Bodyguard (12 page)

I interrupted him. I grabbed him, hugged him and nearly fucking strangled him. He tightened up, almost rigid in shock. ‘I’m working undercover,’ I smothered him. Ushering him straight to the bar, I told him to shut the fuck up.

If he had blurted out ‘BBC’, we would have been in the shit, but I nailed him just in time. He was a big bloke, and very loud. He really could have blown this for us. Simon gave me the eyes to check everything was fine and Steve got the game too – realising it was time to get out, he made his excuses and left. He rang me the next day to apologise, not that he needed to. That was the curve ball I’d feared but he had read me like an old pro.

Occasionally it was hard, but to be the best, undercover in a
football
hooligan scenario, you had to ride that wave with radar eyes and walk that line – the one that meant everyone followed and looked up to you. Then you had to throw the Christians to the lions and get the hell out of there.

When we got to Stuttgart, I too became a Christian.

25 June 2006. England v Ecuador.

The national team had been at their most brilliantly average, scraping to victory against Paraguay in Frankfurt and then on to
Nuremburg to play Trinidad and Tobago, before drawing with Sweden in Cologne. Like you, I can’t remember the results, except that we made the last sixteen, but I can’t forget that many of the fans went on a cultural visit to the balcony where Hitler had delivered his big speeches, to soak in a real sense of history and show their sensitivity to the past.

Did they, bollocks!

We filmed the last of the racist bastards giving the Hitler salute, somehow lost in a moment of National Front bigotry, summoning from history the most odious character of the modern era, and
breaking
contemporary German law in the process by waving swastikas and making mock Nazi salutes.

‘My granddad killed your granddad,’ they chanted melodically.

Proud to be English – they claimed, but who would be proud of that, so far from the moral high ground that we took when good old Britain entered other people’s wars. If their granddads had killed in the name of freedom, they failed to recognise that they were pissing that liberty up the wall, and trampling all over their
ancestors
’ graves. ‘Five German bombers in the air,’ they entertained in almost choral proportions.

Yeah right. Wankers, the lot of them, some even as young as ten – nothing but aggression and racism in their tone. Even it was just the one per cent of the fans, the figure was way too high.

Much as I loved being here, it was same shit, different day – scorching heat, get your kit on, lager it up, and follow like-minded hooligans, with sporadic scuffles the order of the day. We had arrived in Stuttgart three days early. It was clear this was where it would next kick off, and we needed to get our bearings in advance. We had filmed Ronald Kirsch undercover – an acquaintance of our old mate Annis. Organising scraps was his game.

Against Trinidad, there was no whiff of tension – the fans wouldn’t lower themselves to that against such relative no-hopers – and against Sweden, it was the ultimate wide boy porn fantasy. There was no
trouble here – all the English just wanted to nail the blonde Swedish birds. Plus, there was that added notion that Sven might come good. Finally the Emperor’s New Clothes might come off and reveal the genius he’d been threatening us all with since we walloped Germany 5–1 in their own backyard all those years ago!

Alas, no. It was hard to hate him, and everyone knew he was going. In many ways he had become a bit English himself, meaning that come another England versus Sweden game, there was no point
wasting
any hostility. Instead, we enjoyed the sheer comedic potential of our manager singing both national anthems on the touchline,
knowing
that what lay ahead might be more tasty. In fact the Germany versus Poland fixture was more of an obvious flashpoint.

At the last sixteen, Stuttgart was built for the thug. The Germans had tried to lay on a big party atmosphere for the English. At one point, they had described our fans as the best in the world. Those Germans, and their sense of humour, hey? The square was as always the focal point – another hot day was looming and these huge
buildings
towered above the traditional magnet for England fans. I must have counted, at best, a dozen Ecuador fans. The booze was flowing from ten in the morning and the Germans were great hosts – sadly, our lads had different agendas for a party.

Predictably, the fans were burned to a crisp, shirts off and no sun tan lotion on, standing on the steps with twenty pints of lager inside them, wanting to fight the world. Apparently there was a match on. This is a snapshot of the English hooligan abroad. The Germans were out, too, even though it wasn’t their gig. It was, after all, their country, not that it felt like that.

And then it started. We were standing around chatting, Simon on the covert camera so I could pretend to get pissed, when a German girl wearing the national scarf walked past the steps and the massive Greek-style pillars where the world had gathered. The enclosed atmosphere said trouble was on the horizon. England were chanting the usual bullshit – anger in the air.

They approached the German bird and someone threw a pint pot at her, so her knight in shining armour tried to have a go back at the English lout. The next thing I knew, a load of German passers-by who had nothing to do with football didn’t so much get caught up in it as they positively joined in. Again, the weapon of mass destruction emerged – the plastic chairs were brought out ready for another night’s hurling. Caught up in the middle of this, a young Turk got punched in the face right under Simon’s covert camera. Another thug took his picture – then the English scum smashed his specs and drenched him in beer. His face was bloodied. The hooligans were cheering, spitting and pissing on the German flag.

This was a revenge attack for all the incidents when Leeds fans had been stabbed at the hands of Galatasaray, even though week in week out, all this lot hated Leeds. We were left on the steps, caught up in a cordon of German riot police.

‘We need to get out of here, mate,’ I said to Simon. ‘We’re gonna get caught up in this.’

At the back, the coppers were circling. I spotted our very own Richard Bilton and his cameraman Nick Woolley. I knew we were going to get busted. I tried to exit through the guys at the top of the square. I gave my colleagues the eye, telling them not to say anything. Their back-watcher, Bunny Coleman, could see the shit we were in – he tried to create a sideshow so we could get out but I had that sinking feeling that we had been trapped. Caught up in the filming, I had made a schoolboy error. I hadn’t been looking for an escape route. We were there to film, and had got right to the heart of it, but now the riot police stormed in, grabbing everyone regardless of guilt. I knew we were done.

As the oldest-looking guys, it also seemed to the cops that we were the ringleaders. We were fucked. They came for me first. In seconds, I had plasticuffs on me. I was dragged along the street to their van, the first to be thrown in. All around us, either in the know or
working on journalistic instinct, the snappers were having a field day. The overt BBC crew were also there! To their credit, they put their gear down and didn’t shoot me being thrown in, not that it mattered. We looked like the ringleaders. I didn’t resist – just for the drama and authenticity of it all.

Inside, it was a completely sealed unit with two benched seats, one either side, and a grilled unit in the corner. Next came a West Brom fan, followed by a Man U thug and a Southampton piece of shit. Simon was still outside.

‘Where you from? What’s gonna happen?’ they asked me. They were giddy at their arrest, looking up to me as the leader. Inside, I was pissing myself. I was in a small amount of shit and didn’t really know how this would play out, nor if I would have to play the BBC card. But, I also knew I’d been granted access that I would have craved if it was pre-planned. My concern was that I had two spare batteries and two spare tapes on me. That was my only weakness.

Bang. The door opened. Simon was next into the van. ‘Everything OK?’ I asked.

‘Yeah yeah,’ he replied, a massive grin on his face.

‘Everything still working?’ I coded.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ he nodded.

I told the other thickheads that he’d had a kick in the nuts and thankfully his meat and two veg were in order. They bought the whole thing. ‘What’s gonna happen now?’ they asked me.

‘Nothing much. They’ll take us down the nick and then let us go tomorrow morning.’ I was playing the hard man who had been nicked a thousand times before.

It must have been fifty degrees in there. We were dripping with sweat. Then the door flew open again. The next one in was still
singing
‘Engerland, Engerland’ as he was thrown in. Don’t you show some humility at the moment of arrest rather than breaking into song? ‘You fucking German cunts, I’ll have you, we’ll fucking have you. We’re fucking Millwall. You’ve never fucked with Millwall,’ he
put it at his most eloquent best. Who couldn’t be prouder? ‘We’ve fucking done ’em!’ he shouted

There were just six of us in the back and two belonged to the BBC! He was nineteen, both in stone and age, wearing just his shorts.

‘Yeah, I’m from West Ham and we fucking hate you, so shut the fuck up,’ I snarled at him.

At this point, the pissed-up Millwall yob got up to confront me, just as the driver pulled off. It was probably 6 by 4 in there and the copper put his foot down, which left Millwall so wasted that he fell to the floor, spewing up all over the van. ‘Get me up, get me up,’ he whined like a baby as we all moved our legs out of the way. There wasn’t much room in the first place but now you couldn’t move for puke, most of which he was now rolling around in. ‘I need a piss, I need a piss,’ he shouted. That would be the next lovely stench coming our way.

The West Brom fan had managed to get his hands round the front – god knows how. He still had his plasticuffs on.

‘Pull my shorts down, pull my shorts down. I need to have a piss,’ Millwall roared.

‘You’re not having a fucking piss in here,’ I pulled rank.

‘I’m not fucking doing that,’ said the Brummie.

Then he delivered his ultimate death sentence. ‘You don’t know who I fucking am,’ he screamed. ‘I’m fucking Millwall and I was one of the boys who killed that bloke outside the fucking station.’

Jesus, what a dickhead, but bingo, and Simon was filming. What a stupid thing to say – a live confession of an unsolved stabbing. That’s what we were here for. If I had thought about it, I really would have tried to get nicked before, and worked the show from the inside. The van was clearly where crooks put their medals on the table. I was, after all, the first to be arrested, just as I’d been warned at Heathrow – I stood out as a father figure-cum-ringleader, twice the age of many of the new breed of thugs. The downside to that tactic, though, was having to show your BBC hand. It wasn’t something that had even
come up in discussion, because Simon and I backed ourselves as experienced operators – it wasn’t even a consideration.

Then Millwall pissed himself. We had no choice but to lift our feet again, while he found it hysterical … for about two seconds – then the joke was on him.

The driver slammed on the brake, sending Fatboy flying from the back all through the piss and the vomit to the front of the van down the middle area between us all, and back again to the rear of the van.

Outside stood the camp. This was a specially constructed detention centre, fenced off from the main police station just for the World Cup hooligans – or, as most people called them, the English. Simon and I gave each other the look – now wasn’t the time to say we were
undercover
. To do so at anything other than the last possible minute meant that we were failures in our field. We were along for the ride now, and had to stay in character, safe in the knowledge that we had done nothing. We would get what we could until our gear was seized, and then whip out our press cards. My only concern was that I wasn’t sure if we were getting head shots or filming somewhere near the midriff.

There was an inevitable pause before the doors opened. Fatboy from Millwall was left on his own. Getting out without slipping in the piss and the chunder was hard enough for us.

Dozens of English fans were already lined up outside. I just thought this was Colditz all over again, and I was waiting for
The Great Escape
to pipe up. I scanned the line to see if there was anyone I knew, or anyone I knew I had filmed. This was not the time to be recognised.

Amid the shouting and ranting, I had a quiet word with Simon. ‘Stay together, and let’s choose our moment to show them our hand,’ I said calmly.

He told me he still had all the kit. We were almost definitely still rolling.

The Germans ran a tight ship – this time, some three weeks into the tournament, they were ready. We had been quickly outflanked by German police, cutting us off from everything, breaking into the
cordon and nabbing the perceived ringleaders. I clearly looked the part. We were playing it by ear, drunk enough to play drunk but sober enough to be aware. Drinking ten or so pints a day had become routine.