SUNDAY LEAGUE

Ten pints and a doner kebab, and the next morning I was lying in the dirt looking up at the sky and Rich was saying, ‘Get up Danny, you soft bastard.’

 

A jazz band practised in the car park next to the football field, twirling batons and playing the theme from Rocky on kazoos. Kids of eleven and twelve in silky uniforms beat out the rhythm on marching drums and steel triangles. The music drifted over the pitch, fusing with foul-mouthed yells and thuds of leather on leather.

 

‘Are you getting up,’ said Rich, ‘or are we going to have to play around you?’

 

My throat was so dry it itched, my head seemed ready to explode, and my muscles were aching and useless. You get to a point in your life where hangovers become painful. Your liver’s waging war on the alcohol in your blood stream. Your body’s a battlefield, and it was a good night out, but you’re thinking, was it really worth it?

 

‘Howay, man,’ said Rich, casting a giant shadow over my apathetic body. ‘You wouldn’t catch a professional footballer lying around like this.’

 

I belched and rubbed my forehead and said, ‘You would on a Sunday morning.’

 

Right now, most people were still in bed, or reading the papers, or bracing themselves for a visit to IKEA if they were feeling plucky. Me, I was lying on a football pitch in an orange polyester shirt and baggy black shorts that were several sizes too big.

 

Of course, this was before the incident at Old Trafford in front of the prawn sandwich brigade, and the thing with the girl off the telly, and the bother with the police, and all that other rubbish you’ve read about in the papers. And it was after a lot of other stuff, like me growing up, and my dad dying, and me settling into a life of general mediocrity, and loads more you probably wouldn’t be interested in. 

 

But this was where the important stuff started. The stuff I want to put the record straight about. On a council-maintained playing field that we claimed as our home ground. I grew up around the corner from here. My Mam still lived in our old two-bedroom semi, red bricks bleached pink by time, a washing line strung up between the outhouse and an apple tree. I spent hours every week as a kid knocking a ball against that outhouse wall. Until my Mam noticed cracks appearing in the brickwork. Then, whenever she heard the pop-pop-pop of a football knocking against the wall she’d chase me away with a big wooden sweeping brush.

 

Maybe it’s a rose-tinted memory, but back then the playing field seemed as well-kept as Wembley. Now the grass on the pitch was as thin as an old man’s hair. In the goalmouths it had receded completely, leaving only dusty bald patches of baked mud. The once-white goalposts were mostly rusted brown, and ragged orange goal-nets hung fixed by reams of black plastic tape. Around the pitch, the field was spiky and unkempt and littered with discarded snack packets and drink cartons. A yellow Boddingtons can lay crushed and rusting, and a brown plastic cider bottle rolled in the breeze.

 

Following the sudden realisation that I might be lying on a dog’s egg, I sat up. It took a wobbly moment for the spirit level in my head to balance itself.

 

The Romans used celery to cure hangovers, and the Greeks used parsley. They liked a drink, the Romans and the Greeks. The KGB developed a pill that kept spies’ heads clear while drinking on duty. Hair of the dog, that never worked. Some drinkers swore by fry-ups, or raw eggs, or painkilling pills. The only thing that worked for me was not drinking. But what else was I going to do on a Saturday night?

 

So me and Rich were playing football with hangovers, on a field on a hill overlooking the Tyne, surrounded by patterns of identical pebble-dashed council houses that spiralled away down to the riverbank. Occasional high-rises punctuated the terraced estates, reaching out to the horizon and piercing the bright blue sky.

 

Down by the river, past the bridges, up to the west of the city centre stood a towering football stadium, steel and glass cantilever stands gleaming in the sun. Strawberry Park, home of Newcastle East End. That was where we had dreamed of being since we were kids. On a Premier League pitch, surrounded by fifty thousand adoring fans. Instead of here, on a desolate field, socks rolled around our ankles, shorts overlong, shirts untucked, face reddened, hair swirling in the wind.

 

A single small grubby grey cloud swept by overhead. I wished it would open up and rain. Pour. Soak my dehydrated skin. Run across my papery lips and onto my cardboard tongue. Drown me before I shrivelled up and expired.

 

Then there was a shout from the touchline, and it was Walter, the one-eyed team manager, and he was saying, ‘Get up Danny! You’re a fucken shambles!’

 

He was a scruffy sixty-plus midget, sweater sleeves rolled up past his tattooed forearms, face scrunched around a good eye, a glass eye, and a permanent tab end. He lost the eye bare-knuckle fighting in his twenties. Everyone called him Columbo, but not to his face.

 

Walter stood next to a rabble of white-legged substitutes, all shivering in various combinations of tracksuits, training tops and shorts. Dwarfing Walter was the opposition manager, a fat bespectacled bloke in a puffa jacket. Three other spectators stood along the touchline: a brown-haired man in a Barbour with a Sunday newspaper tucked under his arm; a cap-wearing pensioner holding a Scottie dog on a leash; and a lanky teenager playing keepy-uppy with a spare ball. Left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, head, head, left foot, dropped it.

 

The jazz band marched across the car park towards the flat-roofed brown-brick changing room and began to play Oh When the Saints. You can keep your parsley and your painkillers, but the last thing someone with a hangover needs is a bunch of kids banging drums and blowing on kazoos.

 

And then the referee, a lanky bloke in a shiny black kit, yelled, ‘Last five minutes, lads!’

 

I hauled myself to my feet, rubbed clods of mud from my shirt and cautiously bent my knees to check the joints still worked. A stampede of orange and blue shirts rushed past, there was a thump of leather, a football flew over my head, and the shirts ran back in the opposite direction.

 

The blue shirts belonged to Staunton Manufacturing, a factory side that didn’t contain a single employee of Staunton Manufacturing, only ringers handpicked from the cream of the league. The orange shirts were the Coal & Iron, a pub team made up exclusively of patrons of the Coal & Iron public house, all of whom had patronised said public house on the previous night. We were in the closing stages of a North East Sunday League fixture. Things were not going well.

 

So I moved into a slow jog, legs feeling like wooden planks nailed to my hips, orange shirt billowing, black shorts flapping, shinpads exposed. Around me, the oranges flailed around the pitch, shoulders hunched, heads drooped, daydreaming, hungover, and distinctly disinterested. Around them buzzed the blues, strapping, steely-eyed, determined, dangerous, and charging around the pitch at great speed.

 

A pint glass of cold water. Man, I would pay twenty quid for a pint glass of cold water.

 

The ball sailed overhead again in a dirty white flash. I watched big Rich lumber after it across the dusty ground. It held up on the uneven pitch, and Rich got a toe to it. A blue defender blocked his path to goal, the two players ran into each other, and the referee’s whistle pierced the morning air. A free kick to us on the edge of the blues’ penalty area.

 

I suddenly found the energy to run towards the ball. My beer belly jiggled, and its contents sloshed about as I moved. I was breathing like an asthmatic without an inhaler, chest heavy and every gasp an effort. But I got there first, picked up the ball, and held it to my shirt with both hands.

 

‘How come you always take the free kicks, like?’ said Rich, pulling himself to his feet and rubbing mud from his chunky knees.

 

I flattened a divot, placed the ball on the ground, and said, ‘Because taking free kicks doesn’t involve any running around.’

 

Rich’s gel-swept hair barely moved in the breeze. He was the same height as me but twice as wide – a round-faced, triple-chinned, self-confessed big fat bastard. 

 

When we were kids, and knocking around the streets, people called us Little and Large. Now Rich ran the milk-bottling line at the Co-op dairy. He liked to think he looked a bit like Robbie Williams. And on the previous night he’d been swinging on the kebab shop door, with a cheap cigar in his mouth, singing Let Me Entertain You.

 

The free kick was twenty-five yards out, slightly to the left of goal. The goalkeeper, apparently no stranger to pie shops himself, filled the goalmouth. A thick wall of blue defenders huddled together on the edge of the penalty area, the breeze flapping at their shirts. The keeper yelled at the defenders to cover the left-hand post, and he covered the right. I saw rippling blue shirts and swirling heads of hair, but I didn’t see any goal.

 

‘If you score here,’ said Rich, ‘I’ll bare me arse in Murton’s window.’ An uncouth Tyneside tradition at Newcastle’s oldest department store.

 

‘I’ll hold you to that,’ I said, and I took a few steps back.

 

The referee blew his whistle.

 

Then the Scottie dog ran onto the pitch, like a yapping ball of wire wool, leash dragging along the ground behind it.

 

‘Mac! Mac!’ shouted the cap-wearing pensioner. ‘Come here!’

 

The dog scuttled towards the goalmouth, kicking up dirt with its tiny legs. It yelped furiously at the goalkeeper, who took a startled step backwards. Then it dashed at the wall of defenders.

 

‘Mac!’ yelled the pensioner, brogues pounding across the pitch. ‘You little terror!’

 

The little dog was now zig-zagging around the penalty area, sending terrified footballers scattering and leaping into the air. The wall of defenders had tumbled, and the goalkeeper was unable to rebuild it.

 

I took a three-step run, and clipped the ball into the air with my right foot. The ball flew up high over the disordered defenders, then dipped, and swerved in the wind. The goalkeeper spotted the white flash approaching him and attempted a dive. Too late. The ball spun into the top left hand corner of the goal, clipping the underside of the bar with a satisfying donk.

 

I turned away, right arm raised, and yelled, ‘Get in!’

 

And suddenly I wasn’t on a windswept muddy field with a handful of men and a Scottie dog. I was on a lush manicured pitch surrounded by fifty thousand replica kit-clad fans in stands that reached to the sky. And they were on their feet, and they were cheering, and they were chanting,‘One Danny Milburn, there’s only one Danny Milburn!’

 

Then Rich said, ‘Jammy bastard,’ and the pensioner grabbed hold of the Scottie dog’s leash, and the blues began to argue with the referee, and we trooped back to the halfway line, taking care to step over a foot-wide cake of dried-up horse shit.

 

‘Howay, ref! There was a bloody dog on the pitch!’ yelled the blues’ manager.

 

Walter shot the fat bloke a scowl, then offered me a thumbs-up and shouted, ‘Your Dad would’ve been proud of you for that one.’

 

Yes, my Dad would probably have been proud of me. I was a little bit proud of myself, which was stupid as it was just a daft goal in a tinpot Sunday League match, with something of an assist from a Scottie dog. But, bollocks, I was proud of myself, and it was another moment to add to my mental scrapbook of a footballing non-career.

 

See, probably the hardest moment in a boy’s life is the one in which he finally accepts he is never going to be good enough to be a professional footballer. Ever since I could walk, I’d dribble a ball through the streets while rounding up friends for kickabouts. Then it was headers and volleys, cup doubles, five-a-side, eleven-a-side, sometimes twenty-a-side if too many turned up. We played with leather casers, penny floaters, tennis balls, whatever, and marked out goalposts with coats, bags, and road cones. We played every weekend, and every night after school, sometimes until it got so dark we could no longer see the ball.

 

I played for the school team, and then for an under-eighteen side. The truth was I was never really any good, but I was fifteen or sixteen before I finally accepted I wasn’t going to make the grade. So I ended up handling complaints for Newcastle City Council instead of playing football for Newcastle East End. Now I was twenty-nine, and my only involvement in football consisted of watching East End on a Saturday afternoon and playing for the Coal & Iron on a Sunday morning. This was my football career, and I cherished every good moment as if it might be the last.

 

I was still grinning as the match restarted, and the ball appeared at my feet, and the blue number three charged at me, and the blues’ manager shouted, ‘Fucken clatter the twat!’

 

The number three wasn’t particularly big, but he’d been causing aggro all match. He was one of those wiry suedeheaded twats you see scrapping in checked shirts outside city centre boozers. At half-time he sucked down a Silk Cut instead of an orange segment. And now he was bearing down on me with the clear intention of breaking my legs.

 

What you need to do in situations like this is remain cool. You have a spilt second to react, and don’t have much time to weigh up your options. Good footballers, like good chess players, think several moves ahead. They know what they’re going to do with the ball before they get it. They keep a mental picture in their mind of where their teammates and opponents are. A good footballer would know that John Rees was free on the wing, and would dink the ball up the line to him. Me, I wasn’t a good footballer. So I whacked the ball as hard as I could into touch.

 

But the number three wasn’t looking for the ball. He was looking for my legs. He leapt feet-first into the air. Then the crack of studs against shinpad. A large muddy divot flew into the air. So did I. My legs buckled, knees twisted, and ankles lifted above waist. My body twisted and flipped, and I crashed down into the dirt like a demolished chimney stack. There was no air left in my body. I watched the solitary grey cloud drift across the sky and listened to the jazz band play Spanish Flea.

 

The number three stood over me, and spat, ‘Take a lesson, you twat.’

 

And then the referee blew the full-time whistle. ‘Good game, lads,’ he shouted. Then he walked over to me and said, ‘Are you alright, number nine?’

 

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘just a bit clarty.’ And the ref nodded and headed off towards the changing rooms.

 

I reached down to check my legs were still attached. I heard some of the players offering, ‘Good game,’ to each other. Then Walter asked a couple of subs to take down the goal nets. I thought of closing my eyes and letting all the other players go into the flat-roofed changing room, and just staying there on the pitch on my own, and allowing my body to shut down and sleep. Then I thought of the lukewarm showers, and a change of clothes, and the bottle of Lucozade Sport in my bag. So Rich helped me to my feet, and we limped off towards the changing rooms.

 

‘What about that then?’ I grinned at him.

 

Rich wrinkled his brow and said, ‘We lost six-one, Danny...’

 

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘but the “one” was a bit special, wasn’t it?’

 

 

Evening Journal:

North East Sunday League Round-Up

Byker were 2-1 winners over Tyne Tiles in Sunday’s league fixtures. Joe Freeman and Ronnie Benson netted for Byker, while Dave Berry scored Tyne’s consolation. Cramlington beat North Shields 3-1 with Kenny Warren (2) and Gary Martin scoring for Cramlington, and Steven Shipley replying for Shields.The Coal & Iron remain at the foot of the table after losing 6-1 at home to Staunton Manufacturing. Jon Harvey (2), Ed Davey (2), Mick Jewitt, and Graham Homewood scored for Staunton. Danny Milburn netted for the relegation favourites. The match between Durham Lights and Ponteland was postponed due to excessive dog excrement on the pitch.