior teams and this caused me more mental torture than the batting order.
So if you are ever offered the challenge of leading the team and pitting your wits every week better to give as much attention to keeping your tea lady and groundsman sweet than worrying about the odd tantrum from the opening bowler.
It is a job that, once over the white line is very stimulating and can be very enjoyable, but it is not for the faint-hearted and you are never going to be everybody’s mate in the dressing room for as long as you are skipper.
I would love to do it again before I hang up those boots taking on the various challenges – although not the tea ladies – including that of being the prized scalp of the opposition fast bowler as they seek to topple the figurehead of the team.
The reality is that the only chance now would be as captain of the Stiffs (The Seconds) and the nasty fast bowler will be barely past puberty. This is why I admired Andrew Strauss so much in that he never, ever shirked being peppered by the fastest bowlers in the world as they sought to knock over England’s leader, surely one of the ultimate tests of courage.
By the time the second team come calling with any luck it will be somebody as slow as Molly, bowling a version of ECB euthanasia; a bit like death by slow injection.
12 – MAD MEN 1: THE FAT KID BITES BACK
“The goalkeeper is the jewel in the crown and getting at him should be almost impossible. It is the biggest sin in football to make him do any work.” George Graham
Remember when you lined up with your mates in a school playground for the ritual of the picking of the two teams and the fear of not wanting to be amongst the last to be picked, as smirking, smug “mates”, already picked, looked on?
Remember the comfort of looking to one side and seeing the fat lad and on your other shoulder, the token midget with NHS glasses? As bad as it looked, soon you would be in the comfort zone of the approved and selected enjoying watching with the rest, the final pickings; it was just part of growing up, call it meritocracy, call it the survival of the fittest, it was simply life.
This may not be advanced Darwinism Philosophy but I believe that many of the fat kids and midgets never forgot and always caught up with me in later life, having spent a lifetime since, aspiring to become something important and ensure next time there was a selection process they would be doing the picking to avoid any more humiliation.
Throughout my Barclays life I endured a succession of embittered, nasty and particularly short or fat line managers, many of whom were still smarting from those early days of rejection; patient bastards they were but this was now their time. Call it the Revenge of the Nonentity and if you are sneakily reading this in your office today, I bet you can name several of them.
Not all of these instantly written-off souls were destined to turn out to be bad lads and some were just unfortunate to have a different growth pattern to the rest of us; admit it, growing up as a kid could be torture.
There were always lads that were either bigger, stronger, had fewer spots or sprouted their first pubic hairs earlier. I vividly remember the day I spotted the beginnings of my first little hair down there – for the record it was my right testicle – and it was as if I had found gold.
Careful not to get it trapped in the zip on my C&A cords, I raced home, ditched the homework and inspected it at length. Every morning I would awake with a desire to see more and more of these curly little things growing like little tadpoles.
Suddenly the weekly swimming trips to Wapping Puddle, Bradford Council’s conversion of a Victorian slave wash house into an “Olympic” swimming pool, would not be as humiliating; maybe I did not need to change in the corner at such a furious pace that I often fell over entangled trousers in a heap, for yet more mockery from the darker, and consequently hairier, lads.
It was tough being fair skinned and blond but it was a lot tougher being fat. Still, it cannot be as hard for today’s fat kids as there must surely be comfort in numbers.
So there we were, freezing our balls off in the playground, whilst the two chosen captains pondered over the remaining choices. Midget Man always got picked first and announced it with that aggressive, clenched fist pummelling of the air that would revisit most of us in later life as the twat ruined our lives with sales targets nobody was remotely interested in, especially as achieving them was “rewarded” with the dubious prize of meeting the same vain fool.
All that was left was to throw the fat kid the goalie’s bib as he knew his fate by now, so small wonder they became embittered and troubled souls in future life. Forget about counselling the kids with sexuality issues, learning difficulties or silly things like ADHD (whatever that is); it is the fat kid freezing in goals that will be society’s time bomb, as he will never ever forget that early rejection nor life in those early years of frostbite, drowning in the goalmouth mud.
As a case in point, I refer you back to our keeper from the Swing Gate days, Martin “The Cat” Binns, or as he became affectionately known, Bagpuss the Psycho.
It was Big Al who recruited Bagpuss to the Swing team, albeit he had to fight hard to get his mate included by a sceptical Swing elite. He recalls a memorable debut where quite early in the game the opposition had a long range effort on goal that was met with a confident cry from Bagpuss, firmly fixed on his line, of “wide!”
Arms outstretched in confident manner, his look soon turned to visible panic as the ball was clearly not going wide and by this time, he was not going to be able to launch his bulky frame anywhere fast. The ball cannoned into the inside of the near post, rolled behind a startled Bagpuss right along the goal line and hit the other post before Bagpuss dived on it faster than a cream bun.
Bagpuss had arrived and he was to become a key part of the success of the team for many years. Now it is fair to say that Bagpuss could be volatile to say the least, indeed he had a very tetchy relationship with his close friend, Big Al, never more so than the Sunday morning they ended up falling out, and over, in spectacular manner.
Ironically we were playing at Beldon’s old “stadium”, Idle Rec. Bagpuss and Big Al had been bickering at each other all game and it finally erupted at the end in the smallest changing rooms in Bradford. Imagine two giant seals fighting it out on a small ice floe and that’s what we had as they clashed bellies and spat insults before grappling like two Sumo wrestlers.
I would have laughed but I couldn’t largely because they had both fallen on top of me, leaving me feeling like an earthquake victim. As lads do, they remain great friends today and, arguably, should really have just moved in with each other.
To say Bagpuss could be volatile would be understating it; he was so easy to wind up it was hard to resist lighting the blue touch paper and observing the fireworks. Every team needs a goalkeeper, but who in their right mind would volunteer to stand around a freezing goalmouth for over an hour and a half in full realisation that by the time the first shot rained in on goal, you would be too cold to move.
Added to this there were the bone crunching collisions at set pieces as the opposition sent up their heavy artillery, generally with only one thing in mind, that of smashing both ball and keeper into the back of the net.
Warm up time was vital and you have probably seen how the professional approaches this with aggressively energetic routines replicating save after save from a variety of angles. Bagpuss preferred a more gentle routine, requesting no more than a few crosses pumped into the air so he could get a feel of the ball and, sometimes, even astound us by catching a few.
It helps if there is only one man pumping the crosses in, so at least the keeper can focus, but after a few minutes of crosses from one of the guys, balls started to rain in on Bagpuss from the other side of the pitch like bombs from the sky. You could see the steam starting to build and by the time the game was about to start anything could happen as Bagpuss’s nerves were frayed, his eyes bloodshot.
Come halftime and he had endured a torrid forty five minutes; ruddy-faced and wide-eyed, he stomped off the pitch. It only took one innocent little comment from Topper, as he lit up his half time fag for a warm through (who needed Lucozade Sport?) and Bagpuss erupted – lunging for Topper – as fags and lighter went in opposite directions.
Not content with this Bagpuss launched into the first and only sprint I ever saw from him, as the rest of us, plus the opposition and referee, all watched as he chased Topper around in a succession of mad and ever-increasing circles.
Topper was in grave danger because he was laughing that much he could barely run, whereas Bagpuss was like a wounded grizzly and would have ate what flesh he could have found on Topper’s spindly body had he caught him.
Fortunately the referee decided the best thing to do would be to restart the game and at least cordon off the penalty area with Bagpuss inside it. It was one of the few halves of play that Bagpuss kept a clean sheet as the opposition forwards were terrified of going anywhere near the mad beast.
There was an even more glorious moment of Bagpuss madness a few years later, again at Idle Rec, which seemed to induce a regular implosion when he played there; this time the referee was the victim. Bagpuss had an old fashioned approach to any opposing forward who tried to take the ball around him – if he could not stop him by fair means then foul would have to do.
Having already being booked, he had transgressed yet again by flattening the opposition forward. The referee had little choice but to produce the red card and offer Bagpuss an early bath via the bucket of water and sponge in the little hut that masqueraded as a changing room.
What followed was priceless. With a very deliberate and precise manner, Bagpuss started to take his gloves off in a measured if dramatic style, finger by finger and without much further fuss, looked the referee squarely between the eyes and coolly said. “Will it be pistols or swords Sir?” as he challenged the bewildered referee.
As the referee pondered a suitable response – nowhere was this kind of abuse anticipated in the referees’ training –Bagpuss incredibly and nonchalantly slapped him across both cheeks with his gloves and strode off the pitch with the air of an army general.
Now I am not condoning violence towards officials at all, but this was hardly GBH and I am positive that when the shock had worn off, the referee could see the funny side. He certainly did not collapse in a heap, rolling several times and shrieking “penalty!”
It was pure theatre and amongst all the mad goalkeepers up and down the country, rarely can there have been one more in need of sectioning than Bagpuss. Although Fat Sam, the eventual successor to Bagpuss, had his moments he was more like a cuddly uncle than a potential raving lunatic; the odd cock up where he might let one through his legs was pretty rare and so life became almost becalmed in our penalty area for a while after Bagpuss retired.
However, I offer one final case in proof of my contention that all goalkeepers are one screw loose, a bizarre character who kept goal for one of the last Sunday teams I played for. By this time, I was in my early forties and very few of the lads I had grown up with were still playing, indeed it was only me and Dayks left.
Big Al had finally been put out to grass – literally – and for him and Bagpuss it was life on the golf course from now on although they could still bicker freely at each other up and down the fairways. I had just got back from holiday in early October when I found out that my current team had folded; given my age it looked like that was that as far as football was concerned.
And then I got a call out of the blue from Dayks, who by now had played for that many different teams we had lost count. He did like a change and never was the old adage “more clubs than Jack Nicklaus” more appropriate.
This particular season, the team in dire need of a new Number 9 shirt for an old fat lad, by now in the category of “tent size” was Prospect FC. The team had originated out of a junior club and this was their first attempt at senior football with a very young group of lads in need of an old head or two.
All of a sudden I was sharing a dressing room with lads half my age – save for one or two of us old recruits – and it was an education.
Joining Dayks and I was Tony Brown, who had actually played professionally for Leeds United and, although he gave the appearance of looking sixty and being as slow as a carthorse, he was the best player in the team by a country mile.
Being an ex-pro, he also knew all the tricks and one game stands out in particular. The season was going well and silverware looked a distinct possibility again even at this late stage in life. Tony and I had formed a very good partnership in central defence irrespective of the combined ages exceeding a hundred.
Up against us this day was a spotty young lad carrying the signs of a bad diet, a heavy night out and a death wish.
He was getting more and more wound up at his inability to get past these two old dogs and, eventually, turned to us and splurged out “you two are so old and shit that’s why you’ll never ever play at a better standard than this”.
Strictly speaking there was little I could contest in that assertion on a personal level, but Tony simply smiled that smile that said “watch out lad, the next few minutes could be painful” Quietly, and with the patience and precision of a Harley Street surgeon, each and every time Spotty got near the ball, Tony would inflict ever increasing degrees of pain all without the referee’s gaze ever being averted from the ball.
A tread on the toes here, a rake of the calf next and the odd subtle kidney punch; the poor kid was positively begging to get substituted in the end to get away from his tormentor. Quiet, but ruthless, very few passed Tony on the field.
Our regular keeper was actually the manager’s son, which, clearly was the sole reason he actually got picked at all. He was one of these lads that had all the kit and had copied every mannerism under the sun slavishly, courtesy of Sky, with more hand signals than a Rome traffic cop. However, his greatest contact with the ball was when he was picking it out of the back of the net; his deputy though was a total freak of nature.
I cannot remember the young lad’s name perhaps because I never quite got over the sight of my team’s goalkeeper wearing mascara, eye liner and black painted nails. He said he was a Goth, whatever that meant, but as long as he kept out of the showers, then that was fine by me.
On the subject of showers, very few of the young lads actually bothered and whilst not wanting to appear desperate to shower with young lads, the sight of half your team coming off a muddy football pitch, whipping on their jeans and heading off to the pub made me wonder when they did actually wash.
Some days though you simply had no option of a shower – this was after all Sunday football in Bradford – and many times I drove home, caked in mud, to stand outside my back door with a bucket and sponge to the bemusement of my neighbours.
This particular game we were playing was on the other side of Bradford; I cannot be that specific in case one of the occupants of the many prams that day has now grown up into a Hoodie, learnt to read and comes to torch my house.
We had had to change at the side of the pitch which was a real bind as I could never get my oil lathering properly done sat on the company car. Our keeper was about six stone wet and kept getting battered by the opposition – come back the fat keeper all is forgiven – getting jeered by the amassed ranks of prams on the touchline with assorted and liberally tattooed Kylies, Britneys and Shazneys.
Eventually he just flipped and screamed out “shut up you slags”.
Oh boy we all thought, this is going to kick off now. Sure enough the female mutants and the rest started to advance towards a terrified little Goth with their prams like a tank advancement. If it had been to the “March of the Valkyries” it would have been perfect.
It was a synchronised assault of peroxide, tattoos, bulging cellulite crammed Lycra tights and mad eyes. Even the mutants in the prams looked as of they were on for feeding time and never again did little Goth boy utter one word as, eventually and with a few translations, peace was restored and the prams disappeared to the pub.
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