Hooper's Revolution. Dennie Wendt

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СКАЧАТЬ by judges based on foot speed and playing style. In time, the club’s management determined to build the squad based on a stated desire to finish in twelfth each year without ever being suspected of throwing a match; United’s unique aims put them in the awkward position of paying exorbitant transfer fees for players of what the club deemed “exactly our kind of mediocrity.”

       TWO

      The next Saturday afternoon, a late February Saturday afternoon, brought godforsaken Dire Vale United to the Auld Moors football ground for an FA Cup Fifth Round tie. As festive as a Fifth Round FA Cup tie might be, especially for a club like East Southwich Albion, the Auld Moors on a late February Saturday afternoon is still the Auld Moors on a late February Saturday afternoon, no matter the stakes: the creaky old ground, which was reaching an age of possibly preferring to be left alone, emitted the familiar odor of breaded fish, woolly perspiration, and Bovril—roughly the same odor as an East Southwich man of similar age let off on a Saturday afternoon. Danny inhaled the oil-saturated fish, the sweat of old men, the liquefied meat, and thought some version of what he always thought at two minutes to three o’clock on a Saturday afternoon: I’ve been dipped in England.

Despite its forever-midtable/lower-league grimness, the Auld Moors, festooned in bunting and ribbons and pennants and flowers, did seem to bring a little extra something this particular FA Cup Saturday. Elderly East Southwichmen wore blue rosettes and buttons and badges on their bulky coats and caps, testifying to their long and mostly dissatisfying relationship with the club. Ten or fifteen papier-mâché one-legged cockerels^* of varying size and quality made their ways through the crowd, across the fingertips of eager supporters desperate to see the town’s and the club’s talisman brought to some measurable glory. Local women wore floppy blue hats and the mystified smiles of people who weren’t entirely sure how to support a winner, if that was indeed what they were doing. A few real oldsters spun peculiar and irritating wooden noisemakers and filled the air with strange, archaic constructions along the lines of “Up the Albion,” “On you Blues,” and the difficult-to-say “Play up, East Southwich.” The official capacity of the Moors was 11,500, but the day’s official attendance would be listed at 16,579.

This was a special day, nothing like an average Third Division Saturday against Sadbridge United, Ffyddrhyrr Town, Scrumley Villa, or Bloat—not at all. Albion had only recently played a frigid, windblown early December match at Wolves & Wolves (recently merged)^† in front of an announced crowd of 487 that beggared the description of football as the “Beautiful Game.”

      This wasn’t like that. Today was a joyful day, in a reluctant and nervous East Southwich way, of course, but the good people knew this might just be as good as it got, and so they tried: tried to be festive, tried to exult in being the home team and the favorite in a meaningful Cup tie. Today, the Royals’ home stand, mostly shielded from the harsh acute-angle sunlight by its begabled corrugated steel roof, was awash in East Southwich Albion royal-blue-and-white scarves pulled taut by anxious supporters dying for a day, a memory, to call their own, a Cup tale they could pass along one day. “Ah, ’76... I remember that one—’twas a cold, cold day, right bloody cold that day, when little Dire Vale United came to town. We were lucky in the draw—we had only to beat tiny Dire Vale...”

      The truth of it was neither East Southwich Albion nor Dire Vale United had the slightest business in the Fifth Round of the FA Cup. But Albion had won on an own goal in the Third Round and had gotten a fortunate draw against another Third Division side who’d pulled an upset in the previous round to get out of the Fourth. And Dire Vale United had won in the Third after three replays and shocked a Second Division team, who had taken them lightly and had rested their first team for a meaningless midtable League encounter at the weekend and hadn’t counted on Dire Vale waterlogging their pitch until it was a three-inch-deep swamp.

      And now one of these two miserable football clubs—well, one was miserable, the other just not all that good—had a shot at a date with one of the real glamour clubs from London, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, which, no matter the result, would mean a sizable payday for the club and a chance for the players to show what they could do against real competition and maybe, just maybe, a shot at a First Division contract.

      But that’s not what Danny was thinking as he warmed up in the muck and the mire at the Auld Moors to play against Dire Vale United in the Fourth Round of the Football Association Cup. Danny was thinking, Enough of this shite. Danny was thinking about his nutmeg of poor Stevie Johnston, and he was thinking he deserved a little more credit for undoing Johnston, whom the club would be looking to today for a goal or two. Everyone loves a goal scorer, Danny thought. A lazy forward, Johnston. This shite ends today, he thought, as he clapped his hands toward the main stand.

      The East Southwich Albion faithful sang wildly and not at all well—never had so many of them been together, never had they filled the entire Frog’s Bottom Stand, not like this, not shoulder to shoulder, not so you could get lifted off the ground and moved three or four chest-crushing, fleetingly terrifying feet, never so that your only hope of a piss was into the rolled-up newspaper in your own hand, never had they been so cautiously optimistic, never in quite such a First Division way had they all been together, together and this loud.

      And never had the opposition been as boisterous either. The Dire Vale contingent was a disorganized but eager and enthusiastic rabble, reveling in a long, seemingly hopeless day out; they wriggled in their penned-in end like feral beasts, mocking the staid and nervous East Southwich faithful; they attempted rhymes of “wich” with a series of the most foul expressions; they frightened the home supporters, but they only motivated Danny and his teammates. Did Danny ever want to shut them up.

      The sky was clear and an unusually clean blue, the sun white and low, determined in its customary disregard for this part of Britain to withhold its warmth. It would be dark soon. The pitch was green on the wings and brown down the middle, having borne too much trauma over the autumn and winter months, having been mercilessly trod upon by mostly graceless men, having been frozen and unfrozen too many times, flattened by too many cruel mechanical devices in an effort to keep it to the criminally low standard worthy of 1970s English League football. It was perfect.

      The first few minutes of the match contained a spastic crackle missing from the weekly League struggle. Danny instantly broke into a ferocious sweat. Each of the twenty-two men on the pitch had fear to burn, a queasy awareness that an early fluke of a goal could be his fault, his own damn fault, a life of football culminated not in greatness and glory but in a horrific moment that would live in the hearts and livers of all these terrible, screaming, baying people; a hideous blunder that could change the course of the match and of his life, and of his club’s and his town’s history, could be the only goal of the day.

      The best midfielder in each side made at least one awful pass (neither team completed more than two passes in a row in that opening flurry). A Dire Vale shot from distance spun wildly, struck the corner flag, and sat there in the mud (the crowd roared its derision). An East Southwich effort landed in the car park. Each side committed a foul that made absolutely no sense and brought admonition from the referee and “sod offs” and worse from all corners of the ground. A Dire Vale player was called for a foul throw. Even Danny laughed at that one. The Dire Vale end’s singing had taken on a distinctly seaworthy tone, and you could sense the shame down in the Frog’s Bottom end at having no decent response. East Southwich women shook their heads.

      In the fourth minute, East Southwich Albion earned a corner, which floated directly and harmlessly into the arms of Dire Vale’s goalkeeper. After the area cleared, the keeper rolled the ball to the edge of the eighteen-yard box, picked it back up, and launched a mighty punt into the chilled late afternoon. Danny positioned himself underneath it, right on the center СКАЧАТЬ