To set the tone, the scraggy-necked, pasty-faced fishwife in the C.U.F.C. away shorts and the generic polyester Sports Direct football top picks the knickers out of her arse, as she casts her skunk eye at number 34 where that smiley repressed hippy lives.
The football game is a crafted match: the teenage pre-schizophrenic bully at the top of the local food chain and his cohorts versus the marginalised ethnic youth coached by the middle-aged skunk psychotic with a barely containable messiah complex, whose six-year-old dwells in a land of early reptiles and oblivion. Wonderful positional play, sunshine!
The tie takes place at the urban fringe of the middle-class ghetto known officially as South Cambridgeshire where the local MP routinely emotes, yawn! And crocodiles weep tears of hollow laughter. Austerity kicks off!
At first, the crowd is quiet. Realisation is stuck on the M1 North of the Watford Gap - miles from the most unequal UK city in the world, or Cambridge as it’s sometimes called. The football team is united. The city could not be more divided.
As an economic war rages, the ladies and gents of the Trumpington Allotment Society inhabit a fertile green piece of earth, a blue marbled paradise, where orchards create community and votes change things.
Meanwhile, on the estate, all is calm. Ish. The pre-match jitters amongst the local unparented yoof are: generalised anxiety, status dominance and ball control. Regulation prison whites. Hands in pockets. Vicious eye contact. Aggression. But mainly lots of good healthy banter and running around aimlessly. Football gives these kids a goal in life, Sir Kenny.
Away from the House of Lords, amongst the sons of the workers, a football game is organically growing. The big match of the gay-looking, marginal South-East Asian and the only black youth in the vicinity against the local disaffected white precariat (2007/2008 season) in the year of a declaration of hostilities by the rentier class and Tory banksterism.
Only most of us are stupid, Heidi. Heidi Hi Campers! Crocodiles are splitting their sides in the stands. Inspired by the mediocrity and monotony that surrounds us all, the beautiful game has begun. It’s a face-off between a local yoof, him of the half-Austrian dad, and the Liverpudlian skunk casualty.
In the death throes of a post-Thatcherized society, labels mean everything. Council estate. Try that one on for size. In the game, labels mean fuck all. All that matters is yellow and red. Pure instinct. Total monkey brain.
The crowd sings like a Pink Floyd album in reverse: Pass at least 5 GCSE’s or you’ll forever walk alone!
Mad Dad gets the ball and passes to the South Korean who lays it off casually to the third-generation Windrush basket-baller who side-foots it to the youngest in the team, whose parents have come from Ankara to sell delicious kebabs and drive Volkswagen Passats. To spite late capitalism, little Utger in Umbro scores a screamer in the top corner of the metal net. The crowd go mental!
Meanwhile, the six-year-old boy is fabricating daisy chains with a 10-year-old girl, who is a mere brace away from the toxicity of shopping and appearance politics, and whose parents have a loathing for the labels class and gender as an explanation for disappointment, as they contemplate another shift at the local super-hospital that sits on the horizon dwarfing the nearby social housing stock.
The score is 17-8 for the littler kids and the non-white, non-locals, united by mad Dad to occupy the concrete five-a-side cage that serves as stadia to their dreams of flight and soccer stardom.
The bully shows an interest. He loves to succumb to nascent tendencies of violence and domination. A duck to mucky water, he intuits much and understands little, but holds an unhealthy interest in anything on the manor that can be destroyed, so long as it doesn’t belong to the posh and powerful forces of social and economic reaction that hem him in on all sides, like the metal cage provided by the council.
The second half is underway, comrades. BBC supplies the social commentary, as per. John the Mott is sweating buckets and cobs in his trademark sheepskin, as he schleps over the class divide to watch the match.
Over to you, Motty.As I look out across the estate, it very much looks like the wife’s coming on for the last twenty. Surely, she's not bringing herself on at this stage in third-wave feminism. What's your take on this, Sir Trev?
Classic, John. There’s been an interestin’ situation developin’ between the Liverpool feller and the monkey-brainer with the tendency to go in hard. He’s got a violent streak in him as wide as the Dartford Tunnel... not to mention, her outdoors is oblivious to the threat from the right wing.
What’s your verdict, Sir Kenny?
Aye, well, likesay... had he not brung on the South Korean early doors and the mixed race lad, then the handbags could of got a bit nasty and he’d've been well outnumbered in defence.
Aye, well, likesay... had he not brung on the South Korean early doors and the mixed race lad, then the handbags could of got a bit nasty and he’d've been well outnumbered in defence.
Interestin’ match on our hands now, Motty.
Looks like the missus has spotted the six-year-old, marked by a daisy cutter down that left wing, she’s not happy.
You've got to see it from her point of view, all she sees is one unfathered and abandoned 6-year-old.
Here's Dad, beating his pigeon chest, effing and jeffing at the referee, and now red-carded for the second time this week!
What a corker! A sideways glance from the missus. One fold of the arms. One huff of the shoulders. A snort of disdain. Another shake of the head. Not a word wasted. Thoroughly professional performance.
Looks like the missus has spotted the six-year-old, marked by a daisy cutter down that left wing, she’s not happy.
You've got to see it from her point of view, all she sees is one unfathered and abandoned 6-year-old.
Here's Dad, beating his pigeon chest, effing and jeffing at the referee, and now red-carded for the second time this week!
What a corker! A sideways glance from the missus. One fold of the arms. One huff of the shoulders. A snort of disdain. Another shake of the head. Not a word wasted. Thoroughly professional performance.
Referee’s whistle goes. Mad Dad leaves the monkey cage. Local juiced-up yoof take the lead again. Respite from psychosis temporary. You’ll forever walk alone!
Pink Floyd take to the pitch, for another rousing chorus of spliffed out bliss and Grantchester meadow escapism which offers relief and transcendence from the daily bollocks that passes for society. But as a tree that stands by the waterside, solitude scores an away win over loneliness. Three points in the bag. Stay up. It ain't finished till they think it’s all over.
Pink Floyd take to the pitch, for another rousing chorus of spliffed out bliss and Grantchester meadow escapism which offers relief and transcendence from the daily bollocks that passes for society. But as a tree that stands by the waterside, solitude scores an away win over loneliness. Three points in the bag. Stay up. It ain't finished till they think it’s all over.
No comments:
Post a Comment