Quotes

Moyesy says: "It is difficult for me because I want to win all the games and I am desperately disappointed at the moment. The result at Blackburn doesn’t change my thoughts on how I am feeling after losing. But it is not a bad position to be in – we could have been in a lot worse spots than this. We are still two points ahead of our close rivals who are pushing us hard for a Uefa Cup spot with one game to go. We have something to play for and we are going to be involved in a great game next week.”

Lard says: "Put yer fuckin drink down Taylor, you knob"

Band of Brothers
By
Mickey Blue Eyes

I don’t like the modern Fulham Football Club. I don’t like their owner, their Daily Telegraph lower middle class gobshite fans, their players or the various crummy stadia they play in. They are a bunch of no-marks who should be driven to the White Cliffs of Dover and pushed off en masse. No mercy should be shown to the whole herd of metro-centred phonies. They’re all………………………………well, we’ll come to that later.

So why did I choose to go to this away match, of all away matches? Because the Kipper boys invited me, that’s why. And having missed the game versus Villa because of a call much more important than mere football I was eager to restoke the fires. It included an overnight stay and visits to various local hostelries. I needed some light relief, and it was forthcoming. Well, except for the match that is.

Awake at five a.m., in and out of the shower, pack a weekend bag and await the arrival of – what else? – The People Carrier. A beautifully mild clear morning, a flotilla in the river for final remembrance of the Battle of the Atlantic, and a quick tour to collect the rest of the party plus another motor. From here on in the names have been changed to protect both the innocent and the guilty.

We set off into the risen sun and communicated immediately by moby with Texyla and Mogsy (names not changed) on The Bus. Co-ordinated action is everything. The target was a Comfort Inn hotel on Cromwell Street and then The Crown and Sceptre pub in a scruffy yellow brick area doubtless suffused with negative equity. En route, Sam said he hated cockneys. In fact he hated the entire south east of England. They’re all Twats, he claimed. We decided Twats was the weekend word and settled down for the journey. A lively discussion ensued as to what constituted the most vehement form of the expletive. Eventually we decided just being a Twat was passable. But being A Proper Twat was tantamount to high treason and rape of Anne Widdicombe rolled into one, sort of.

I can recommend the hotel in a sort of non-fussy, clean, handy sort of way. After checking in we walked over to Brompton Road and eventually persuaded an Ozzie (if it’s so good THERE, why are most of them HERE?) barmaid to open up a pub called The Dingo and Dingbat. Or it might have been The Boomerang and Crocodile Dundee. Whatever. She was very pleasant and I introduced her to our permanent Lothario, henceforth called Lot, because it would save us all the tedious business of listening to carefully rehearsed chatup techniques we already know by heart, like HK’s after dinner speeches. She was from Melbourne or somewhere else obscure on the arse end of the planet. Limbs ached and then stretched, lager was quaffed and more mobile phone calls made to complete our pincer movement on the target pub. We were ready.

We commandeered a fleet of taxis while Tommy Cooper told the first driver, “An’ don’t fuckn think you can overcharge US la. We’re dead smart, us.” The driver turned one corner and said, “Here it is.” And there indeed was a pub called The Crown and Sceptre. We piled out. Half way across the street, a left-behind voice yelled, “It’s the wrong fuckn pub yer melts!” Oh dear. Blue faced, we returned to the taxi. The driver didn’t have a clue where the target pub was. With beautifully measured sarcasm TC said, “Oh. Relaxed the fuckn rules on The Knowledge ‘ave yiz?” The driver smiled back sweetly from behind his A to Z of Lahndan. Eventually we got there with Lot’s unerring navigation.

I shit you not, the pub had a fly-covered moose-head on the wall and a cabinet full of dead but preserved very large spiders. We could have been in…………………well, it could have been Australia, actually. We decamped outside to avoid the pervading odour of burgers on a grille and to quaff undisturbed. A large Blue Kipper banner was draped over a nearby fence where it flapped defiantly in the breeze like an Atlantic battle ensign. The Bus showed up, so did Squire – late as usual, hungover as usual, but not rotund – and Tim and son after struggling through Lahndan’s awful carbon monoxide spewing gridlock. We exchanged views and tactics as usual. Sensibly, everybody I spoke to said they hated Fulham with a perfectly justified purple passion. For a time this felt cathartic. Then you felt it was the equivalent of hating a hamster. I mean, what’s the point?

After a few more beers we decamped to Loftus Road stadium, one of those dangerous, decrepit, creaky old dumps the Melledrew Tendency claim has “atmosphere.” Actually, Loftus Road is a shitheap which ought to be demolished as soon as possible and turned into affordable social housing. We were in the upper tier, in row A, with hardly any leg room and a distinct feeling the place was dangerously unhealthy and overcrowded. Pretty soon, it WAS unhealthy and overcrowded………………………with arguably our most hapless display since the horror of Shrewsbury, now out of the Football League just to rub salt into our wounds.

We might have known from the off. For some reason Moyesy had Slaphead in centre mid with The Gravedigger. This, while Tony was restored to right back. Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t one of our great Moyesy-inspired successes this season the right side pairing of Slaphead-Tony? Oh well. Great to see Joey restored to his best and only position, centre back.

Anyway, the game quickly deteriorated to the usual pattern against the formerly over-hyped Thames-side plonkers. That is, niggling, ankle-tapping and shirt pulling all over the place. It’s the Gallic influence, see, the sort approved of by ex public schoolboys like Brian Glanville. Tigana lives. To this you could add even more of the kind of physical treatment of Wayne Rooney he’s going to have to get used to from players not worth a lace in his adolescent boots. On him, the usual pattern was doubled in an attempt to get him booked or sent off. At one point, that disgusting twerp Boa Morte kicked him, had the free kick awarded against, and then added a verbal assault while The Duke just stared straight at him without moving. Others tried the same thing. All in all, Fulham are useless bunch of Proper Twats who should be relegated as soon as it becomes legal to dock ten points for saying “Mohammed El Fayed” or “Harrods.” They’ve always been the same and they’ll never change. Their fans are even worse, easily the most stupid bunch of know-nothing sorry bastards anywhere in the league. With some luck they’ll go down next year. I hope.

That said, we were just awful. As usual, Fulham were absolutely useless anywhere near the penalty box. So we go and give them two first half own goals of the type you would castigate in a Sunday League match. First, Stubbsy politely headed over a badly positioned Wrighty, then SuperKev missed an immediate chance for a one-on-one equalizer their ‘keeper knew nothing about, and then Wrighty goes and fumbles a wrongly awarded free kick for the second. It was a loony score line. We had plenty of free kicks in reasonable positions and some corners but Pembo’s early season deadly accuracy has deserted him. We wasted them all, and in quite hapless fashion too.

There’s no point having a go at any individual because nobody played well. Only Joey left us with some reasonable moments. What made it worse was the fact that just a half of one of our displays this season would have demolished that lot easily. Even as it was we had plenty of second half chances.

As the second half wore on we began to do a bit more, more out of desperation than anything else. This was exaggerated when The Big Yin came on with Stevie and we promptly started, guess what, heaving long balls up to his head. As usual, he won almost everything in the air. Equally as usual, his headers mostly didn’t reach one of ours. Even so we had at least four clear chances in the closing quarter, all of which should have got buried. How we’ve missed The Rad’s pace!

It was all too much for Lot. Outraged by the spectacle of mediocrity – he’s a handy player himself – he was on his feet, face flushed with lager, arms stretched wide, shouting, “Yizr all TWATS! The whole fuckn lotta yiz!!” I am still unsure whether this was aimed at the collection of council tax whingeing wooly bobble hats which supports Fulham or whether it was aimed at Our Boys. But, given the emotion of the moment, whoever the target was, the words were perfectly justified. It was so wonderfully purple it almost drew a round of applause from everybody. Sam, originator of The Twats Theory, was effusive in his praise. Maybe this was because Lot had not only endorsed the theory wholeheartedly but had also dubbed Lahndan Twatshire.

The match petered out with us battering their goal and them relying on breakaways which almost produced a third. Aaarrgghh. As a minor form of compensation we celebrated our good fortune in the incoming favourable scores from elsewhere. One thing we can have absolutely no complaint about this season is our share of luck. That said, it has all been earned.

Afterwards, we walked back to The Dingo and Dingbat and the Ozzie barmaid. She’s an ebullient and polite soul and we all quickly decided she was definitely a NonTwat. Johnny disappeared and came back with two catering containers of spare ribs he had brought down in his luggage. The barmaid was quickly bribed to turn a blind eye and we went through them like a tribe of cannibals. And you know what, I haven’t enjoyed ribs so much in years. We quaffed some more and arranged the evening in accordance with TC’s schemata.

Back in the hotel, showered, and out to a tiny pub called Novello’s. Wherein dwelt an Elvis impression and a clutch of attractive women presumably attracted to a quite reasonable rendition of “Viva Las Vegas!” and a tight white suit and bell bottoms studded with brass pinheads, slashed to the navel, all topped with the obligatory quiff cascading unrestrained over a bottled tan face. In the audience, men everywhere had turned up collars and sultry expressions. One guy had all of this plus a pink shirt and tight black leather trousers. We decided the latter was a Proper Twat. Conversation with the girls even persuaded some of our gallant band to turn up their collars. We decided these were Soft Twats.

At one point we were assembled in the corner of the tiny bar comparing notes and Sam fought his way out of a circle of adoring women to ask us pointedly, “Is this the Scared Of Women Club?”

By this time Lot was seated at the corner of the bar smugly chatting to one of the barmaids. This one, exceptionally pretty, was from South Africa. Beer and wine flowed. We tried to sabotage the juke box by selecting The Carpenters, Peters and Lee and Don McLean ad infinitum but they must have seen us coming because we never did get to hear any of them.

Then TC rallied the troops and directed us to, er, the Clapham Grand. Which is where I draw a discreet veil over everything. The only thing I will say is that the Clapham Grand is my idea of Hell forever stuck on a feedback loop of eighties pop music, all of it badly illuminated by glitter balls and coloured swivel spotlights, the air wet with cheap perfume and even cheaper after shave. It was wonderfully human and ripe for People Watching and other things. You couldn’t write the script. Hogarth would have loved it.

Next day we drove home. We rustled through the Sunday papers. One of them reviewed a new Lahndan satirical show. The author, whose name currently escapes me, opined, “All great satire is a morality trap………………and before you question that, ask yourself why you fall into the trap………………” or words to that affect.

“How true,” I thought.

As we sped on home up the motorway Lot cast his eye at one of the place signs. “We’ve just left Twatshire,” he said with satisfaction.

That was true too.