Articles of Faith Read online

  ‘Wembley and Germany are typically powerful sirens to summon my slumbering jingoism. Not this time’

  3

  A pledge is not enough to make England shine

  You know them pledges we make when England are knocked out of major tournaments on penalties? Typically the pledge will be formed along the lines of: ‘England, you have betrayed us and shamed us. Worse than that, you have given us momentary hope, and hope is so much harder to withstand than despair, thus I shall never more be inveigled into caring about your results or supping the toxic broth of brouhaha that surrounds the carnival of fools we call our national team.’

  ‘If it was up to me I’d put chimps in the team, and ballroom dancers’

  ‘Tis a long and solemn oath. That’s usually how it is for me; then the tournament continues without England, all pale and ghostly, and I’m left to ponder what I do with my life, drifting listlessly, unable to feel, involving myself in any senseless bagatelle just to try and stir some emotion. Then, like a tragically willing victim of spousal abuse, I find myself lured back into the tempest by the gorgeous oaf that is patriotism and the incessant promise that they’ve changed.

  Well, I think that on Wednesday I might’ve broken the cycle. I know it was a friendly but it was at Wembley and against Germany – two powerful sirens that are typically sufficient to summon my slumbering jingoism. Not this time.

  I just went out and got on with my life. ‘Alan Smith might play’, I heard echoing through ol’ Jung’s collective brain box. I continued with my chores. ‘Joe Cole will be given a more creative role’ – I remained undeterred. ‘Micah Richards is gonna get his willy out’ – I was curious but did not seek out a Dixons window in which to confirm the rumour.

  Everyone’s quite rightly excited by Richards but am I alone in detecting homoerotic undertones in the relentless drooling about his athleticism and his ‘leap’? ‘Ooh, what a leap,’ pundits say, struggling to stifle a stiffy; ‘I’ve never seen a leap like it’; ‘I wish he’d leap into my parlour, then leap on to my bunk, then leap about on my tummy till I cry guilty tears about my bastard marriage vows.’ That’s what they say, these pundits. They say it with their eyes.

  Micah ‘The Leap’ Richards is the most encouraging thing about England but I was not seduced into watching the game because I still feel a bit despondent about international football. I think this is because of the following:

  1. Steve McClaren. I believe him to be a bit of an appeaser – ‘You want Beckham back? Have Beckham back.’ He seems to make reactionary decisions and as much as we might think we can manage England, we can’t and shouldn’t be allowed to. ‘Don’t listen to me,’ I feel like saying, ‘I’m whimsical, capricious, vindictive and jealous. I make stupid decisions.’ If it was up to me I’d put chimps in the team, and ballroom dancers. It’d be ridiculous, but fortunately I have no power.

  2. The team is going backwards through time with McClaren like an autistic archaeologist digging up veterans and former heroes who can only sully their good names. David James? Sol Campbell? Why not reinstate Bobby Charlton and get him to play a quick half. In fact get the entire pub team of legends from that beer advert and give them a go.

  3. Sometimes I get depressed but it passes and I only think it’s really bad when I think, ‘What would make me happy?’ and I can’t think of anything. That’s how England make me feel now. What would make it work? David Bentley? Aaron Lennon? Robert Green? There was a time when we’d clamour, that’s right clamour, to have someone in the team: ‘Pick Rooney’ – ‘But he’s only 12’ – ‘PICK HIM’. Or, ‘Take Gazza’ – ‘He’s drunk’ – ‘TAKE HIM’. Now at the first sign of a clamour we’re obeyed, it takes all the fun out of the clamouring. Having said that, PICK ROBERT GREEN.

  Those are my three reasons. I dare say once the games become competitive I may feel a tingle but Premier League football hoovers up loyalty like a junkie anteater so it’ll never again be as painful as Italia 90 or Euro 96 or that kick in the nuts last summer. I shall enjoy international football perched like a connoisseur on a barstool of snooty indifference. And you can take that pledge right down to the ol’ pledge bank.

  4

  Dark lore of Dyer and the Hammers’ hex

  I suppose, were I able to trade in some cosmic stock exchange, I would relinquish West Ham’s passage into the third round of the League Cup in order to preserve Kieron Dyer’s lower right leg. As Alan Curbishley said after the win against Bristol Rovers: ‘Now the result seems immaterial.’

  It’s difficult to celebrate victory having seen Dyer suffer one of those wince-inducing injuries where the leg visibly contorts within the sock and it seems impossible to imagine it ever healing. It will, of course, in time, six months or so, but that’s the bulk of the season without him and he looked sharp and fast against Wigan last Saturday.

  I feel dead sorry for him, in a hospital somewhere hurting. Obviously I don’t know what it’s like to be a professional athlete but it must engender a particular insecurity to be dependent on your body in such a palpably direct manner. Whenever I suffer great physical pain or even mild discomfort it immediately resets my psychology to neutral. Say if I feel all sad and self-indulgent then get stung by a wasp, my misery feels quite abstract and I long just to be in spiritual pain once more – ‘Damn you tiny assassin, all clad in yellow and black, how I crave my former innocence where melancholy was my only trial.’

  ‘What?! Arsenal away in the fourth round? Damn you, Lucifer. Why have you forsaken me, Lord?’

  It’s terrible news for West Ham, and Curbishley implied there might be a jinx as so many of the players he’s bought in have suffered injury. It is bloody unfortunate, but a curse? After last season’s controversy plenty have grudges, not least in the city of steel. Could former Blades boss Neil Warnock be poised in a circle of stone, stinking of chicken’s blood, spewing white-eyed incantations and clutching a buckled dolly of Julien Faubert?

  There appears to be a troubling tendency among under-pressure Premiership managers to jab accusatory digits in the direction of the dark arts – Martin Jol cited ‘black magic’ as the reason Spurs didn’t get a penalty at Old Trafford at the weekend. Perhaps Tottenham did deserve something from a tie in which United were less than brilliant and they doubtless had chances but the resulting home win surely owes more to Nani’s right foot and Wes Brown’s chest/upper arm than Aleister Crowley’s necromancy.

  Perhaps this is a further indication that top-flight managers are under too much pressure, when in our secular age they crumble into medieval beliefs whenever luck goes against them – ‘What?! Arsenal away in the fourth round? Damn you, Lucifer. Why have you forsaken me, Lord?’ However, the injury crisis at Upton Park, if not the work of Beelzebub, is critical: Dean Ashton, Scott Parker, Dyer, Faubert, Freddie Ljungberg and both Lucas Neill and Matthew Upson joined the afflicted minutes after they signed. The only solution available to the club is to keep signing more players, an approach I believe was pioneered by Stalin in his gruelling fixture against Hitler on the Eastern Front.

  His mentality was, as I understand, ‘Right, loads of Germans are dying, loads of Russians are dying and we’re both going to continue to pour young men into this battle until it’s resolved, but as Russia has a larger stack of human chips we can carry on playing beyond the point of German exhaustion. I feel the hand of history, not on my shoulder but cheekily goosing me out of respect.’

  Let’s hurl more millionaire footballers onto this bonfire of the lame; why wait till they arrive at West Ham? Just give Eidur Gudjohnsen a sack of money then smash him in the balls with a pool cue. Let’s buy a wing at Whitechapel hospital and send an army of thugs with chequebooks and chainsaws on a tour round Europe to assemble a hobbling chorus of convalescents. I wish Dyer a speedy recovery. It’s a shame, and as an offer of appeasement to the angry football gods I shall sacrifice the next virgin I meet on Green Street. It could take a while.

  5

  Never mind Israel, I’ve been b
eaten by Bohemia

  I am writing this at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, where Arthur Miller wrote A View from the Bridge, where Sid Vicious killed Nancy Spungen and where Leonard Cohen received ‘head on an unmade bed’ from Janis Joplin. As is the case with most hotels trading on history, it’s a bloody dump.

  When I phoned reception in the dead of night to ask for water, water, I was told: ‘There’s a deli across the street.’ In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs water is right there with shelter and excretion at the pyramid’s foundation; they may as well dispense with the toilet and the building; they could just have a bellhop stood in the street charging you $200 a night for crapping in the gutter and snuggling up with Oscar the Grouch. Comprised neatly in this scenario is the perennial issue of the romantic versus the pragmatic – you don’t stay at the Chelsea for room service, you stay because you’re renting a little counter-cultural history for the night.

  ‘Rio said not qualifying is “unthinkable” but that just sounds like Chris Eubank describing the Titanic’

  Today England face Israel at fortress Wembley, God help us. A draw against Brazil, defeat against Germany – it’s not exactly impenetrable. Steven Gerrard has his own romance v pragmatism choice to make – does he play with a fractured toe, knowing his significance and skill are vital to Blighty, or does he heed the advice of his club and convalesce?

  It seems that Stevie will play, which worries me for a couple of reasons. I hope no one treads on his foot in the game of football he is playing against Israel’s national football team on a football pitch. Also it is difficult not to be concerned about the state of our squad when sickbeds have to be trundled to stadiums like wheelbarrows and tipped on to the field so we can scrabble together 11 men.

  In addition to Steve McClaren’s grave-robbing selection policy – this week Emile Heskey, next week Dixie Dean – it leaves me thinking that not qualifying is a realistic possibility. Romantically, I think, ‘No, England shall qualify, ‘tis our destiny. None shall pass.’ But bloody hell it don’t look good. Rio Ferdinand said that not qualifying is ‘unthinkable’ but that just sounds like Chris Eubank describing the Titanic. It is thinkable, too bloody thinkable, I’m thinking about it right now in Yanksville, Americee, where in ’94 a World Cup took place in which there was nobody speaking proper English and Alexi Lalas was just a Hanna-Barbera flesh sketch, a living Shaggy, not yet the manager of another resurrected McLazarus selection.

  It’s awful when England don’t qualify; I’d rather watch every woman I’ve ever loved drunkenly fellating handsome idiots at a bus depot than sit through another USA ’94. Actually the bus depot thing could be quite sexy, inducing a masturbatory experience that flits between jealousy and intense excitement, where one cries, despite oneself, during the act of onanism. I believe it’s popularly known as a ‘cr-ank’. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to crank my way through Euro 2008. I’m older now and more dignified.

  How are we to avoid this phantom of a nation lost in sexual flagellation – which would be an awful, Catholic, Marvin Gaye anthem: ‘In this situation I need, sexual flagellation, get up, get up, get up, let’s cry-wank tonight’? It’ll never catch on, so how do we avoid it? Where do we look for salvation? Dear, hobbling Stevie Gerrard? Confidence junky Emile Heskey? Joe Cole? Possibly, but he’s not starting for Chelsea and I don’t think he’s ever recovered from Glenn Roeder’s barmy decision to make him put on two stone – why did he do it? He might as well’ve bulked up Darcy Bussell or Harry Potter.

  I don’t know if I’ll be able to watch the qualifying matches as I’m all caught up making a documentary about Jack Kerouac and On the Road for the BBC and I’ve got more chance of discovering the essence of being that the Beats quested after than a telly showing soccer-ball – even in the Beckham era.

  Good luck England. I reserve the right to flood these pages with hyperbole if we beat Israel and Russia, and begin a campaign for McClaren’s knighthood. Such is the nature of football. Now for a spot of breakfast at the Chelsea, which will most likely be a lampshade smeared in peanut butter, by me with a room key. No wonder Sid killed Nancy – he was probably hungry and had a delirious vision of her as a hamburger. Arthur Miller was probably bored into writing that play and I bet Leonard and Janis’s bed was unmade when they arrived.

  6

  Repent, for the kingdom of Steve is at hand

  The one thing that could perhaps redeem the column I wrote seven, vast days ago; immense days, days with the limitless, intimidating scale of the expansive Kansas plains that I’ve been crossing this past week is that, at its close, having spent 800 words fear-mongering, I did offer, with rare perspicacity, the sentence: ‘I reserve the right to flood these pages with hyperbole if England win both matches.’ Well England did win both matches but hyperbole is not what I’m going to offer, no, I think more appropriate would be contrition. I feel contrite at having referred to the team’s key player in those games, Emile Heskey, as a ‘confidence junky’. So what if strong, committed, unselfish, skilful Emile sometimes requires what Ron Atkinson (note: this stereotyping refers to pre-racist Ron, when he was just a bejewelled vending machine for clichés) would doubtless describe as ‘an arm round him’ once in a while.

  I think that’s rather lovely. In this age where the modern footballer is regarded as a brash millionaire floozies-harvester, players like Emile, and indeed Shaun Wright-Phillips, occasionally suffer from self-doubt and need assurance from their manager if they are to perform to their potential. Unhelpful then to reduce Heskey to a man who uses esteem like a drug and sees his coach as the pusher, hence ‘confidence junky’. Sorry.

  Also in my doom-laden scribbling I conjectured with grisly portent that Steven Gerrard would end up in a wheelchair as a result of fierce Mossad attacks or assaults from ex-KGB but, I now accept, he seems to be fine. Again, I’m sorry.

  Then dear, triumphant, indefatigable Steve McClaren or ‘McLazarus’, as I dubbed him due to his tendency to resurrect dead or at least departed players, a tendency which I now realise marks him out as brave and willing to take risks rather than being a victim to the whims of an all-too-fickle press, of which I must now stand as the worst example. Also ‘McLazarus’ doesn’t quite work because the biblical character Lazarus, upon whom my cruel, cheap pun was based, was resurrected by Christ and did not resurrect anyone himself, so I’ve offended theologians as well as the great tactician McClaren.

  I’ve had scores of complaints from theologians but I’m less concerned about insulting a group who have forgiveness as one of their core tenets than I am noble McClaren who is as wise and gracious as Christ. I’m so very sorry.

  ‘When I left, McClaren picked his teams like a drunk shuffling bags in a trolley. Now he is indispensable’

  I did also say that Alexi Lalas looks like a live action version of the Scooby Doo character Shaggy. I stand by that. Thank God I didn’t have time to express my ill-informed views on Michael Owen who I would’ve probably dismissed as ‘finished’ or ‘a bastard’ but would now like to celebrate as a great servant of the game who will doubtless surpass Bobby Charlton’s 49 goals during the qualifying phase of this tournament, a tournament that last week I revealed grave doubts that we’d be attending beyond this formative stage but now firmly believe we’ll win.

  Furthermore I cast aspersions on Owen’s assertion that Wembley would become a fortress, claiming it was as impenetrable as Nancy Spungen’s jugular. I was writing the piece in the Chelsea Hotel and it seemed a fitting simile as it was there that Sid Vicious for once lived up to his name and murdered her. The line was cut from the published article on grounds of taste – I only wish the censor’s pen had removed the relentless, pulsating pessimism which seeped through the column staining the page the way Nancy’s blood did the tarnished floorboards of my hotel room.

  Tentatively, let me say this: West Ham were tumbling towards the Championship last season with such fervour and pace that one could be forgiven for thinking that the players were sexually arouse
d by the prospect of poor stadiums, then I went to Hawaii to work and they immediately became a squad of well-drilled, committed heroes winning eight of their last nine fixtures.

  When I left the country 10 days ago England were playing like a bunch of berks and McClaren picked his sides like a homeless drunk shuffling bags in a trolley. He is now indispensable and Gareth Barry is the new Bryan Robson. I said if England won both games I’d campaign for the manager to be knighted; I now demand that Her Majesty kicks Phil right out of the royal sex-pit and instates Steve as her lover and the new King of England. I’d also like her to sit beside him on the bench and squeeze his thigh and coo when things go well.

  Well done England and sorry for last week’s column. Prudently, I’ve read this week’s column back and I’ve written nothing that could offend anyone, what a relief. Finally, huge congratulations to our dear brothers north of the border. I should probably stay in America for football’s sake.

  7

  Chelsea too small for these two randy stags

  Jetlagged and delirious, I’m trying to make sense of the events that adorn the front and back pages of the English newspapers. José Mourinho and Chelsea have parted company ‘by mutual consent’ due to a ‘breakdown in their relationship’. This doesn’t seem to me to be the typical language of the boardroom but the brittle nomenclature of damaged emotions. When I recall the numerous occasions on which I’ve been, in my case deservedly, sacked, my incensed employers seldom said things like ‘It’s not you – it’s me’ or ‘I just feel we should spend some time apart.’ It was usually ‘Get out you thief’ or ‘You smell of gin.’