So, then – to business. United. And Ronaldo, that snide ponce. And Ferguson, the begging, clever, Scotsman that he is. We’re all here saying, fuck it, let him go, but Fergie knows the score; even if we have to act like needy little bitches to squeeze one more season out of the thin-bloodied show-pony. Football moves at a different pace than it used to. The biggest clubs can no longer expect “loyalty” from the biggest players; they have their own designs and ambitions which often don’t include eking out a rain-lashed existence in some freezing northern outpost full of celebrity-spotters obsessed with Coronation Street and United. But just remember; no matter how big you are, there’s always someone bigger to rein you in. In this case Glazer is the big boy and Ronnie’s the slave. But if it means we can equal the Mickeys’ league honours and do the business over Chelsea and Arsenal again this year then so be it. It’s not about loyalty or respect anymore. This is the big time. Ron wants out, we want him here and that’s that. Yes, it is a bit upsetting; a young hunk like that just fucking us off like some skanky old trout from the Ritz. But if you’ve never fucked over some skanky old trout from the Ritz cast the first stone. KnowhatImean?
And Glazer. Ooooh that ‘orrible little man, eh? Who does he think he is, signing Tevez for a British record fee?! Anyone’d think he didn’t have debts to pay. Buying bloody good players for the bloody good of the bloody club when there’s debts to pay! OT’s evidently Chickentown, occupying a lowly eighth place in the Premiership season-ticket price scale. But Number One in attainment (ditto Europe). How we ever regained that “richest club in the world” status last season I’ll never bloody know. The pressure has been transferred from the players onto the executive branch ‘cos Mancs just love to moan. You’re not allowed to slag United players anymore. The “proper lads” won’t allow it. But Ronaldo has single-handedly reversed this trend with his off-field behaviour. Traditionally, Old Trafford was always a bad do for them wot didn’t pitch in on the pitch. That disconcerting rumble was legend; it was the sound of a full-house. The discontent of armchair fans whose armchairs were situated above United Road Paddock. The moody Anfield grandstands never slung shit at Liverpool players because the shit slingers were sat at home with the wireless and the attendance was 24,000. If we don’t win the games the players earn their weekly wage either way but the club loses those Euro boosts. Players who don’t do the business are a drain on spending and Ronaldo does the biz like Top Cat. Simple as that. Someone’s gotta get it in the neck though. So you’re all dithering between slagging Ronnie and slagging Malky. Are you with me, you beautiful moaning cunts?
There was a time when being the richest club was a source of pride. We rubbed it in their faces. From the moment they gingerly trod that forecourt in their escort, to the minute they scrambled onto their trains and coaches. Worried, exhilarated faces against glass as they moved off back to their slumdiums. These days they rub it in our faces like being the biggest is a thing of shame. And you sit there shit-scared of saying owt negative about any United player. In your reissued Adidas Stockholms (or Dublins if you’re colour blind) and your (possibly) snide Lacoste polo off eBay muttering about how “plastic” it’s all become compared to the 80s. Look at yerself.
Being sports fans you’re probably superstitious twats. Perhaps you indulge in rituals, the stupidities of which escape you in your fear of defeat. Maybe you salute a reeking jock-strap allegedly worn by King Eric. Or perhaps you sing a special song every week before the game. A Stretford End ditty salvaged from the 70s, bearing inaccurate stanzas unnoticed even by “proper lads”. Forgive me; I’m sure I’m mistaken. Belief in paranormal powers helps sports wallahs believe they’re winners, degenerate gamblers as they often are. I’m no gambler; I consult my periodic table before making wagers. It’s a science like all tangible things, I tell myself. Then I bow before my signed Bert Trautman X-ray and fidget with my rat-bone effigy of Kenny Dalglish. I keep King Kenny tucked next to my unwashed scrotum along with a carved soap (on a rope) likeness of Drogba. And a poem-engraved toilet bowl freshener. The poem’s about 1999 and all that. These talismans in my trousers endow me with confidence and without them I am nothing. I would probably also stink. Why would a grown man have such voodoo stuffed down his pants? There’s a story in it.
These lucky charms were thrust upon me as a result of being from the Salford corner of the Salford-Ardwick-Blackley Inner-Quadrant Triangle. That’s right; an important segment of our landscape uniting parts of Q1 and Q2 and making mincemeat of every place outside it. This is Goat Country. Where heart and soul dovetail and knit. Superstition and clannishness galvanise the tribes who live there. After all, even pseudoscience is science of a kind; astrology for instance. Wise Bangladeshis predicted cholera plagues in the Middle Ages by unknowingly gauging the moon’s influence on flooding deltas; floods bring plankton loaded with shit, and I mean shit, to the people. Shit is a terrible thing. That’s why we need toilet bowl fresheners. With poems about Barcelona engraved into them.
What? You want me to talk about more relevant stuff, cunt? Back to my roots and all that? United? When you accuse me of wandering, just remember: Manchester travels as far as it needs to make a point. As United illustrated when they entered European competition against the FA’s wishes in 1956. And the chronology of your personal mobility? Eh? Shall I grab you by the scruff of the knackerbag and demand to know what brand your trike was? Did you have a Chippy? Progress to a Chipper? Or were you one of them alternative Tomahawk tossers? And then you got a Chopper for Christmas, did you? Thought you’d finally “arrived”..? But what if I claimed ownership of a Dragster? Big fuck off gear-stick with a knob on’t’ end and a concertinaed leathery bit down at the bottom? You’d cack yer keks, wun’t yer? Fuckin panty-girdle. Nah, only kidding; I had a yellow second-hand Chopper. Paul Clough who lived on our street had a Dragster. Lucky fucker.
The gorgeous Triangle accent drips Soul and soot from that brickish jungle. But life is uncertain there and people let you down. If you tow the line and show loyalty, you get shafted. Look at yer mate Ronaldo. A prisoner of yer enemy Glazer. That’s why I decided to become part of something worthwhile. That something is a motley band of Britishers who devote their lives to acting the cunt around the world. It’s very popular, a mafia for people who don’t want to grow up. Maybe you’re a made man in it. The fact you’re reading this suggests as much.
The day I earned my button I still remember clearly. I’d been kicking beads up to a neighbourhood “tough” who’d been weighing in a local “face” who’d been bunging a “respected man” in the area a butty and so on, since I was 6 years old. My car-washing and paper round (massively boosted by carol singing at Christmas) had caused a blip in the paystream and the Mister Bigs started to notice. They reached out to me one day. I was hoovering out some tight get’s car down our street (probably Paul Clough’s dad; no wonder he had a Dragster). Lads on Choppers flirted me a business card with directions scrawled on the back in what appeared to be mascara. They were funny like that back then; it was a joiner’s pencil. I was ordered to a rendezvous behind Piccadilly Station. Some Q2 youths wearing patent leather slip-ons they’d found in a skip blindfolded me with an oily rag. They took me to a basement somewhere naughty. There, I was given the full issue; rat-bone effigy of Dalglish, carved soap-on-a-rope of Tony Adams, later changed to Drogba (by which I mean a different soap, not the same one further carved; you’d never manufacture Drogba’s hair and features from Adams’ you fucking idiot) and the toilet bowl freshener, sans poem. I was told under no circumstances to engrave any old poem on it. I had to wait until United hit their greatest heights ever and use this as the material for the verse. A scalpel was provided. A hairy meathead yanked out the waistband on my Tesco-issue council shorts and shoved the lot inside, exposing and maiming my recoiling winky with knowing relish. I was told to leave my booty down there permanently and reveal it to no-one. They pricked my trigger finger with a little United badge and made me swear an oath of allegiance to the addictions Manchester and United bring. It entailed running away from home, of course. A dilapidated shed in Clayton became my winter palace while I summered on the graceful banks of the Irwell at Greengate, puffing a corn-cob pipe like Huck Finn under a leaden sky. The Triangle was my oyster but it was no Bryan Robson free role; I was assigned to a capo, an ageing alcoholic from Ancoats who would intermittently grab my leg and squeeze it painfully. It kept me conscious over the barrage of alcohol, LSD, amphetamines and cannabis we self-administered on an hourly basis. He called it “The Krabb”. The grip on the leg, that is, not the drug cocktail; the cocktail was a Nameless Thing in a then unreported world; the plastics hadn’t wrote their books or made documentaries about “lads” at that point. It was quickly revealed to me that not only were there dozens of other crews operating out of unassuming hollows across the city, but that we were connected to other such groups in other cities. All reds.
The Boss of the Family was known as The Goat-Necked Boy from Tinseltown but I never heard anyone call him that to his face. We lived on shoplifted bars of cacao- lard and milk gargled on doorsteps at dusk. Wore over-pressed school uniform trousers; shiny like a pigeon’s psychedelic neck. Snatched from suburban washing-lines in places where 14-year olds dwarfed us on our malnourished Inner-Quadrant goat-legs. To say we jibbed the turnstiles was like saying we breathed air. We were forced into crimplene and acrylic market-wear by our substance addictions. But we never stopped going to United. While Plastics continued to pursue the discontinued designer gear of Casual culture we spunked every ha’penny on remedies for our ills. The Goatfather commanded a legion of red soldiers both fearsome and strange. It takes years to claw your treacherous way up (or down) to the more respectable echelons of the organisation. It demands the stomach of a rat and the footing of a mountain ungulate.
Being made is only the beginning. You have to start at the bottom in companies like this; my first responsible assignment was selling buckets of canal-slutch to tramps; posh cunts that they were, they grew herbs in it. Rosemary and basil. Stuff peasants like us didn’t know about (Madeira’s probably crawling with it). These were real gentlemen of the road who lived in the foetid green belt between Victoria Station and Collyhurst. Slutch was a form of polluted mud first catalogued in Salford by my great-nan. My mother uses the word freely but always with proper respect to geologic prerequisites. Other Triangle vocab includes “scrawp”; a cross between a scrape and a cut. “Rammy”; filthy as bleedin’ ‘ell. “Teeming”; a meteorological observation which has become quite fashionable. Even the plastics know “skrike” ‘cos they’ve read it in Wikipedia (and now have the gall to use it, the plastic twats). How times have changed; they’d have no more been caught saying “summat” than a cockney saying “lad” fifteen years ago. But they all say it now don’t they? They even drink bitter. The Inner-Quadrant Triangle is rich with these expressions and behaviours. They are being adopted by plastic outsiders much like the Adidas reissues and for the same reason; an attempt to obliterate the sick secrets of their uncool sterile adolescence.
But I digress. I graduated to selling knocking certs to alkies in the old Yates’s around town. I even took a few quid off our boys in the Auld Reekie and Portland Bars; “insider” info on horses being smuggled in from Eire. All nonsense, and the currency was ale, with some shrapnel for Ancoats who kicked a piece up to Goat-Neck. All it took was some simple calculus and a turf map. The weight and form of the gee-gees was balanced against an ability to mentally coalesce a mass of soil and climate data: Bingo. It was then I discovered the belief in magic held by the gambling depraved. How I laughed, while secretly drawing faith from the cornucopia of fecal and bacterial masking products in my undercrackers. Next, a musty old office in Stevenson Square became the “Manchester School of Business”. Definitely not to be confused with the globally-recognised Manchester Business School off Oxford Road. Innumerable Africans enrolled into our curriculum. Bamboozled by Air Mail, letterheaded paper and crude brochures promising a (completely unrecognised) diploma should they complete our business course. They surrendered their rand, their Ugandan shillings and Nigerian pounds. I controlled the operation from a glass office. Overlooking a typing pool populated by the daughters of barrow-boys and ex-dockers. Boss-Goat started to call me “son” and to place his arm about my neck, itself maturing into as fine an example of Capra aegagrus as one could hope to see. 1985. I was 19 years old. Didn’t know how to wire a plug but I could build a bong using candle-wax, a plastic bottle and a Bic pen. We’d beaten Everton in the FA Cup Final and all was well; for Christmas that year Goat-Neck presented me with the coveted Trautman X-ray; there were some jealous young footy-orphans round that dinner table then, I can assure you. Laws were passed and Africa kicked us out. I was already on another trip; hoisting furniture round town with the Whit Lane Warbler, an old Salford legend who filled pubs with a voice more mellifluous than Dean Martin’s. Got away with it for years. Became something of a professional grafter. Even went to America to live. I wasn’t half starting to enjoy it all. Then suddenly last month I was called in. Hand-picked for a special goat mission. Sexy beast.
Outside Paris in a secret vault sits an object known as the International Prototype Kilogram (IPK). It is made from a platinum-iridium alloy and along with its six sister copies is used for global calibration of mass. Without it human civilisation is doomed. Goat-Neck in his stupendous megalomania decided he wanted it on his Beswick mantelpiece. An elite team of 8 boys was assembled from the ginnels and rat-runs of the Triangle. These were lads with long experience of pilfer and patter. Collyhurst’s Colin Blaney was made Captain and Mike Duff Counsellor. Duff is, of course, an honourary member of the Family, being an Unred. And undead, some would say. The rest were blaggers and tea-leafs who’d smashed windows for Lacoste and Rolex before Ronaldo was born; Greengate, Ordsall, Weaste, Ancoats and Openshaw. I wasn’t happy; like Ronaldo I craved the balmy climate and luxurious culture of another place. But orders was orders; Captain Blaney whipped us into shape with a merciless regimen of jumping jacks and flying saucers. The papery alien craft with their tart sherbet cargo had us lean as butcher’s dogs and ten times as hungry. Duff organised mass kiting blitzes to raise the fare to France; this was no time for jibbing. Openshaw provided some smack and the Salford lot crocheted some boss pillows; we enjoyed a restful journey. By the time we hit the Gare du Nord that day in our shiny school pants and Tuf Weatherman we were clockwork sentinels. We sounded like it an all; our collectively secreted toilet-fresheners, bone-effigies and carved soaps (on ropes) created a scented-yet-stinking cacophony. Like industrial music but quieter. You had to be there.
Finally it was business time. Arses twitching we pressed on in formation; Blaney up front, scoping and blimping; two Salford lads way out on either wing, banging out the moodies. Duff brought up the rear, disappearing into book shops while the remaining 4 of us clinked along with our thoughts. The IPK was contained in a glass case, criss-crossed by lasers in a non-repeating chaotic cycle. We each popped a dozen saucers and bounded into action, jump-jacking our way over the wall and through the hall to the Kilogram. We replaced it on the weight sensitive alarmed plinth with an exact replica. Indistinguishable from the real thing. My suggestion that we just give that to Goat-Neck and save ourselves the mither earned me a fat lip and a black mark. In no time we were back in Paris, supping ale and talking about what a cunt Ronaldo was. That’s when Duff realised; the focus for moaning had shifted back onto the players from the executive branch. Those poor wage slaves. Shafted again.
Blaney fingered the hold-all the IPK was in and shook his grizzled head. We were getting fucking gypped royal by that Goat-Neck bastard with nowt to show for it. Someone suggested we weigh the Kilo in. That earned some laughs.
“I’ve been clankin’ around wi’ this lorra nonsense in me trolleys since I was four year old,” Blaney said.
“Yer what?” countered Duff. “Me rat-bone effigy’s fused ter me nutsack, it’s bin down there that long!”
Despite misgivings we continued to observe the code of silence between ourselves; one must never under any circumstances reveal the identity of one’s personal effigy for it will lose its power. Same goes for the poem and the carven soap likeness. But now I am speaking out. Our worldly goods totalled a few crumbling sanitary devices for Armitage Shanks while the big boys had International Prototype Kilograms and numerous sports franchises. We decided that Goat-Neck and Glazer really were to blame for our and Ronaldo’s predicament. “Let’s not boo the wop cunt this season like we planned then, eh?” one of the Salford lads said. “It’ll only make things worse for us and better for them.” The rest concurred, including Pete from Ancoats who, as far as I could discern, was an albino gorilla. Duff got himself into such a state he collapsed in the Rue in Montmartre and demanded the last rites. Blaney threatened to piss on him if he didn’t get up. He did a Zebedee and vomited on the lad from Ordsall. There followed the sickening slap created by the meaty expanse between primary and secondary knuckle upon contact with boat-race. Openshaw tried to intervene but Weaste put the head in like you read about. The white gorilla somersaulted across the table sending our absinthe bottle flying onto Greengate’s napper. Before long the IPK was rolling in the gutter; fortunately noticed by Captain Blaney and straight back in the bag. After more debate of this type we returned to Manchester. We were from generations of United slaves, destined to pay homage like pigeon-panted dossers awash in a stink of booze, drugs and mayhem. We had no choice but to honour Goat-Neck with his prize. It’s in the blood. Ask Duff, he’ll tell yer. Loyalty is for local boys like us. The rest is claimed by the lions.
So next time yer wonderin who you hate most, Kenyon, Glazer or Ronaldo, just remember where yer loyalties lie. Then you’ll see the dirty truth; we’ll always get shafted by the big boys. It’s just the way of the world. But weasels is as weasels does. The least we age-old goat-slaves can do is stick together. And when we bring undreamed silverware back from Europe it is only us of a certain tribe who cry real tears. Us of the beat-down sense of self and United Triangle bondage. But there’s still nowt wrong with giving the fucking players some stick, eh, mard-arse? We’re riding high but we’ve known much failure in previous United epochs. We’ve got talent to spare these days. A wino on Salford Precinct once asked my ol’ feller, What have I got to lose?
He replied, “You? Nuthin. Gerron with it”. United used to be that wino. Nowadays they go into Europe and return with weird silver footballing yardsticks.
Or as unbooable Ryan Giggs might say: That Kilogram looks fuckin mint.
