The Damned Utd by David Peace (easy readers txt) 📕

made his money as a credit draper and who bugs your office and your house, and where the players are adulterers, drunks, thieves and gamblers who play in their street socks. This is heaven here –

For you and Pete, together again and working again –

The youngest manager in the Football League –

You on £40 a week, Pete on £24 –

The bucket-and-sponge man –

‘We’re in the shit good and proper, make no mistake,’ says Pete. ‘We’ll be asking for re-election at the end of the season. Bound to finish bottom. Lower if we could. Something’s got to be done about this lot and done fucking quick.’

But it’s you who paints the stand. Who unblocks the drains. You who cuts the grass. Who empties the rainwater from the buckets. You who goes round the colliery clubs. Who sits in committee rooms and stands on stages, asking for donations. You who borrows hand-me-down training kits from Sheffield Wednesday. Whose wife does the typing. You who takes your Public Service Vehicle Licence so you can drive the team bus. Who organizes the cars to Barnsley when you can’t afford a coach. You who buys the team fish and chips. Who goes without wages for two months –

The newspapers, the photographers and the television cameras, all there to witness and record the whole bloody show. The pens, the tape recorders and the microphones, all there for that big bloody open mouth of yours:

‘Age does not count. It’s what you know about football that matters. I know I am better than the five hundred-odd managers who have been sacked since the war. If they had known anything about the game, they wouldn’t have lost their jobs. In this business you’ve got to be a dictator or you’ve no chance, because there is only one way out for a small club: good results and then more good results –

‘How hard it is to get them results, few people will ever know.’

Should I talk the way you want me to talk?

The bloody microphones and that bloody mouth of yours –

Say the things you want to hear?

Infecting the press. Inspiring the players. Infuriating the chairman –

This is the start of it all. This is where it all begins –

That new accent. That new drawl –

Hartlepools, 1965.

* * *

Pre-season. Fun and games. The 1974–75 season begins for real in sixteen days. Before that Leeds United, the League Champions, will play in three friendly matches and in the Charity Shield at Wembley against Liverpool, the FA Cup holders. The first friendly is at Huddersfield Town on Saturday, the day after tomorrow –

‘Enough pissing around,’ I tell them. ‘Let’s have a few games. Seven-a- sides.’

Hands on their hips, the first team shift their weight from foot to foot.

‘Bloody get on with it,’ I tell them. ‘Come on, get fucking moving.’

The team turn to look at Syd Owen, stood at the back with his hands on his hips –

Syd shrugs. Syd spits. Syd says, ‘Hope no one gets hurt.’

‘Thank you, Sydney,’ I shout back. ‘Now come on! Two teams.’

They take their hands off their hips but they still don’t move.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ I shout. ‘Harvey over there, Stewart here. Reaney there, Cooper here. McQueen there, Hunter here. Bremner there, Cherry here. Lorimer there, Giles here. Bates there, Clarke here. Madeley over there, and I’ll be here. Jimmy gets the whistle. Now let’s get fucking going –’

They amble about, pulling on bibs, kicking balls away, scratching their own.

Jimmy puts the ball down in the centre circle of the practice pitch.

‘We’ll kick off,’ I tell him, tell them all.

So Jimmy blows the whistle and off we go –

For hours, hours and hours, I run and I shout, but no one speaks and no one passes, no one passes until I finally get the ball and am about to turn, about to turn to my left with the ball on my right foot, on my right foot when someone puts me on my arse –

Flat on my arse like a sack of spuds, moaning and groaning in the mud.

I look up and I see my youngest lad, my youngest lad watching and worried. I get up and I see them watching, watching and whispering –

‘I told you someone would get hurt,’ smiles Syd. ‘Bloody told you.’

No one is laughing. But they will, later. In the dressing room and in the bath. In their cars and in their houses, when I’m not there.

* * *

You start to keep clean sheets. You start to build from the back. Even win away from home. You finish seventh from the bottom of the Fourth Division in your first season, 1965–66, and this is how your chairman says thank you –

‘I can’t afford two men doing one man’s job any more.’

You open the autobiography of Len Shackleton, Clown Prince of Soccer, to page 78. You show the blank page to Mr Ernest Ord, millionaire chairman of Hartlepools United:

The Average Director’s Knowledge of Football.

‘Piss off,’ you tell him. ‘Pete’s going nowhere.’

‘You’re getting too much publicity and all,’ says Ord. ‘You’ll have to cut it out.’

‘Piss off,’ you tell him again. ‘This town loves it. Loves me.’

‘My son will handle publicity,’ says Ord. ‘You just manage the team. You manage it alone and all.’

‘Pete’s staying put,’ you tell him. ‘And I’ll say what I want, when I want.’

‘Right then,’ says Ord. ‘You’re both sacked then.’

‘We’re going nowhere,’ you tell him –

This is your first battle. Your first of many –

You go to Conservative Councillor Curry. You tour the clubs. You get shipyards and breweries to pay players’ wages. You raise the £7,000 that the club owes the chairman. You