JAMES RIORDAN

Football Stories

Dave Ward
The Kick-Off 

Len lunged in for the tackle just a fraction too late, just a fraction too high - and that's what started it all, that's what kicked it all off. He'd got carried away in the heat of the fray. He'd meant no harm: no spite, no malice, nothing sly. But he'd hurt the Ellis Street captain's pride. Now the rest of his side were after him: Len would have to pay.
  A few moments later Len was up-ended, stud marks on his leg, but the ref didn't see and waved play on. Len staggered back up, back on to his feet, just trying to stay out of the way. But his mates had seen what happened: by now tempers were running high. Insults were unbuttoned, fists began to fly. The ref stopped play, lined the culprits up and ordered them off the pitch. At first they refused to go, but when they did the fracas continued on the touchline; trainers and spectators wading in - half urging them on, half trying to prise them apart.
  The referee glanced at his watch and blew a long piercing blast on his whistle with over ten minutes to go. Hardly anyone heard it: half the rest of the players had already left the pitch to join in the general mêlée.
  Len stood alone and dejected in the middle of the centre circle, his red and black shirt cascading loose from his shorts nearly down to his bruised and muddied knees. He'd wanted so much to play in this match, Chapel End's crucial game in the Boys' league against local rivals Ellis Street. He'd got his chance when Colin, their regular centre-half, went down with a dose of flu. Len was small but determined: maybe too determined. He stood now, cuffs flapping over his knuckles, watching as the unseemly scuffle continued off the pitch and all the way back to the makeshift changing rooms.
  'It's all my fault,' he muttered. 'That clumsy tackle when I caught his too late - that's what kicked it all off.'

  '...That's what kicked it all off.'
  Len's mother looked at the state of his father as she bathed his bloodied nose, head back in the chair. More punch-drunk than drunk, his words slurred with excitement as he recounted how the Ellis Street men had all been waiting as they tumbled out of the pub. Fathers, uncles, all the cousins of the lads who'd played out that afternoon's match. Some had been there, others had been roped in as the news of the set-to spread through the maze of alleyways that linked the terraced houses and the tenement blocks. They came to settle old scores that had been simmering since they were boys. They came because they'd seen their own boys battling with the Chapel End lot. They came out of honour and excitement to rack out old grudges and hatred: gunpowder, treason, and plot.

  The twilight sky exploded with over-eager fireworks ignited too early as Len pulled the front door shut behind him and set off down the length of the redbrick terraced street. Every window seemed to watch him as if he were emerging from the player's tunnel and stepping out on to the pitch. He tried to strut, he tried to stride as he reached the alley halfway along: but inside he jittered like a jumping jack as he plunged through the gloom of the lonely back jigger, weaving his way between unlit lamp-posts and overflowing rubbish sacks, zigzagging past packing cases and stagnant puddles.
  Ever since the match the air had seemed to crackle like the unexpected bangers, an atmosphere of whispers, rumours, and stares. Catcalls, gestures and a rash of fresh graffiti daubed on backyard walls, marking out territories in the colours of the teams: yellow for Ellis Street and Chapel End's red and black. He could smell the hatred smouldering like early bonfires as the rival gangs from rival streets drew their battle lines.
  Len knew it had all kicked off with his tackle, but he didn't know how it would end. He watched it again in his mind like a newsreel and wished he could go back to that moment and run it again. Make the tackle, but make it clean; take the ball from the feet, leave the man and pass it on. Instead...
  Two shadowy figures dropped in front of him from the top of a backyard wall. Len knew who they were, knew what they wanted.
  'We've a score to settle with you, son.'
  Len knew that if nothing else he was on his own territory and turned on his heels to run. But with a jarring thud two more figures landed behind him; thickset and heavy they towered over him.
  'Think you're clever...think you're smart...there's two in hospital because of you...'
  Len knew. He didn't want it. He wished that they weren't there. The push and shoves of the schoolyard scraps had exploded into the real thing when the men took up cudgels for their sons. But here were their sons come back again, surrounding Len in the alleyway as he tried to make his way to Chapel End's training session.
  Faces pushed up close to him. He could taste their sweat, feel their hatred as warning fists jabbed into his ribs. A cry let loose from his lips, at first a shriek of startled fear that turned, as they pummelled him, into a squawk for help, a battle whoop, a rallying call and over the wall from either side scaled elder brothers, cousins too. Mothers and sisters threw in their lot as back gates clattered in response to the racket. Dogs ran barking towards the fray and startled cats flew the other way as the sky lit up again with an illicit rocket.
  The four intruders from Ellis Street raced off on heavy booted feet as Len was hoisted shoulder high by Jacob, captain of the Chapel End team, and carried all the way to their practise pitch on the waste ground at the end of the street.

  The training session straggled on late into the gathering gloom, half lit by one-eyed crooked street-lamps and punctuated by battle cries, echoed by those from Ellis Street, leering and screeching like wandering jackals out of sight, out of reach three blocks away, yet making their presence felt right there on the pitted, flint strewn pitch that stretched between the walls of two demolished houses on the corner where the grocery shop used to be.
  When they finally wrapped it up, they grabbed their coats and fitted the ball snuggly into a duffle bag as they scampered away, taking to walls along the alleyways until they dropped into one deserted backyard and levered up the lock on the outhouse door.
  A skeleton frame lurched towards them. Len caught it before it hit the floor. A web of broom handles, old rags and string, a pair of old kecks knotted tight around its waist: only one thing was wanting.
  'An Ellis Street shirt.'
  An Ellis Street shirt to tie on the guy. This guy to be lighted five nights from now: to burn on the bonfire at the back of the block, with this emblem of hatred in an enemy shirt blazing at the top.
  'An Ellis Street shirt for its body and a football for its head.'
  Busy hands were already daubing the ball with cartoon eyes and nose and mouth, all in hatred shaded of Ellis Street yellow, sickly as a bowl of mouldy custard. And on top where the hair should have been a riddle of autographed signatures mapped in their own red and black, spelling out the dread consequences Ellis Street would face it they stepped out of line again.
  Eagerly they lashed this football head with lengths of string and sticky tape to the upright broomstick neck, before taking up the cry again:
  'An Ellis Street shirt, an Ellis Street shirt,' and snaking out into the night's dark silence to seize from an unsuspecting washing line, or laundry basket, or maybe even some lad's back if he stumbled lost into their trap.
  Len and Samuel set out along the maze of backyard walls, scrabbling over outhouses, hopping on and off pigeon lofts, squinting down into the bright-lit back kitchens where blinking faces peered out into the darkness, seeing them but not seeing them as they inched like cats, then bombed in and out like hard-faced starlings.
  The closer they crept to Ellis Street, the quicker Len's heart seemed to beat. Tuffets of dandelions grew between the crack, yellow as Ellis Street shirts:
 'Wet-the-beds, just smell them too,' as Samuel liked to say.
  But now they were no longer so sure of their way, remembering it like a map from previous raids. They peered at the shirts pegged out like flags on straggling washing lines. There were work shirts and best shirts and hand-me-downs. But the Ellis Street team shirts must be all stashed inside, drying safely on wooden maidens framed around the fire.

Football Stories © James Riordan 2004. Published by Oxford University Press.