Chapter 18 of "The Knock 'em Down Boys"
Where the fans from London get a nasty old school surprise from the Swindon Boys.
Chapter 18
Charlton Athletic – Away – Saturday, January 14th
Our next match was a cup game away to Charlton Athletic who were in the division above us.
They had a decent sized following and were currently in the top half of their division, and playing good football.
They probably don’t see it, but the London sides can really piss off everyone else around the country. So there can be a bit of added needle in these games.
I mean, there are plenty of reasons to dislike London clubs, if you follow a team not based in the capitol. Take for example, their feelings of superiority.
Regardless of where you come from in the South West, your average Londoner is going to consider you a sheep-shagger and a farmer. And if you’re from Up North, it’s even worse.
And the typical London based football supporter will let you know that he knows these “facts” repeatedly throughout a game.
To me, this was all bollocks.
I didn’t take any of the “banter” seriously.
What bothered me was the players that London Clubs could get on account of the attraction of being in London. In particular, the calibre of players that what should be run-of-the-mill London clubs like: Charlton, Fulham, QPR and Crystal Palace could field against us.
These are teams that if they had been established anywhere else in the country, they wouldn’t have had a chance of signing the quality of player they do. Let’s not kid ourselves, these players aren’t desperate to play for these clubs, they just want to be in London – and the money too.
We all of us fancied the trip though. Swindon to Paddington, hop on the tube to London Bridge station, heads down in case any Millwall fancy a go at us, and then off down the line to New Cross Station and The Valley – home of Charlton Athletic.
On another visit, pitting ourselves against the Geezers of Millwall would be right up our street. But not without planning it. Nobody fucked with Millwall – least of all us – and if we went toe to toe with those boys, we would think very carefully about our strategy.
Sparky and me had had an idea gestating in our minds for a while before the Charlton game. If Ghandi and Scratch wanted to do something like the petrol bombs again, we weren’t having any of that. What we had in mind, was something a bit more old school.
When we got to the station for The Valley, we had agreed to meet up with Ghandi, Scratch and some other lads and tell them our idea. They had travelled in a van, like the Wolves game, and we had used the train, just in case the police took an interest in too large a group travelling from Swindon together.
I didn’t beat around the bush, “We’ve got an idea for today,” I said to Ghandi.
“You have?” said Scratch. “We make the decisions in this firm.”
I noticed Sparky glaring at Ghandi, and I held Scratch’s stare equally.
We didn’t speak until Ghandi intervened. “Calm down,” he said to Scratch. “Let him speak. I’m interested in what he’s got to say.”
Ghandi patted Scratch’s shoulder and he sat down again.
He reminded me of a guard dog brought to heel by his master.
“We’ve got a decent mob today, right?” I said.
Everyone nodded.
“So, we’ve got a decent mob and we’ll all stand together at the side of our end nearest the home fans, right?”
They were still nodding.
“Charlton are hardly known for having the best mob, are they? And I know for a fact, because the club never expects much aggro, they don’t use a lot of stewards, and a minimum of police. Barriers onto the pitch and arrangements for fan segregation aren’t up to much either. Now, we’re not Millwall, so they won’t expect too much trouble today, just a routine game. In my mind, that gives us an opportunity to put ourselves centre stage.”
“What opportunity?”
Ghandi was interested, so I explained our plan.
After five minutes of talking, Ghandi was smiling and even Scratch seemed to have come around to the idea that what I was saying might just get us on the map.
The station nearest to Charlton’s The Valley, was about a half a mile’s walk away.
The van was parked safely on one of the side streets leading up to the ground.
We travelled separated like this to avoid police detection, as they were always on the look-out for large groups of lads travelling to football. What the police failed to realise, was that size of mob, and severity of violence didn’t always correlate.
Sometimes, when two bigger mobs came together, it was difficult to get into the fighting. And with so conspicuous an event, there was always someone on the blower to the police pretty quickly. Within minutes, the scrap would be broken up and the lads would drift off into side streets to avoid arrest.
But smaller battles, between fourteen or fifteen lads on either side who were evenly matched and well organised – these fights were the ones that tested you, that lasted any length of time, and that often got nasty.
Really nasty.
We weren’t expecting anything like that from Charlton. They weren’t known for having any real boys, so we sauntered up to the ground pretty relaxed and focussing on the opportunity that might present itself during the game.
We were on a good run, so plenty of Swindon fans had made the journey to London. When we got into the away end, there were large groups of supporters congregating in different areas. I motioned to the right hand corner of the stand and we all took up positions standing in the bottom right hand corner.
I had explained my idea to Ghandi, Scratch and the other lads. It was old school, but they were right up for it. We had decided to wait for the second half to do it.
We needed patience.
The game was decent; both sides playing attractive football on a well maintained pitch. There wasn’t much in it. And for once, our star man Julio was able to express himself like the Argentinian ace that he was, without some council house scrotum kicking lumps out of him.
At half-time it was one a-piece, and we knew that Pablo, our manager, would be the happier of the two bosses when the teams went in.
The reason we needed to be so patient was the aggravation we were getting from a bunch of cockney wannabe lads who had made their way to the corner flag nearest to us. They had been giving it the big one from behind the safety of a metal barrier, some stewards and a couple of coppers.
From the way that they were hurling abuse at us, I guessed that they hadn’t bothered to look at the footage of us in action. They were well oiled with cheap lager and fancied themselves – typical pseudo-andreia. The usual wide armed insults about sheep-shagging and the comical imitation of the slitting of the throat, a classic sign favoured by the pantomime hooligan, found their way over to us.
Stupid of them really, because while they were jostling to be at the front of the line hurling abuse at us, I could see our lads clocking their faces and storing the mental images for later. I’d have bet any money that the loudmouths twenty or so yards away from us didn’t fancy standing toe to toe with us at all.
And I would have been right.
I was standing with the usual crowd: Sparky, El Pigface, and Rook.
We had our shoulders hunched and our hands in our pockets as we surveyed the Charlton side of the ground where the vocal group were still leaning over the barriers and frothing at the mouth about us as they pretended to want to get past the barriers, stewards and police.
I couldn’t help smiling. The Charlton lot were a joke. I’d seen it all before.
“I can’t wait to wipe the smile of their faces,” Scratch was beginning to lose the little cool that he had left.
“They’ll get what’s coming to them,” said Ghandi, “Just wait for the sign, yeah.”
Scratch wound his neck in and I thought about the sign.
The sign was my job.
Ghandi had delegated the decision of when to make our move to me. It was my idea, he said. They’d all go when I gave the signal. We had agreed on the second half, but other than that, I had to decide.
“When should I give the signal?” I asked Sparky as the Swindon team ran back out onto the pitch after half time.
“Give it ten or fifteen minutes,” said Sparky. “See how the second half pans out and then make our decision.”
I nodded.
“We all know the plan,” Sparky said to reassure me. “Whenever you say go – we’re ready.”
I had no doubts about our unity of purpose.
The first ten to fifteen minutes of the second half followed the same pattern as the end of the first – and then Charlton scored.
The Charlton fans went into their frenzy of celebration and the wannabe lads to our right went into wanker sign overdrive.
Then it happened.
The trigger that meant we had to make our move now.
One of the mouthy Charlton boys pushed his way right to the front, next to the barriers. He made sure that he had our attention, and then he did it. He zipped open his jacket and we all clocked the yellow shirt he was wearing under his jacket.
Fucking Poxford United!
I gave the sign.
Immediately a small group of our lads hurled themselves at the barriers and made it appear to the few stewards and police that they were desperate to get over to the Charlton lads.
The distraction created the effect I was banking on.
While the small group of lads almost, but not quite, got over the barrier and into the Charlton lads, the stewards and police were flocking around them in a panic.
I noticed that reinforcements in hi-visibility jackets and copper hats were gathering and moving towards where our distraction was continuing.
“Now!” I shouted and around twenty of us surged forwards, to the right of the distraction, and within seconds we were on the pathway around the pitch.
It was too late for the ground’s security teams once they realised what we were up to, and there were too few of them to slow our momentum. We were over the barrier of the home stand and into the Charlton lads before anyone could really react.
The lad wearing the Poxford shirt would get what he deserved first, and from the look on his face the prick hadn’t entirely realised that his statement was a declaration of war from our perspective.
One of the disadvantages of the terrain in a modern day, post-Hillsborough football stadium, is the seating. Like I had predicted, the Charlton lads turned and tried to run as soon as they saw some opposition whose bite was most definitely worse than their bark.
Like Sun Tzu said, “Exploit the lie of the land.”
The problem for the Charlton lads, and the advantage to us, was that in the tightly packed stand, if the Charlton lads wanted to escape from us they needed to turn and move backwards over the chairs.
If you’ve ever tried that in a packed football ground, then you’ll know that it’s awkward and pretty difficult to do at speed without falling over. Added to that for our opponents was the fact that the supporters behind their attempted escape didn’t really know what was going on and so they weren’t moving, which effectively created a dead end for the Charlton lads to run straight into.
As the Charlton lads stumbled over the chairs, and into each other, they hit the wall of bodies that was their own supporters.
If they turned around and stood their ground, they’d be hit by the Swindon lads, and if they kept going, they’d have to attack their own fans if they hoped to get away from us.
In a split second, the Charlton lads made the decision they were always going to make when presented with the opportunity to stand against us.
They let fear overcome them and started to push, shove, kick, punch and trample their own – anyone who blocked their escape.
But the barrier of their own fans was enough to slow them down long enough and let us get at them.
Scratch was first to grab one of their lot – the one in the Poxford shirt who had run as fast as he could after the first Swindon fist had connected with his face.
As Scratch turned him around, I could see fear in his eyes which were wide and terrified, and he raised his hands in front of his face in a pathetic attempt to stop the inevitable.
Scratch dispatched him in seconds and his feeble frame crumpled down between the rows of seats.
We got a decent amount of blows in before the ground security managed to round up sufficient numbers and the police and stewards piled into the home end.
We formed a circle to protect ourselves from attack. The Poxford shirt was still in the middle of us, and I got the impression that Ghandi and Scratch wanted him right where he was as they moved with subtlety to obscure him from view.
The next few seconds found us standing like a small island of Swindon in a sea of Charlton fans. As if we were carrying some kind of contagious disease, a space opened up between us, the Charlton fans, and the stewards and the police.
The ground security force seemed happy with the status quo. We weren’t attacking anyone. Charlton had lost all of their bottle and the police looked like they had everything under control. The police would be happy now to contain the situation and chuck us out onto the streets afterwards.
Nothing changed for the next ten minutes or so.
The police glared at us, but didn’t move.
The Charlton lads, from their relative safety behind the police and stewards’ cordon, had a few who had miraculously forgotten immediate history and were giving us the universal “come on” style gesticulation with their hands.
They weren’t saving any face, if that’s what they hoped.
I realised what was going to happen to the Poxford shirt when I glanced around and heard Scratch speaking to him quietly.
The lad was a good bit older than me, maybe nineteen, but he wasn’t older than Scratch. He was pale now. He looked pretty sickly. Any of the pretend courage he had shown when he was playing at being a hooligan had all gone. He looked like a little kid now. A little kid who knows that the big lads are waiting for him outside the school gates and whatever happens, they’re going to humiliate him and rough him up, and there is nothing he can do, and no one to protect him, from this inevitability.
He must have been thinking about running – or at least making himself known to the police who could fish him out to safety.
But Scratch had thought of that.
The Poxford shirt was looking intently at Scratch, but not at his eyes. He was looking at what Scratch had in his hands. And he was listening carefully to what Scratch was saying.
Scratch was whispering menacingly, but I could just about hear what he was saying.
“You can see what I’ve got here, can’t you? You shout for the coppers, or try to get away, I’ll ram it in your guts. Do you get me? No one’ll know who did it with all these people around. And the noise we’re gonna make, no one’ll notice you slumped down there, or realise that you’re hurt. You’ll be on the floor, pissing out your blood onto the stands, and I’ll personally stamp you into it until even your mother won’t be able to identify you. By the time anyone finds you and realises how bad you are, you’ll be fucking dead. Do you get me?”
The Poxford shirt was nodding his head mechanically and there were tears in his eyes.
“I said,” Scratch leaned forward hissing out a whisper that dripped with venom, like a snake about to strike, “do you fucking get me?”
The Poxford shirt tried to speak, his mouth opened wide, but he was shitting himself so much that he couldn’t even squeeze out a sound.
Nearing the end of the game, the police didn’t seem too happy with us, and they were jittery about us remaining in the home stand.
After a couple more minutes, the copper who must have been the Sergeant in charge, or whatever a boss copper is called, told us to get down the stairs to underneath the stands.
Scratch flashed his knife at the Poxford shirt, and he obviously got the message, because he kept pace with us, still surrounded, and still in the middle.
When we all gathered under the stand, a steward had opened an exit and the boss copper made his opinion clear, “You scum had better fuck off back to whatever shithole you crawled out of. Think yourselves lucky we aren’t nicking you. And if I, or any of my officers, catch sight of you bastards in London again, then I swear that you’ll regret it. Now fuck off!”
We didn’t stand still for long.
We knew better than to argue with the Metropolitan Police, and to be fair, we’d had a good day. We’d taken their end, and Scratch had a particularly nasty trophy. We could easily have been arrested on another day, but we got away with it. And even better, one of our lads who was still in the away end had texted me to say that he had captured our invasion on his phone and he was uploading the footage now.
Result all around.
Outside The Valley, Ghandi spoke quickly, “All of us to go back in the van.” He gestured to the Poxford shirt. “And make sure that he comes along. We might as well give him a lift back to his spiritual home.”
Sparky pushed the Poxford shirt hard in the back and he stumbled as he moved forward. He was still pale, and he looked scared. Maybe that’s why he tried to reason with us.
“Look, lads,” he said as we moved along, “I didn’t mean anything by it today. I’m sorry, ok? You’ve made your point so can’t you just...”
Ghandi nodded to Scratch who hit the Poxford shirt hard around the head, “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll shut up. Now keep walking.”
The Poxford shirt looked increasingly more desperate. He was looking from side to side, nervously searching for an escape route. He couldn’t run away from us. We’d be on him straight away. But maybe he could attract someone’s attention and get help.
Scratch seemed to sense this, like I did, and moving forward he walked closely behind the Poxford shirt who made his last attempt to reason with us, “I’m not even Oxford, honestly. This was just a wind up, that’s all, a joke. I wasn’t the only one...”
“No,” Scratch pushed the end of his knife into the back of the Poxford shirt, feeling for a space between his ribs, “but you’re the one we caught, and if you keep on talking, I’m gonna shove this between your ribs.”
The Poxford shirt tried to pull away, but Scratch held him tight, “A joke? You think this is a fucking joke? Well, can you see any of these boys laughing shithead?”
Scratch must have pushed a bit harder with the knife, and pulled back a bit harder on the Poxford shirt’s shoulder, because he arched his spine as he moved forward and let out the kind of squeal you might get from a pig once it realises what the shiny bit of metal you’re waving in its face means for its future.
Scratch cuffed him on the head again, to shut him up, and we walked on.
When we got to the van, we threw the Poxford shirt down into a corner behind where the driver sat.
We all got in and pulled the doors shut.
“What are you going to do with me?” said the Poxford shirt.
We all ignored him.
“What are you going to do to me?” He shouted in a panic, which came across louder, and more panicky than it might have, if we weren’t in such an enclosed space.
“That’s it,” said Ghandi. “I’ve had about enough of his noise. Get him tied up.”
He put up some kind of half-hearted resistance, but it took Scratch and a couple of the other lads less than a minute to tie his hands behind his back, his feet together and gaffer tape his mouth so that all we could hear was his muffled mumblings.
After a while, he stopped squirming around and presumably decided to conserve his energy for what was to come.
Ghandi didn’t intend to hurt him. Scare him? Yes. Humiliate him? Yes? Use him to get at our greatest rivals? Absolutely. But at the time, we didn’t know that, and we were a bit uncomfortable with the whole thing, the nearer we got to Swindon, and the further away from London.
When we didn’t take the turn off that would have taken us into town, and instead took the turn off for the road to Oxford, I added a feeling of confusion to my sense of unease. If we were going to seriously damage this lad, we were going to do it conspicuously?
Half way along the dual carriageway, and about ten miles from Poxford, Ghandi signalled to the driver to pull over onto the hard shoulder.
Scratch moved near to the Poxford shirt, “Pissed yourself yet, you wanker?”
He took out the knife he had been carrying and waved it around near the Poxford shirt’s face.
The lad’s eyes were bulging from their sockets as he squirmed about, probably thinking that this was the time Scratch would stick him and then dump him by the side of the road.
Suddenly, he started violently thrashing his body, attempting to avoid Scratch’s blade.
“Hey!” Ghandi slapped him across the face. “Hey! Hey! Calm down! Hey!” Ghandi grabbed the Poxford shirt’s face. “Hey, fucking calm down! We’re not going to hurt you.”
The Poxford shirt stopped thrashing so aggressively.
Ghandi continued, “If I wanted to hurt you I’d have done it by now.”
The Poxford shirt stopped moving and looked at Ghandi.
“No,” Ghandi went on, “you have the honour that you are going to do a favour for us.”
Scratch grabbed the Poxford shirt’s legs and pulled him into the middle of the van. Without warning, Scratch cut the bonds tying his feet together and then passed orders to some of the lads in the van, “Get his trainers, trousers and pants off.”
The lads looked at Scratch.
Scratch eyeballed them, “You heard me, everything. He needs to look just right for what we want, now do it.”
The lads set about him and pulled off the clothes so that the Poxford shirt was naked from the waist down, wearing only his joke Poxford shirt. His hands were still tied and his mouth was still taped up. He was contorting his legs to try to hide his genitals.
It wasn’t really working.
Ghandi banged on the partition window to get the attention of the driver of the van, “Make sure you get a video of this.”
“Get him out of the van,” ordered Ghandi.
Scratch and two other lads threw the struggling Poxford shirt out of the van and onto the hard shoulder.
He hit the asphalt heavily and after a few moments struggled to his feet.
He stood in front of us, knees scratched and bleeding, bending his legs in an attempt to cover his genitals and only succeeding in pushing them out further.
He was staring at us, and I wondered what he could be thinking. He surely didn’t want to risk getting back in the van? We were too dangerous. But being outside of it, stuck half naked in a Poxford shirt, barefooted, hands tied behind his back, gagged and with his penis flapping about for any driver to see – that wasn’t an attractive proposition either.
So he just sort of stood there, squirming at first and then weirdly sort of settling down. Not knowing what to do with himself as we recorded him in his discomfort.
“Who’s the joke on now you stupid cockney twat?” spat Scratch as he shut the van doors laughing.
We pulled away from our victim, and headed a mile up the road towards Poxford where it was possible to do a U-turn and head back to Swindon.
It was around seven on a Saturday night. Not busy on the road, but still people shuttling along, minding their business.
We pulled into the right hand lane, as near to the barrier as we could as our driver shouted that he could see a yellow shirt walking along the hard shoulder.
We slowed down a bit as our driver held out his phone to capture a second image.
Those of us who could pressed our faces against the partition glass to see what was happening and our driver hooted his horn as we went passed him, some of us cheering and the lad next to the driver returning the wanker sign to the Poxford shirt that he had been giving us all afternoon at the ground.
There are two things that stick out when I think back to this scene now. Firstly, I remember that the Poxford shirt looked small and pathetic, half naked in the biting cold wind as we captured his image for everyone to see.
Secondly, that even when we had driven a mile, did a U-turn, then driven a mile back to him, and even though plenty of cars had passed him, no one had stopped to check that he was alright.
No one.
Half an hour later, as we left the van, I saw that the images from today were all over the internet: our taking of the Charlton end, and the Poxford shirt.
Ghandi had made sure that nothing was left to the imagination and filmed the boy in close up for detail, as well as a long shot for the effect of showing how pathetically small he was in the cold air.
Underneath the video Ghandi had posted a simple message:
Poxford United – have got no balls!
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