www.casspennant.com
Media Articles
THE INDEPENDENT
8th March 2002
INTERCITY DAYS
|
In 1978, when I
was a chubby 16-year-old with a wispy blond moustache that could not
be seen from more than 10 feet away, a middle-aged man from Birmingham,
who was wearing a quilted anorak and looked vaguely like my uncle, spat
at me and called me ‘scum’. I felt like crying.
Because I was not scum, I was a respectable grammar school boy who,
give or take a tricky gerund, could translate from the Latin Ovid’s
Pyramus and Thisbe. I had been brought up to offer my seat on a
crowded bus to my elders. I was not scum. The man in the quilted anorak
was dead wrong about that. I told him to eff off. A little later that
day, I stood in the away supporters’ section of St. Andrew’s,
Birmingham City’s football ground, and with a couple of thousand
others, to the tune made famous by sweet, long-haired Mary Hopkin, bounced
up and down singing: ‘Those were the days my friend/We took the
Stretford End/We took the Shed/ the North Bank, Highbury/We took the
Geordies too/We fight for Everton/We are the Street, of Everton FC/La,
la, la, lala, la la la la lala …’ I had, of course, never taken Manchester United’s Stretford End; in fact I had never even been to Old Trafford. I had been to Highbury, but I took my cousin, not the North Bank. Nor had I ever fought for Everton. On the contrary,
at the first sign of a scuffle, I used to walk rapidly in the opposite
direction. On leaving away grounds we were often herded down narrow terraced streets by policemen on horseback, on which occasions it was customary to call, in self-mocking fashion, ‘baa’ or ‘moo’. Actually, I greatly appreciated the mounted escort, although my friends, Rafe, Mugsy and Bean, respectable grammar schoolboys also, sometimes referred to the police, albeit quietly, as ‘pigs’. I could never do that. The word simply wouldn’t form. I had always been nervously respectful of authority; at least since my friend Heppy and I had tried to nick a Mars bar and a Twix from Boots in Chapel Street, Southport, and got caught by the female store detective. That had been my only assault on civilised values, which is not to say that I did not look capable of assault. |
To Everton matches,
home and away, I wore denim jacket lavishly decorated with badges –
including one that said ‘Koppites are gobshites!’ – and
scarves knotted around both wrists, one a blue-and-white Everton scarf,
the other in the colours of Borussia Mönchengladbach, who had played
Liverpool in the 1977 European Cup Final. Oddly enough, by
then, real football hooligans looked much more respectable that I did. In his new book
Congratulations, You’ve Just Met the ICF, Cass Pennant writes
of those years, when the police were stepping up their campaign against
hooliganism: ‘We had to change from a mindless yob army to a thinking
thug army … where was the fun in just looking hard? We smartened
ourselves up and started wearing casual fashions. The Farah strides,
Pringles of Gabiccis we wore on a Friday night we now sported to matches
on the Saturday. Anything to get as far away as possible from the authorities’
stereotyped image of what they thought they had to look out for … ‘It was funny
the way the beer monsters in their claret-and-blue hooped rugby shirts
with donkey jackets regarded the new casual look as something tarty.
But they gave respect when they saw how quickly the casual in the Lacoste
would pull out a blade and squirt.’ The title of Pennant’s
book refers to the message printed on the grotesque calling cards deposited
with victims by members of West Ham’s so-called InterCity Firm,
of which Pennant was a leading ‘general’. Although Pennant
claims to have had second thoughts about the hooligan culture in the
wake of the 1986 Heysel disaster, and the ICF is long since disbanded,
the book represents a shameless glorification of that culture, full
of self-aggrandising references to war and the movies. Vietnam, Custer’s
Last Stand, and the films Gladiator and Zulu are all evoked
in the descriptions by him and other ICF members of fights with opposing
supporters. Not, of course, that ‘supporters’ is quite the word. Pennant’s is not a football book. Although football expressions are used, such as when one of the ICF’s founders, Andy Swallow, laments that ‘Stoke seems to be a bit of an unlucky ground for me,’ the reference is invariably to violence. ‘I’ve been going there since ’73,’ Swallow elaborates. |
And West Ham very disappointingly always seem to lose the match? Erm, no. ‘And I always end up … getting hit on the head with a brick and such like.’ There is, in fact,
scarcely any mention in the book of West Ham the team, although there
is a revealing account of an exchange between Swallow and the West Ham
player Frank Lampard, during a pitch invasion at Birmingham City after
the Hammers had lost an FA Cup tie. Lampard: ‘Andy,
why don’t you do everyone a favour and get off the pitch?’ Swallow: ‘Bollocks.
. I’m doing a better job than you. You lost your battle, we’re
going to win ours.’ The heyday of the
ICF coincided with the height of my passion for Everton. I attended
virtually every match, home and away, in the 1978-79 season; the year
that the punk band Cockney Rejects – managed by Garry Bushell,
later the television critic of The Sun – effectively became
the ICF’s cheerleaders. Their songs included ‘Are You Ready
to Ruck?’ and ‘Running Down The Back Streets’. They played
on Top of the Pops in West Ham’s colours of claret and blue. In the Gwladys Street
End at Goodison Park, meanwhile, I joined in the language of violence
almost as wholeheartedly as I avoided the reality of it. I always stood
in the same place, a few yards from a frizzy-haired character known
as Fozzie Bear, who used to hang from a stanchion with one arm and make
provocative gesticulations with the other. Fozzie usually led the Street
End’s chants and Rafe, Mugsy, Bean and I always followed, except
for the Saturday afternoon when Rafe tried to initiate one himself,
which petered out rather pitifully. Most disloyally, not even Mugsy,
Bean and I joined in. Anyway, thanks to
a dog-eared Rothmans Football Yearbook, I know that on 24th February
19979, while Cass Pennant and his ICF thugs were working out a strategy
to beat up as many fans of Oldham Athletic as possible, I was at Goodison
in my denim jacket to see Everton vs Ipswich Town. Fozzie initiated a hugely witty chant that day, intended to mock the relatively rural setting of Ipswich. ‘You’re going home,’ we sang, right arms raised in tribal unity, ‘in a combine harvester.’ |
But by the final
whistle, by which time Ipswich had had the temerity to win 1-0, the
words had changed to the standard: ‘You’re going home in a
fucking ambulance!’ As far as I know, none of them did. And we
went home, as usual, on the number 17 bus. Despite my mother’s
anxiety, even in those grim days when every Saturday afternoon saw outbreaks
of crowd trouble in English football, violence could always be avoided.
Equally, violence could always be found, which Pennant and the ICF made
it their business to do. Rather surprisingly,
given that football hooliganism was, and still is, associated with right-wing
racists, Pennant is black. He recalls Newcastle United fans chanting
‘Chicken George’ at him on one memorable occasion, shortly
before a petrol bomb was thrown, but adds: ‘The support behind
me that day from the West Ham ICF lads never wavered.’ How sweet. He also refers to
a former black skinhead called Animal, ‘now known as Olajide Ikoli’.
Whether he was always Olajide Ikoli, then known as Animal, is a possibility
Pennant does not explore. Whatever, Ikoli admits there was a real buzz
knowing you were being accepted by another culture and that this culture
hated you. ‘Everything at West Ham in those days was pure racism,
but they accepted you and stuck by you, even when the skinheads were
singing ‘Ain’t no black in the Union Jack’. Before I wrote this
article, it was suggested to me that I might like to meet Cass Pennant.
I declined, on the basis that I didn’t much want to shake his hand.
But we have been, at least once, in the same stadium at the same time.
In 1980, Everton played West Ham in an FA Cup semi-final replay at Elland
Road, Leeds. Pennant writes about
that night in his book. ‘The mobs were even-numbered, but the Everton
lads, who had our respect, never tried hard enough to breach the police
cordons to get something going with us. We never even saw them. They
just went their own way.’ It was the one time when our different philosophies as football supporters clashed. And mine, I’m pleased to say, came out firmly on top. |
