Until recently I owned a ginger she-cat that was a dead ringer for Paul Scholes. A warrior cat, Cleo willingly jumped into any and all situations with no fear, including the road out front. Sadly she collided with a large metal thing there one morning. My dad brought her off the road. We buried her in my lunch hour, wrapped in a couple of towels. Said goodbye and shoveled earth into the hole; a good pal, gone forever. These encounters between human and non-human are all too often snatched away by unyielding steel jaws. Our other cat is a three-legged skinny scruffy little bastard. Very fast. A bit like Giggs, actually. Not much of a consolation; Cleo was more human than many people I’ve known. And so is Paul Scholes, even though, like Giggs, he is in fact mostly goat.
Goat encounters aren’t common these days. I remember when Saturday nights were fraught with wiry buttheads hellbent on denting your kite. Many mornings after nights before spent dissecting evenings gone awry. Encounters that needed a vocabulary defining their threat level. An encounter of the first kind meant dirties and little more. Second kind involved words being exchanged. Third was physical violence. After that things become difficult to corral using the familiar shapes of language and law enforcement. A Saturday dinnertime reminiscence might be, “Last time I saw you yesterday, you were playing cards with what I can only describe as a troll”. How we laughed. But it was true. And that’s not funny.
We eventually get used to these wonders of cryptozoology; they slowly morph from monster to mascot as we are jaded by a drunken life. This is The Jack Duckworth Syndrome; Jack first steamed into the Rovers in 1979, a Flying Horse gargoyle from Rossamon or Inkerman Street. Totally looked the business. But gradual familiarity erased his rough edges and revealed the human beneath. They say you should never turn your back on a wild animal. Ask Bet Lynch, she knows about goats; she’s shagged a few in her time. We all have our arc, beginning with Duckworth ‘79 status, through that honeymoon proving ground period and eventual descent into muppethood. Jack was an unknown quantity from 1979 until 1983, when the Duckworths moved into the Street and the Vince St. Clair enigma ruptured. But there’s a dark side to it; Nietzsche famously said, “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby becomes one himself”, and here lies the synergy: Reverse Jack Duckworth Syndrome. Squared. That’s right; I said reverse squared; reverse Duckworth times Duckworth. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts when such forces clash and resonate.
When we chuckled nervously about close encounters from the night before, we imagined ourselves in a pubworld populated by horrible specimens. We never thought about how others saw ourselves; growling, scowling, staggering through the crowd with goat eyes and drugged feet. Ready to insult or punch those gadflies and sock-puppets that dared get in our way. We had become monsters. Our goat genes had put us at the business end of the Jack Duckworth Syndrome. As we aged and scorned the Duckworth diminishment, so did our assailants scorn us. Paul Scholes knows what I am talking about here. For monster though ye may be, the sands of time wait for no monster. Even Scholesey – or is it Scholesy? – has finally lost his troll status and been reduced to that of Abe Simpson. Or at least Homer. Thankfully, we still have Shrek. He has a few years in him yet, but who will replace Scholes? The more interesting players always die off in the end. First it was Neanderthals, then pixies and elves, then Homo erectus, and now the goat-boys; Scholes, Giggs, Neville and Co. Generic cockheads with no personality or distinct skills remain. I mean, is Mike really gonna be the goal machine they’re saying he’ll be? Many of us are down on Mike, him being a Welsh Scouse and all, but let’s give him till Christmas and see if he produces any match-winners.
When my cat died I considered reaching out to friends online in my time of grief. The real friends I have here are all psychopaths so I turned to the internet with trepidation; there are some arseholes on the UWS message board who hate cats. Indeed, the cats v. dogs debate is one of the most divisive on the forum. I didn’t mention my little Scholesey being killed; they are cruel godless bastards on there. It would have provoked a shitstorm of death-puns, abuse and taunts from the dog-loving element, various UWS writers, assorted eccentrics and interesting weirdoes who frequent the place. I stuck to other issues instead, such as the state of the church clock in Saint Anne’s Square. Not a hand on the thing, and the square considered “posh” by those who claim pride in the city. I’ve provided free advertising for Manchester for decades to anyone who’ll listen, but not after seeing that clock. And now, with that old goat panting around the midfield, a full-blown casualty of the Jack Duckworth Syndrome, a freckled muppet-prince, a yellow card machine possessed of a need to run up to opposition players and literally push them over, with only Scouse Mike for back-up. Imagine being manhandled by a beast old enough to be your father, in front of almost 80,000 jeering northern monkeys. That, my friends, is a goat encounter of the fourth kind…
Back in the alcohol perfused Robson/Whiteside/McGrath/Moses era we had goats by the bucketload. You couldn’t move for goats, from the defence all the way up to the front end. It was a pleasure to serve the club back then. Working the bars in A and B Stands. One match, after a particularly thorough routing of the serving hatches, I filled a black bin-liner with pies. Sold them on a visitors’ coach on the forecourt right out of the bag. I remember ridiculing Paul Ince’s long leather coat while passing through the players’ tunnel area. Ince looked like he was up for chinning me. Excellent. I was about 25 then and fancied myself as a bit of a lad, but Incey saw no threat, no Duckworthy challenger. Just a half-cut tosser with fifteen pilfered miniature whiskies clinking in his Salford Rugby League tracky bottoms and a fucking big bin bag full of pies. It was the Jack Duckworth Syndrome in reverse, is what it was, and I was forced to face the facts. 25 and already coming down the wrong side of Plateau Duckworth, courtesy of a man who called himself “The Guv’nor”. Obviously suffering from a particularly virulent case himself.
So what you have is Jack Duckworth Syndrome (’79), often in reverse. And additional is the Vince St. Clair Effect (’83), which always precipitates a major decline. And don’t be thinking the Syndrome is limited to individuals. Oh, no, it applies to everything; football, teams, hooligan firms, music, species, cities and countries. I believe it extends all the way up to the scale of the biosphere – the planet itself. We all have our 1979 in the Rovers Return. Some of us even manage a brief stint as Vince St Clair if we’re lucky. Our Mancunian Duckworth Cataclysmo came at the end of the Ice Age: Ancient Manchester was a place of pyramids and vast ball-parks, where prehistoric games were watched by crowds of godlike people 80,000 strong. There were giant beasts that pulled gilded chariots. Palaces and labyrinthine gardens, where an advanced and enlightened St. Clair-like species gambolled on balmy lawns. Most of the evidence was erased by a flood of biblical proportions caused by melting glaciers. A tidal wave swept down the channel from the mouth of the Mersey, flooding the majestic Irwell Valley and causing a deluge that spread as far as the primitive hunter-herders of ancient Lancastria. One bloke saw it coming and built an Ark (Knowall, his name was). He filled the massive vessel with goats. The thing was afloat for a thousand years…strange things went on…people and goats living together. When the queer offspring of a millennia of goat-human congress came bouncing down the gangplank from the Ark, circa 8,000 BC, the stage was set; much of human history would now be controlled by these goat-boys and their violent, self-destructive ways. Manchester’s 1979 in the Rovers was obliterated by The Flood, and its horny progeny. A Golden Age of towers and gleaming plateaus smashed by a tsunami from the west. This is why Mancs hate Scousers; Knowall received a sign from on high telling him that devastation would come from that quarter, and indeed it did. The Irwell Valley was flooded with goats and Liverpool was repopulated by snakes driven out of Ireland by Saint Patrick. Now the goat-boys are almost extinct and the snakes are getting cocky. But enough of that.
The season has begun and my parents have been staying with us for 2 months. My dad’s amazed that we can buy Heinz beans and PG Tips at the local supermarket. Told me every tin of Heinz beans on earth was made in Wigan. I checked. It said “Hayes, Middx”. Typical. He wants to sort that bleeding clock out instead of bragging about beans. Same goes for the rest of you “proud” Mancs. Next to the beans sits a tin of spaghetti, in sauce. Heinz again, proper English processed fodder. My Italian wife shuddering in horror every time she sees it. But we’ve played, and beat, Arsenal, without escalating to the previous goat encounters of the third kind. It’s an uncertain time, one where Scouse Mike the (False?) Prophet has suddenly appeared, with his square head and public desire to play for Liverpool – for half what he gets paid at OT – even before he’d kicked a ball for United. Giggs and Scholes are hanging on by the skin of their hoof-tips, and a giant black question-mark is gathering over the theatre. We need a new Jack Duckworth. No, fuck it, we need a Vince St. Clair. Where is he?
