Football Crazy (5 page)

Parks ignored the jibe. “If it keeps being muddy like this I'm going to start wearing a shower cap.”

“
A shower cap? Do they allow you to do that in the Coca-Cola League?”

“
Well I don't see why not.” Parks reasoned. “I mean that bloke who played for Southend, what was he called, Sodje, he wore a bandana.”

Hanks looked puzzled. “A banana isn't going to keep much mud off your hair, Parksy.”

Parks looked at his team mate in disbelief. “A
bandana,
bollock brain, a
bandana.
Like a turban thing.”

“
Oh,” said Hanks.

Such was the chit chat that morning which passed for conversation amongst the Frogley town squad.

Martin Sneed, the sports correspondent of the Frogley Advertiser, a tall, thin man with the jaundiced look of someone who has failed to achieve his ambitions, sat down at his computer, adjusted his trademark polka-dot bow tie and prepared to pen the first article he'd written about Frogley Town since the end of the last football season. As in previous years it would be a piece about the Town's prospects for the coming campaign.

Sneed was in a good mood today, having had a little tickle on the gee gees at last night's race meeting at Pontefract, thanks to information from an inside source, so he didn’t intend to be too hard on the town's football team this time round. Notwithstanding that he was a newspaperman, and whatever he wrote would have to be the truth. But he now had extra money in his pocket and the sun was shining at last, so he saw no reason why on this occasion the truth couldn't be written whilst his usual iron fist was sheathed in a velvet glove.

He already had his headline and now quickly typed it in. 'Whither Frogley Town?' Then he added 'By Martin Sneed, The Man They Can't Shut Up.' Although he knew that his by-line would be included automatically, Sneed always typed it in as he liked to see it written down in black and white as it served to remind him of what he was all about, journalistically speaking.

He considered the headline for a moment. Could it be improved on, made more meaningful perhaps? How about 'What's In Store For Frogley Town This Season?' which meant exactly the same but would be more easily understood by the sort of people who read the Advertiser, half of whom probably wouldn't know what the word 'whither' meant.

He quickly came to a decision. No, leave it as it was. Educate the buggers. Better still, why not make the headline into a pun? 'Wither Frogley Town?' Because that's what would continue to happen to the club, or his name wasn't Martin Sneed, The Man They Can't Shut Up. The football team had been withering for years, why should this year be any different? However he dispensed with the idea as quickly as he’d thought of it, reasoning that if the readership of the Advertiser didn't know what 'whither' meant then they certainly wouldn't understand the cleverness and subtlety of replacing it with the word 'wither'. Besides, hadn't he decided to go easy on the Town this once?

He considered what to write. Over the years he had said just about everything there was to say about Frogley Town and finding something new to say wasn't getting any easier. There were only so many ways you could say crap. And they would be crap again this season, as sure as God made little green apples. They had already convincingly lost their opening three pre-season friendlies, and the most recent of them to a team that had finished only mid-table in the Unibond League the previous season.

Recalling this a headline immediately suggested itself to Sneed. 'Unibond Team Paste Frogley'. He filed it in his mind under 'Sarcastic Puns' for possible future use.

He began to type. 'As the start of another football season fast approaches, what fate awaits our local team, Frogley Town? Sadly this column has seen no evidence to suggest there will be anything ahead of them other than the usual uphill struggle for survival. When I last spoke to manager Donny Donnelly he remarked that all his players were treated the same, that there were no 'stars' in his team. This column will not argue with that summation, because, and staying with the analogy of comparing footballers to celestial bodies, the nearest thing to a star the Town have would be an extremely modest-sized burnt out asteroid.' He paused for a moment, smiling to himself. ‘Extremely modest-sized burnt out asteroid’. Good, that; worthy of Fleet Street itself.

At the thought of Fleet Street Sneed’s mind began to wander. It was really the place where he belonged. With the big boys. And he would have been there too if there had been any justice in the world. He was as good as any of them. Better than most. But they'd rejected him. All of them. The Mail, the Mirror, the Sun, the Star, even the Sport for Christ’s sake. Not out of hand of course, well except for the Telegraph. They'd all interviewed him, listened to his views, read the portfolio of articles he'd written over the years for the Advertiser and other provincial newspapers on which he’d worked, and all of them had been complimentary about his work. The Sport had been particularly enthusiastic. Especially about his article on the gymnast who had been abducted by aliens from Mars and nine months later had given birth to a slightly green baby midway through an exercise on the beam. (In fact this had been a fictional rent money article he’d written for 'Strange Tales' magazine but the people at the Sport had thought it was a hard news story and Sneed hadn’t been about to advise them otherwise.)

The Sport had also enthused about his end of column filler about the Championship goalkeeper who kept having wet dreams every night and couldn't keep clean sheets. But when it came to the crunch they wouldn’t give him the break he deserved and nor would any of the others. ‘Very good, excellent in fact, but not
quite
our style.' was one of the things they'd said to sweeten the pill. 'I feel sure that your undoubted talents will quickly be taken on board by another newspaper.' was another. And other lame excuses in similar vein. But they didn't make the pill any less bitter. Well bollocks to them, it was their loss.

He turned his attention to his article. However his reflections on how he had been shunned by Fleet Street had soured his mood, all thoughts of going easy on the Town had disappeared, and as he started to type the usual invective he employed when writing about Frogley Town had returned.

When Clarence Shufflebottom decided what he wanted to do with his life he changed his name to Dave Rave by deed poll, reasoning that people might make fun of a television presenter with the name of Clarence Shufflebottom. The fact that a large proportion of the viewing public make fun of television presenters anyway, regardless of their name, and that the sorry attempts in the art of television presenting by the likes of Jamie Theakston, Steve Penk, Keith Chegwin and others too numerous and trite to mention, have probably been responsible for more laughs than the combined efforts of the Goon Show and Monty Python's Flying Circus, had never crossed Dave's mind.

Dave was doing very well for himself, thank you very much. At the age of only twenty two he was Frogley Radio's number one presenter, and had a business card that said so - 'Dave Rave - Frogley Radio's Number One Presenter', the card proudly proclaimed in italic gold lettering. That he was Frogley Radio's only presenter, in addition to being Frogley Radio's newsreader, football commentator, disc jockey, advertising space seller, switchboard operator, host of 'Friday Feng Shui Phone-in with Mr Wong', odd job man and lavatory cleaner, was something Dave chose to ignore when it came to the matter of promoting himself.

In any case it was only a matter of time before he’d make Frogley Radio so popular that the station’s owners would be able to afford to employ other people to perform the tasks that currently came within his domain; although he thought he might hang onto the lavatory cleaning as he always had his best ideas when he was on the lavatory, and he would still be able to commandeer it for thinking purposes whenever he needed it on the grounds that he was cleaning it.

But by then he would probably be off anyway. Snapped up by Greater Manchester Radio or Radio Leeds, or even, dare he say it, Radio One. Then, after conquering that, television!

He would probably have to do Children's TV first like they all did, even Noel Edmonds had to start on that, but very soon after would come fronting quiz shows and compilations and after that the ultimate....hosting the Brit Awards! He scarcely dared think about it. But why shouldn't he think about it? He was certainly good enough, talented enough. It was bound to happen one day. Bound to. It was written. He’d written it, on a piece of lavatory paper one day when he was between ideas.

For the time being though he was on his way to the Frogley Mental Hospital. Some of his biggest fans were incarcerated there and he was short of a few interviews he needed for the piece on Rock and Roll Legends he was doing on his daily 'The Dave Rave Show'

As Joe Price's form of dress had remained unchanged for over fifty years so had the decor and accoutrements of his office. Not a single concession had been made to the twenty-first century, or the second half of the twentieth century for that matter. Even the large black Bakelite telephone on Price's desk was the same telephone that had been there when he took over the office from his father over four decades earlier.

Price liked his office the way it was, so why alter it? He could only replace the walnut wall panelling with some other walnut panelling, because you couldn't get anything better than walnut panelling to line your office walls with, so why bother? And why change his desk? Would another desk be any more impressive than the six feet by four feet solid mahogany, Moroccan leather-topped desk at which he was now sitting, awaiting the arrival of Stanley Sutton? Price doubted it very much.

The Wilton carpet had been changed in 1989, but only for another Wilton carpet in exactly the same design. The man from Batt's, Frogley's leading purveyor of carpets and soft furnishings, had tried to talk Price into a different, harder wearing carpet, a 'more suitable for office use' carpet, as he had put it, but Price would have none of it. The Wilton about to be replaced had lasted for over thirty years and that was hard enough wearing for Joe Price. Besides, when he had people on the carpet he wanted them to be aware they were on a proper carpet, a gradely carpet, a Wilton carpet, not some over-priced rubbishy synthetic job.

There was a tap on the door and Price's secretary Miss Pimlott, spinster of this parish, stepped inside. “Stanley Sutton to see you, Mr Price”, she announced.

Price looked up from the proposed plans of a new factory he was thinking of building in Scotland, a country he had convinced himself was starved of decent meat and potato pies - or why the hell else would they eat haggis?

“
Well show him in woman, show him in,” Price growled, “Let t' dog see t' rabbit.”

On the other side of the door, Stanley, hearing Price's words, had no doubt who was the dog and who was the rabbit. Miss Pimlott turned to him and snapped. “Take your cap off then!”

Stanley snatched his cap off as though it were on fire, made to tuck it under his arm, then changed his mind and decided to keep hold of it for wringing purposes. Miss Pimlott gestured impatiently to him to enter. He waited for a moment, took a deep breath, then shuffled slowly past her and into Price's office. A man leaving the comparative comfort of the condemned cell for the hanging chamber could hardly have entered with less trepidation. Barely across the threshold he stopped, licking his dry lips.

Price beckoned him and said, “Well get over here, mon. Jump to it.”

Stanley almost ran to Price's desk, stumbling and almost falling in his rush to get there. Price looked him up and down. “So tha'rt Stanley Sutton?”

“
Aye. Sorry, Mr Price. Don't give me t' sack, please. T' Town would never be able to manage if I lost me job.”

“
Oh? And why might that be?”

The words rushed out in a torrent. “Well it takes most of me wages to have t' Development Fund Prize Draw tickets printed and if there were no Development Fund Prize Draw tickets I wouldn't be able to go out selling 'em and then there wouldn't be enough money to pay t' players Mr Price, sir.”

Price considered Stanley’s outpourings for a moment then got to his feet: then, adopting his policy of always making visitors to his office sweat a bit, he hooked his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets, went to the window and looked out. When he had considered that Stanley had sweated for long enough, Price turned to him. “Tha'rt Chairman of t' football club supporters club, they tell me?”

“
They're my whole life, t' Town, Mr Price.”

Price raised an eyebrow. “
Are
they now?”

Stanley panicked. The last thing he wanted was for Price to think that he put the Town before his job at Price's Pies. “But I'll stop supporting them if tha says so, Mr Price. Just say t' word, Mr Price. I'll....”

Price cut him off short. “Stop grovelling, Sutton.”

Stanley clammed up immediately and held his breath. Price went to his desk, opened a drawer and took out a postcard-size sepia-coloured photograph. He looked at it for a moment then turned to Stanley and regarded him as a Master of Hounds might look at an unruly hound.

Stanley shuffled his feet uncomfortably, unsure of what was expected of him. He said, “Shall I carry on grovelling now, Mr Price?”

Price ignored his words. “This afternoon, Sutton, I am going to buy Frogley Town Football Club,” he proclaimed.