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

speak; you don’t speak; Longson and Webby don’t speak; Kirkland and the other directors don’t speak. No one speaks at all. No one says a single bloody word –

Things have come to this; month by month, week by week, day by day. Now things can’t get any worse; the month is here, the week is here and the day is coming, the hour and the minute. Tick-tock, tick-tock, go the hands on your watch. Tick-tock –

This is the end, you think. This is the end. This is the end.

You and Peter stay with the team in the dressing room, your wives in the stands on scalped tickets, the ground filling up, the ground opening up –

Tick-tock, go the hands on your watch. Tick-tock.

You go down the tunnel with the team, your team, and out onto the pitch. You walk along the touchline. You look up into the stand for your wife. You see her in the stands. You put two fingers together and salute her with a wave. You take your place in the dug-out, on the bench, with Peter and with Jimmy –

Tick-tock, go the hands on your watch.

Just four minutes in and Forsyth underhits a back pass to Stepney, and Hector nips in and tucks the ball into the corner of the net. Just four minutes in and it’s as good as over, good as over until the seventy-ninth minute when Kidd and Young hit the bar. But the score remains the same until the end –

This is the end, you think. This is the end.

‘I know that Don Revie studies the league table every night,’ you tell the press and the television. ‘And I know he’ll be looking at that table and thinking about Liverpool and Newcastle. But I also know one club will hit him right in the eye, and that club is Derby and this time I reckon we’ll be ready for Don Revie and Leeds United when he brings them to the Baseball Ground on November the twenty-fourth.’

‘You’ll still be there then, will you?’ they ask. ‘Still the manager?’

Peter pulls you away. Peter takes you to one side. Peter says, ‘Winning here doesn’t happen very often. Let’s take the wives upstairs to the boardroom.’

‘I don’t think it’s a good idea,’ you tell him.

‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Might never happen again.’

Tick-tock, tick-tock, go the hands on your watch. Tick-tock –

‘Go on then,’ you tell him, ‘but I’m not staying more than half an hour.’

So Peter goes off and finds your wives and then the four of you go upstairs to the Manchester United boardroom, the Manchester United boardroom where Longson and Kirkland and all the other Derby brass are having the time of their bloody lives, with their cigars in their hands and their wives on their arms, the time of their lives until you four walk in and the Manchester United boardroom goes quiet, silent –

Tick-tock, go the hands on your watch. Tick-tock.

But then the glasses clink, the coughs come and the conversations start back up.

‘This must be the first time you’ve been in here?’ asks Louis Edwards as he cracks open another bottle of champagne. But Peter is already pulling you away, already taking you to one side and saying, ‘Time we were going back down.’

‘Fuck off,’ you tell him. ‘We’ve only just bloody got up here.’

‘But I don’t like it here,’ he says. ‘Not my kind.’

‘Looks like someone wants a word with you though,’ you tell him, and Peter glances back to see Jack Kirkland crooking his finger, beckoning him over.

‘No one bloody crooks their fucking finger at me,’ hisses Peter.

‘Just go and see what the twat wants and then we’ll get off,’ you tell him –

Tick-tock, go the hands on your watch.

But as Peter is walking across the Manchester United boardroom towards Jack Kirkland, Longson is walking up to you and, in front of your wife and in front of the room, Sam Longson asks, ‘Did you make a V-sign at the Manchester United directors?’

‘Did I do what?’

‘Did you make a V-sign at Sir Matt and the Manchester United directors?’

‘No.’

‘They say you did.’

‘Well, I didn’t.’

‘I want you to apologize.’

‘No.’

‘I’m not asking you to apologize,’ says Longson. ‘I’m telling you to apologize.’

‘Fuck off.’

The chairman of Derby County Football Club stares into your eyes as your wife looks down at the devils in the carpet and you glance at your watch –

It has stopped.

Longson turns and walks away as Peter comes back across the Manchester United carpet. Peter is also red-faced. Peter also has tears in his eyes. Peter takes Lillian by her arm. Peter leads her out of the Manchester United boardroom –

You turn to your wife. You tell her, ‘We’re going.’

No one speaks on the coach back to Derby; the players don’t speak; the trainers and the coaches don’t speak; Jimmy and Peter don’t speak; you don’t speak; your wives don’t speak; no one speaks at all –

No one says a single fucking word –

It is Saturday 13 October 1973, and you know this is the end.

* * *

The sun is shining, the sky is blue, but it’s still another bloody ugly Yorkshire morning at the arse-end of August when I wake up in my modern luxury hotel bed in my modern luxury hotel room, feeling like fucking dogshit, and reach over the pens and the papers, the league tables and the fixtures to switch on the modern luxury radio beside the bed:

‘Yesterday Mr Denis Howell, the Sports Minister, chaired the so-called Soccer Summit to hammer out plans for dealing with hooliganism after the stabbing to death of a fourteen-year-old Blackpool supporter last Saturday. Afterwards Mr Howell said that players would also be required to tighten up their conduct on the pitch:

‘“We have expressed the view that the FA,