David Peace - The Damned Utd

I’ve known Jimmy Gordon since I was a player at Middlesbrough. Doesn’t work hard enough on the field , he once wrote in a report on me. Jimmy didn’t like me much then. He hated me. Thought I was a right bloody show-off. Big-headed. Selfish. He once told me, Instead of scoring thirty goals a season, why don’t you score twenty-five and help someone else to score fifteen? That way the team’s ten goals better off . I didn’t listen to him. I wasn’t interested. But I was when I went to Hartlepools. First job I had, I tried to get Jimmy to come and coach for us. But Jimmy wasn’t interested. That changed when we got to Derby. I spent five hours round his house –

He said, ‘Why me? All we do is argue.’

‘That’s why I want you,’ I told him.

Five hours later, Jimmy still didn’t like me. But he had his price. Everybody has. So I found him a house and I got the chairman to pay a £ 1,000 interest-free deposit on it –

But Jimmy still didn’t like me much then. Jimmy still doesn’t like me much now. Jimmy looks around the room –

‘What the bloody hell are we doing here?’ he asks me –

I’m sat in that office. Don’s office . In that bloody chair. Don’s chair . Behind that fucking desk. Don’s desk . My youngest on my knee. To cheer me up . A brandy in my hand. To warm me up –

‘They’ll never forgive you,’ says Jimmy. ‘Not after all the things you’ve said. They never forget. Not round here.’

‘That right, is it?’ I laugh. ‘So why did you agree to come and join me then?’

‘Much as I don’t like you,’ he smiles, ‘I don’t like to think of you in trouble.’

I finish my brandy. I ask him, ‘You want a lift tomorrow morning?’

‘So I can drive you back?’

I pick my lad up off my knee. I put him down. I wink at Jimmy –

‘Best not keep them waiting any longer,’ I tell them both.

* * *

Welcome to the edge of the world. To Hartlepools –

You can drop off the edge of the world at Hartlepools. On the beach at Seaton Carew. Bottom of the entire Football League and up for re-election again –

Many men will never know. Many men will never understand –

Heaven is here. Here where the Victoria Ground was cursed by a Zeppelin bomb, here where the roofs now leak and there are buckets in the boardroom to catch the rain, where the stand is made of wood and the terraces are covered in chicken feathers, where the chairman is a five-foot millionaire who made his money as a credit draper and who bugs your office and your house, and where the players are adulterers, drunks, thieves and gamblers who play in their street socks. This is heaven here –

For you and Pete, together again and working again –

The youngest manager in the Football League –

You on £40 a week, Pete on £24 –

The bucket-and-sponge man –

‘ We’re in the shit good and proper, make no mistake,’ says Pete. ‘We’ll be asking for re-election at the end of the season. Bound to finish bottom. Lower if we could. Something’s got to be done about this lot and done fucking quick .’

But it’s you who paints the stand. Who unblocks the drains. You who cuts the grass. Who empties the rainwater from the buckets. You who goes round the colliery clubs. Who sits in committee rooms and stands on stages, asking for donations. You who borrows hand-me-down training kits from Sheffield Wednesday. Whose wife does the typing. You who takes your Public Service Vehicle Licence so you can drive the team bus. Who organizes the cars to Barnsley when you can’t afford a coach. You who buys the team fish and chips. Who goes without wages for two months –

The newspapers, the photographers and the television cameras, all there to witness and record the whole bloody show. The pens, the tape recorders and the microphones, all there for that big bloody open mouth of yours :

‘ Age does not count. It’s what you know about football that matters. I know I am better than the five hundred-odd managers who have been sacked since the war. If they had known anything about the game, they wouldn’t have lost their jobs. In this business you’ve got to be a dictator or you’ve no chance, because there is only one way out for a small club: good results and then more good results –

‘ How hard it is to get them results, few people will ever know .’

Should I talk the way you want me to talk?

The bloody microphones and that bloody mouth of yours –

Say the things you want to hear?

Infecting the press. Inspiring the players. Infuriating the chairman –

This is the start of it all. This is where it all begins –

That new accent. That new drawl –

Hartlepools, 1965 .

* * *

Pre-season. Fun and games. The 1974–75 season begins for real in sixteen days. Before that Leeds United, the League Champions, will play in three friendly matches and in the Charity Shield at Wembley against Liverpool, the FA Cup holders. The first friendly is at Huddersfield Town on Saturday, the day after tomorrow –

‘Enough pissing around,’ I tell them. ‘Let’s have a few games. Seven-a-sides.’

Hands on their hips, the first team shift their weight from foot to foot.

‘Bloody get on with it,’ I tell them. ‘Come on, get fucking moving.’

The team turn to look at Syd Owen, stood at the back with his hands on his hips –

Syd shrugs. Syd spits. Syd says, ‘Hope no one gets hurt.’

‘Thank you, Sydney,’ I shout back. ‘Now come on! Two teams.’

They take their hands off their hips but they still don’t move.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ I shout. ‘Harvey over there, Stewart here. Reaney there, Cooper here. McQueen there, Hunter here. Bremner there, Cherry here. Lorimer there, Giles here. Bates there, Clarke here. Madeley over there, and I’ll be here. Jimmy gets the whistle. Now let’s get fucking going —’

They amble about, pulling on bibs, kicking balls away, scratching their own.

Jimmy puts the ball down in the centre circle of the practice pitch.

‘We’ll kick off,’ I tell him, tell them all.

So Jimmy blows the whistle and off we go –

For hours, hours and hours, I run and I shout, but no one speaks and no one passes, no one passes until I finally get the ball and am about to turn, about to turn to my left with the ball on my right foot, on my right foot when someone puts me on my arse –

Flat on my arse like a sack of spuds, moaning and groaning in the mud .

I look up and I see my youngest lad, my youngest lad watching and worried. I get up and I see them watching, watching and whispering –

‘I told you someone would get hurt,’ smiles Syd. ‘Bloody told you.’

No one is laughing. But they will, later. In the dressing room and in the bath. In their cars and in their houses, when I’m not there.

* * *

You start to keep clean sheets. You start to build from the back. Even win away from home. You finish seventh from the bottom of the Fourth Division in your first season, 1965–66, and this is how your chairman says thank you –

‘ I can’t afford two men doing one man’s job any more .’

You open the autobiography of Len Shackleton, Clown Prince of Soccer, to page 78. You show the blank page to Mr Ernest Ord, millionaire chairman of Hartlepools United:

The Average Director’s Knowledge of Football.

‘ Piss off,’ you tell him. ‘Pete’s going nowhere .’

‘ You’re getting too much publicity and all,’ says Ord. ‘You’ll have to cut it ou t.’