Football fans accused of violent disorder after mass brawl in Burnley Miners Club
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| Burnley Miners Club |
The 23 accused men include seven over the age of fifty and
"63-year-old Timothy Wilkinson, of xxxxxxxxxxx, Burnley"
I wrote about over-aged hooligans in my book, Violent Disorder, a book which tried to bring a certain level of social comment to the football hooliporn genre and which received mixed reviews as a result. I should have just written a book with loads of fighting in it.
Here's a rather cynical view of the phenomenon of overaged football hooligans expressed by one of the Bully Brothers, the book's protagonists.
The older men, veterans of the glory years of quite terrifying football violence in the seventies and eighties, appear unable to give up this sporadic, random, urban, tribal violence, which leads to feelings which they describe as "better than sex".
You know Jimbo?
I do.
He’s just been at it.
He’s sixty? He was
sixty at Bournemouth. They had a party for him.
I know. Good, innit?
I overheard this
conversation.
Sixty.
To this day, I would
not have believed that sixty year olds fought at football matches, but HobNob
isn’t far off, only a decade and a bit away, and I looked at him, in his black
shirt and full head of chestnut brown hair, trotting across the canal bridge, like a
man half his age.
The sixty of my youth isn’t the sixty of this generation, the
health service performing miracles in keeping people alive.
No more war,
healthy eating, and health conscious wives with plenty of culinary ideas other
than fish and chips. The end of cigarettes, changing genetic profiles,
society’s veneration of everything young and that incredible sense of the
pointlessness of the modern world.
Sixty.
The more you looked
at the issue of aged football hooligans, there was a certain amount of logic in
it.
It was just a number.
One after fifty nine
and one before sixty one.
Some Sikh geezer ran
the London Marathon, and he was a hundred and two.
I know an eighty year
old who runs ten kilometres a day.
Thirty years ago,
sixty meant you were virtually dead, your shifts in a rice pudding factory a
millstone around your neck. Weekends spent imprisoned in an armchair, your
armchair, a seat to be avoided by everyone for more reasons than one;
exhausted, watching a dead television with dead celebrities, dead themes, dead
ideas, dead adverts, dead chat and dead game shows, drinking Double Diamond straight
from the can, eating fish and chips (extinct fish, potatoes saturated in dead
fat) straight from the football pages of The Sun.
Missus slaving, cooking and
cleaning, transfixed by a reverie of Marigold fantasies involving her hunky next door neighbour.
Eventually, Mr
Sixty would nurture a streaky combover and his nostril gaps would swell like a
pike’s gills and his cheesy teeth would loosen: Tarnished eyes amidst sunken
sockets. A scent sticking to him, a diaphanous presence the consistency of
muslin in his faggy armchair on his faggy carpet with his faggy TV, and by the
time he was sixty five and retired, he would be six feet under after a massive
coronary and his missus of thirty years, before her month of grief was over,
would be enjoying her next door neighbour’s attentions, her fantasies realised
because her rice pudding slave husband was dead at sixty, she fancied her neighbour
something rotten, and luckily for her, those feelings were reciprocated.
Today, the
sixty-year-old was off his armchair.
Having a good
runabout in Nottingham Town Centre with his mates, his Hackett Cap and blouson,
his hundred quid jeans, his Gazelles. Keeping fit, keeping
active. A healthy regime for
the modern age.
Gym in the week.
10k on the treadmill.
Five-a-side with the
lads.
Salads and plenty of
extra virgin olive oil.
No cigarettes.
No drinking at
lunchtime.
No drinking in the
week.
Kick fuck out of some
know-nothing Coventry arsehole on a Saturday afternoon with the chaps.
No more armchairs any
more.
All the heroes are on
the streets.
This is what I have to say about Violent Disorder - read it and loved it, which may surprise you since I am not a fan of football. Yes, there are #football hooligans running a mock but there is a depth to the story, fuelled by emotion which Mark Barry has created with his honest, gritty urban writing style.
ReplyDeleteThis is a book which should be read for nostalgia and for the experience of reading a darn good book. When was the last time you read a really excellent piece of fiction?
Worth the $1.30 or £1.00 asking price,if you ask me! n x
Violent Disorder calls it as it sees it - a great book, not just for men, either. If you love sports, you'll love Mr. Barry's prequel, Ultra Violence. And, age is just a number.
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