Gone and Forgotten

I haven’t blogged now for around 10 months now (doesn’t time fly) but I thought I needed to write an article about a recent book I read for more reasons than just the book itself. It’s something I have seen a few reviews about and have always been meaning to get a copy of it yet it had always evaded my purchasing habits until now. The book is entitled “Naughty.” Despite its name it’s not a porn collection, though it does have some tits in (in a purely metaphorical sense of course). The book, itself, is the story of a man called Mark Chester with excerpts from other blokes about their time running with the football hooligan firm linked to Stoke City called the Naughty Forty.

The first thing that springs to mind from it is that football hooliganism has moved on from violence to being a nice little money-making industry. This is by two methods. The first being organised crime linked to drugs. Easy to see how when you already have an organised group of men who have little to lose and up for the fight as reflected in sequel to this book “Sex Drugs and Football Thugs” but perhaps more surprisingly the completely legitimate business of using the media and even the education system to give extra coverage to the issue. These books about football hooliganism are numerous in many book shops now and the authors, like Chester, have hit the lecture circuit and regularly give talks at the universities on the issue as well as even having his own website. Go and kick someone’s head and then write a book about how and why you did it. Easy money it seems.

The one thing I particularly liked about the book was the fact that the author called a spade a spade. Too many authors often dress up events but here he was honest by telling things how they were no matter how unpleasant they were. Having a situation where your mother is a tart, your father is absent and your principal carer an alcoholic isn’t going to have you first in the queue to study at Oxford. But not everyone who goes through it ends up a violent criminal either. I would have appreciated a bit more on why he wasn’t going to take the conventional route in life as well as why he went on to lead the life that he did. The two aren’t necessarily the same thing.

Some things in it particularly caught my attention. The first thing you find from the book about the people involved is that the outcome of it all is far from the easy life. For every one gracing university lecturing halls up and down the country now, there are ten who are in jail, dropouts from society or even worse six foot under, many through the choice of their own. Most of the guys involved ended up this way with most as well starting like this. Drugs, alcohol, violence with damaged parents or often-absent ones were all features of the usual crap childhood that a significant proportion of kids have to go through in the supposed enlightened age of the 21st century. It seems that this sort of upbringing is what attracted these men to Stoke City and the violence attached whatever the rights and wrongs of that maybe.

However it seems that characters involved were unable to take out their anger just through football violence. What is noticeable is that they would fight over increasingly trivial things such as a guy giving you a funny look in a bar. It became increasingly like an addiction picking on new victims no matter who were they (a reference to Newcastle game in 1995 when anyone in black white was fair game for a smack in the mouth). What also became increasingly clear what that that these guys had very little in their lives aside from the football. Sure there are some wives/girlfriends/bits on the side/ and maybe even some children mentioned but it doesn’t seem like anyone was making strides in a professional career during the week just drifting from job to job. I also found slightly disturbing how the group would arrange fights for lads as young as 14 by taking them all over the country to smash people and places up. If the author cared so much for these lads as he says he did surely some more helpful guidance in life would have done them more justice. Many of the lads seem to have looked up to him as a father figure and he let them down just as his father had let him down.

I do have a few criticisms of the book as well. Firstly I wanted to hear more about the why behind football hooliganism than the how. If I want to see a fight I can just stick on the telly or go into a city centre at night. After all, there is only so many times you can read “such and such ran straight into the first one of them with a forearm smash.” There was a bit too much of it and it became repetitive after a while.

Another point was the humour side of it. Ok if I want to laugh maybe I should read a book on a more cheerful subject than this but even so their must have being a bit of humour the guys could have shared even from the years. I counted one moment in the book that I found funny which is pretty poor for 380 pages. Incidentally the joke was about a game where Stoke fans invaded the pitch and then wrote “supportive messages” to the players on the dugout such as “you’re f***ing toss.” Well it made me laugh at least.

Finally, it seemed that a lot of the people involved loved the violence more than the club. There was very little about Stoke as a football team and when there was the details were incorrect for example spelling ex players names incorrectly. Often the guys would turn up late for games. When you prioritise a punch up over the team it is difficult to see you as a supporter.

Overall, The main message the book confirmed for me is that football is something very special to many people. By football I don’t mean sitting in that nice warm sports bar following the multinational company of your choice be it the shit, Arsenal, Chelsea etc. I mean having the psychology having the affinity with a place that might be as grim as my waistline and then paying 40 quid of your hard earned money travelling to such glamour spots as Barnsley, Bradford or even Stoke itself to see a load of overpaid donkeys representing that place running around at the same time as getting pissed on and seeing your team lose 4-0 in the vain hope that one day they will turn it around and do something you will be proud of along with 500 or so other lonely souls. Sad you may say but addictive. Yet the activities of this group made it to a certain extent a more miserable experience. As a regular football supporter you are often characterised as a moron but due to hooliganism the authorities used a sledgehammer to crack a nut and imposed measures on Stoke fans that would be have made the front page of the Guardian if done to other groups in society. The Naughty Forty is partially to “thank” for this inconvenience.

I think also this book confirmed to me that football hooliganism is increasingly coming a thing of the past or at least changing. ID cards, all seater stadiums and games kicking off at 12pm on a Sunday have led to a loss of appetite for those seeking a fight. Trouble at the games these days seems to be small groups of chavs no older than 18 waving their arms around and coming out with certain muffled phrases that might be English to them but not to me. Very rarely does this lead to real fights. Not that there is anything wrong with it. Football is male tribalism at its most natural. Where else can you go and spend 90 minutes voicing your opinion in such poetic language with 20,000 people doing exactly the same? The difference seems to be that most can do this and then walk back into their everyday lives. These guys didn’t, because they simply didn’t want to, been perfectly happy to pull anyone in who was remotely interested. That’s the reason that football hooliganism creates more losers than winners. The fact that the losers come in as the weakest people leads me to think that for all the thrills the Naughty Forty were a cancer on the club. Most of them don’t go anymore and it seems that the club has gone from strength to strength on and off the pitch without them. That’s why they are gone and forgotten.