Football Crazy

Superintendent Screwer fixed Hawks with a beady eye. When would they ever learn? “Where there is football, Sergeant, there is football hooliganism. Having previously been stationed at Leeds I know that for a fact; and I know all about the cancer in our society that football hooliganism has become.”

“
With respect sir, what few supporters the Town still have are nothing like Leeds United supporters.”

Screwer glared at him. If Hawks had been the office door the paint would have blistered. “Respect?” he screamed. “Respect, Sergeant Hawks? You aren't showing me any fucking respect! If you were you wouldn't be arguing with me, you would be making plans to adequately police Frogley Town's opening game of the season!”

Hawks bit his lip. Retirement and that cottage in the Lakes suddenly seemed very far away. “Yes sir.”

Screwer drew in his horns a little. “Football supporters are the same the world over, Sergeant. Animals. Nothing more, nothing less. Take my word for it, just because the fans of Frogley Town have yet to reveal their true colours doesn't mean to say that one day they aren't going to.”

“
No sir.”

The horns shot back out again as if spring-loaded. “Well just let them! They will not find the Frogley Police Force wanting. Not while my name is Herman Screwer they won't. We'll be ready for them, Sergeant. Ready to whip them into line; ready to break them; ready to smash the brainless bastards into submission!” He suddenly smashed his right fist into his left hand. The splat of the bone of his knuckles colliding with the flesh of his palm made Hawks wince. “Crowd control, that's the name of the game. Do you know who my hero is, Sergeant?”

Hawks didn't, and didn't want to, he just wanted to leave. “No sir?”

Screwer offered a clue. “He rode a white horse.”

Hawks thought for a moment. “Attila the Hun, sir?”

Screwer smiled in fond recollection. “'The Policeman on the White Horse', Sergeant. 1923 Cup Final at Wembley. One man controlling the uncontrollable; a crazed mob of over two hundred thousand. Now that's what you call crowd control! What are we like for tear gas?”

FOOTBALL CRAZY

Copyright © Terry Ravenscroft, 2009

Cover by Tony Colligan
www.tctoons.com

A RAZZAMATAZZ PUBLICATION

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About the author

The day after Terry Ravenscroft threw in his mundane factory job to write television comedy scripts he was involved in a car accident which left him unable to turn his head. Since then he has never looked back. Born in New Mills, Derbyshire, in 1938, he still lives there with his wife Delma and his mistress Divine Bottom (in his dreams).

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****

Also by Terry Ravenscroft

CAPTAIN’S DAY

JAMES BLOND - STOCKPORT IS TOO MUCH

INFLATABLE HUGH

DEAR AIR 2000

DEAR COCA-COLA

LES DAWSON’S CISSIE AND ADA

STAIRLIFT TO HEAVEN

I’M IN HEAVEN

THE RAZZAMATAZZ FUN EBOOK

ZEPHYR ZODIAC

(Will be published early in 2012)

Sample pages of each of these titles can be read at the end of this book.

****

FOOTBALL CRAZY

“
Football isn’t a matter of life and death. It’s more important than that” – Bill Shankly

When the Frogley Town Supporters Club pre-season meeting was due to begin only six people occupied the hundred or so chairs set out in rows in the upstairs concert room of the Shoulder of Mutton. Stanley Sutton, the Chairman of the Supporters Club, suspected that even one of the six who had bothered to attend was a tramp who had come in out of the cold.

Aged sixty four, Stanley was about five feet four inches tall and no more than seven stones wet through; which he frequently was, by virtue of his tramping the mean streets of Frogley every spare moment he had, stoically selling tickets for the Frogley Town Development Fund Weekly Prize Draw.

He decided to give it another five minutes, even though he knew it was unlikely that anyone else would turn up. He looked with sadness at the sea of empty chairs. What was the matter with folk, he asked himself for the umpteenth time, didn’t they want a football team in Frogley?

Five minutes passed. Nobody else turned up and one who had turned up went, claiming he thought he might have left the chip pan on. Stanley hoped he had and that it had set fire to his kitchen and burned his house down, then quickly got the meeting under way before anyone else came up with some other lame excuse to leave.

He rapped on the trestle table with his knuckles. “I declare t’ meeting open. First item on t’ agenda is approval of t’ minutes of last meeting. Do I have a proposer?” He scanned the rows of chairs. No one seemed interested in proposing the motion, not least the suspected tramp, who had by now fallen asleep and was gently snoring. Stanley asked the pitiful assembly again, this time almost pleading with them. “Anybody?”

“
What’s t’ point, Stanley?” It was Alf Nadin, a man of about Stanley’s age, from the front row.

“
T’ point Alf?” said Stanley, surprised at such a question from a man who was chair of the local pigeon fancier’s club and thus knew full well the formal procedure adopted by official meetings. “T’ point is we can’t have a meeting until we’ve approved t’ minutes of t’ last meeting.”

Alf sighed. “I mean what’s t’ point of having a meeting at all?”

“
What does tha mean, at all?”

“
Well, tha were at t’ club’s AGM last week so tha knows as well as I do that if t’ club doesn’t pay off their overdraft t’ bank has threatened to foreclose on them. And there’s about as much chance of them paying off t’ overdraft as there is of them winning t’ European Cup. I don’t know why we bother. They’re t’ worst team in whole of t’ football league; a right load o’ wankers they are, and no mistake.”

Stanley knew there was some truth in this but would have chosen death in preference to admitting it. Instead he defended his beloved team, his jaw thrust out in defiance. “No they aren’t, Alf. No they’re not.”

“
No, you’re right Stanley,” Alf conceded. “Wankers know what they’re doing.”

“
Don’t make fun of my football team, Alf,” Stanley admonished him. “I love t’ Town. Sometimes when I’m slaving away on that Bone Pulveriser at Price’s Pie Factory t’ thought of seeing t’ Town of a Saturday is t’ only thing as keeps me sane.”

“
Well tha’rt not going to be sane for much longer then, is all I can say,” said Alf, with an air of impending doom. “Because mark my words, Frogley Town is going to finish up like another Accrington Stanley, Stanley.”

Fully aware that Accrington Stanley had been re-admitted to the Coca-Cola League in 2006 after spending years in the wilderness, Stanley was about to seize on this as a probable likelihood if ever Frogley Town, God forbid, were to suffer a similar fate, when Alf continued, “Except that Accrington Stanley got back in to t’ league eventually. If t’ Town drop into t’ Conference they’ll be there till kingdom come.”

Deep down Stanley knew Alf was right in his forecast of what would happen if ever Frogley Town lost their league status. The feeling of abject misery this gave him could not have been worse if the entire dark forces of The Lord of the Rings had suddenly descended on him.

Following a defeat at White Hart Lane a Tottenham
Hotspurs supporter ran to the Spurs dugout and
threw a punch at their manager, Glen Hoddle.
It
was the first recorded case of the fan hitting the shit

Standing on the Lancashire/Yorkshire border, directly on the flight path of airplanes landing at Manchester Ringway Airport, Frogley is a town of some ninety odd thousand souls (and a hundred and thirty two odd souls, who reside in the local mental hospital, but more of that later). Someone once called Frogley a sleepy little town, and if that is the case it’s probably because there’s never very much going on there worth waking up for. Nor could it ever be accused of being pretty; old mill towns never are, and Frogley is no different. Once, when the town council erected a notice 'You Are Now Entering Frogley, Please Drive Slowly', it wasn't long before one of the more astute residents had painted out the word 'Slowly' and replaced it with 'Quickly'. The notice, changed from a polite request to a piece of helpful advice, was considered by most residents to be entirely appropriate.

The airplanes pass over the drab millstone grit houses at a height of about five thousand feet, and if a passenger were to look down he would be able to pick out the home of Stanley Sutton quite easily - not because it was a large house, it wasn't, it was a two-up two-down in the middle of row up on row of terraced houses - but because Stanley had painted every inch of his house in the Frogley Town Football Club colours of red, green and yellow stripes. From that height it stood out, as the captain of an American Airlines Boeing 757 had once remarked to his co-pilot, in language no less colourful than the Suttons’ house, ‘like a nail in a black’s ass’.

If, maybe due to severe turbulence over the Pennines or the pilot making a bit too merry with the duty free, the airplane had happened to be flying over Frogley at a height of five hundred feet instead of five thousand feet, and the date happened to be August 2
^nd
2010, a passenger looking down on Stanley Sutton's house might have seen Stanley serenely applying a fresh coat of paint to one of the yellow stripes on the front of his house. However one would have had to be passing the humble house on Abbatoir Street on foot to have overheard the conversation that was taking place between Stanley and his wife Sarah Jane, after she’d returned from shopping and observed what Stanley was doing.

“
I see as you've enough money for paint then, Stanley Sutton,” she snapped.

Stanley didn't pause in his brushwork. “T' house has to look right for t' start of t' new football season, Sarah Jane.”

Sarah Jane sniffed her disapproval. “I haven't had a new coat in ten years. T' house has had ten new coats in that time.”

“
Nine”, Stanley corrected her. “I didn't paint it in 1998.”

“
Only because tha fell off t' roof in 1997 and broke thee back. Six months tha were off work and not a penny coming in apart from t' pittance tha got off t' sick. Not as it would have made any difference because t' more money we have t' more tha spends on that Godforsaken football team of thine.”

Stanley stopped painting for a moment and regarded his wife. It was completely beyond his comprehension that he should have to explain such a thing, but he did nevertheless. “Town's my life, Sarah Jane. I’d do owt for t’ Town”

Sarah Jane scowled at him. “Aye, and don't I bloody well know it.”

She made to go inside.

“
Have you seen owt of Fentonbottom?” Stanley enquired of her. “Only I haven't seen him all morning.”