Crinklybee

Champion

Me Mam (AKA ‘Izzy’ in the comment box over there) has sent me two pictures, unearthed from the hotchpotch collection of shoeboxes piled up on shelves in the spare room which in the WhatsApp message forwarding them to me she rather grandly refers to as ‘The Family Archive’. The images, black and white but still perfectly preserved, take us back to an early 80s Saturday afternoon day trip into town which was more keenly anticipated than most, for the purpose of this particular number 12 bus ride from the Fenham terminus was to call into Fenwicks Department Store, where an escalator ride to the Third Floor (Toys and Games Section) would deliver us into the presence of greatness- in the form of the World Subbuteo Champion: one Andrea Piccaluga, of Italy.

The Newcastle-upon-Tyne leg of the nimble-knuckled young Mediterranean’s promotional tour had been marked out as a red-letter day not only in our household; the event was deemed of sufficient importance to be covered by the local paper. A two-man crew were dispatched the short distance from the Evening Chronicle’s Groatmarket HQ up to Fenwick’s equally iconic Barrack Street location, and the image shown here is an enlarged print of the original as captured that afternoon by the paper’s photographer (my dad drank with people who worked in the printroom, so was able to get one produced for us). It shows the Chronicle’s reporter taking on the eminent Italian visitor on a pristine Subbuteo pitch set up for the occasion, and it accompanied a 500-word feature on the event under his byeline, published in the following Monday’s edition, headlined: ‘TABLE SOCCER WHIZZKID HITS TOON!’.

The background to the shot features an incongruous middle-aged lady (not Me Mam: she tells me she had taken my little sister Abby off round the store to do some shopping, possibly in the Delicatessen) mixed into a line-up otherwise made up of variously-sized boys. The tallest boy is the Champion’s companion- who, noticing only now the striking resemblance, I think may also have been his twin brother. The other three are the day’s young Geordie pretenders to his throne, each of us the unrivalled master of our own bedroom four-by-three foot cloth pitch in the suburbs. We are captured on the sideline as we await the Chronicle’s man’s game to reach its conclusion, itching for our own turn for a five minute challenge match. I’m the absolutely tiny one, wedged in between the twin brother and the middle-aged lady, with the floppy fringe and the oversized Starsky and Hutch shirt collars. I look about 10- but then I looked about 10 from the ages of approximately 8 to 16, so we will hazard a guess that I am actually 12. Which sets the scene in- let’s see now- sometime in the 1979-80 season.

In the WhatsApp caption accompanying the pictures, Me Mam remarks on the ‘rapturous’ expression on my face. She’s half-right there. I was certainly engrossed in the spectacle, and more than a little dumbstruck by the sudden proximity of what counted in my world at that time for the very last word in global celebrity (not that I would have got far if I had suddenly taken it upon myself to engage the olive-skinned adolescent eminence in conversation; he remained enigmatically tight-lipped throughout the afternoon, and I doubt spoke a word of English). The attitude I most recall as I awaited my turn to be called forward, however, was one of fixed concentration. I had noticed that the game was being played according to something which looked rather unlike the Rules of Subbuteo Table Soccer as they were customarily applied in the West End of Newcastle- and I was growing concerned as to what this may mean for my chances of laying a glove on The Champion in the upcoming encounter between us.

Duly I was called forward for my five minutes of fame, during which my fears proved entirely founded. Not only was I indeed flummoxed by the alien concept of ‘defensive flicks’ (a practice permitted in the official Rules of the Game but widely ignored in Fenham, whereby the player not in possession may stymy the opposition attack by swift off-the-ball tactical manoeuvring of his own players, thus closing off spaces and blocking the route to goal- very continental!)- but I was also floored by the referee’s quite draconian interpretation of the game’s most fundamental rule, which judged my preferred ‘side-of-the-knuckle-strike’ method for propelling my tiny footballers across the cloth to be in flagrant contravention of Rule of the Game 1.1, which prescribed a forefinger-only ‘Flick to Kick’.

Just two minutes in from kick-off I had conceded three goals to the Champion, each and every one the result of a direct freekick awarded against my flailing players, who, so adept on their home carpet back in the suburbs, were now conspicuously failing to adapt to the big-city occasion. Here under the harsh lights of Fenwicks Third Floor (Toys and Games Section) my tiny plastic men skittered clumsily across the playing surface on their outsized semispherical bases like so many drunken weebles, leaving a trail of flattened miniature Italian footballers in their wake. Frankly, I was lucky to get to half-way without a red card being shown to one of my number, and when the final whistle blew, the result – 4:0 in the Champion’s favour- was if anything, mildly flattering to the Young Pretender from Fenham.

My margin of defeat, however chastening, remained two goals better than that endured by the Chronicle reporter- a statistic I inwardly consoled myself with during a closing round of handshakes featuring myself, the Chronicle man, The Champion, and the Champion’s Twin Brother, who (perhaps controversially, in light of the interpretation of the rules as recounted above), had also served as the Referee. As the next young Geordie pretender lined up for his tilt at the throne, the brother/referee presented me with the fancy-looking certificate shown here, commemorating my game. The document is signed by the Champion (who chose to pen his name back to front- perhaps, I wondered, to draw attention away from the fact his first name was, or at least would have been in Fenham, a girl’s.). It is also signed by an illegibly-named Director of Subbuteo Sports Games Ltd (who I do not recall being present during the afternoon, unless perhaps he/she had, like my mother and my sister, been detained temporarily in the Delicatessen).

Twenty minutes later, we- Me Mam, my sister, and me- had been reunited, and were all on our way back home on the number twelve. The Fancy Certificate went straight up on my bedroom wall, and the enlarged print from the Chronicle joined it a week or so later, when my dad brought it home in an official-looking plain brown envelope. They both stayed up there until I moved out- before ending up in that shoebox, where they have remained until this week, when, occasioned by the trip down memory lane we made together in the previous post here, me mam fished them out.

Today, after a rainy (and Subbuteo-filled) half term, Frankie is back at school. But I’ve got the day off. And there is no-one home. So if you will excuse me, we have twenty-two players, two goals, and a ball to get out of that Continental Starter Set I was telling you about- and the small matter of AC Milan (myself) versus Olympique Marseille (also myself), to take care of, over ten minutes each way on the kitchen table there. Defensive flicks not permitted, needless, I should think, to say.

Flick to Kick

Somewhere in my mam’s attic there is a 35-year-old notebook, its fading pages crammed with the fastidiously recorded details, biro-captured in a teenager’s spidery handwriting, of the outcomes of football matches. Recorded for posterity here are not only final results, but also scorers, minutes of goals, attendances, and, during what seem to have been intermittent spells of tolerance for not only hard data but also subjective judgement, a star-rating (out of five) denoting the entertainment value provided to the paying spectators. A typical entry will read:

FA Cup, 4th Round replay. Newcastle United 2, Newport County 0. Withe (27), Shoulder (85). 28,419. ***

Nothing unusual here, we might say. Not the first time a pre-adolescent of detail-oriented bent has chosen to capture the minutiae of his chosen obsession for the questionable interest of future generations of historians. Except, here’s the thing: that match never took place. And neither did any of the hundreds upon hundreds of others, successive seasons’ worth of league, cup and European action, filling the pages of not just this notebook, but of another twenty or so, spanning the years approximately 1978 to 1984.

When I say, ‘never took place’, I mean, the games didn’t happen in what is generally referred to as real life. You certainly won’t find that cup tie in the official Rothman’s FA Handbook of the era, and if you asked either Withe (27) or Shoulder (85) about it, they would not know what the hell you were talking about. But if you’re thinking that means the game was merely a figment of my imagination, then you can think again. For if that FA Cup tie may not have actually graced Newcastle’s St James’ Park turf, it surely as hell was fought out over 15 minutes of carpet-level action, on a scaled-down pitch of marked-out green cloth covering a quarter of my available bedroom floor, between two teams of eleven miniature plastic footballers (the hosts in the famous black and white, their visitors in Wolves-esque Old Gold), each of the tiny protagonists centred upon a patent semi-spherical base whose rounded underside made for ‘realistic’ propulsion across the playing surface at the behest of my hot, spindly fingers . As for the 28419 spectators- well OK, they may have existed purely in my head. But the game? The game was real enough for me.

If you haven’t worked it out already, you probably didn’t grow up in the 1970s/80s, so the tradename ‘Subbuteo’ will likely mean nothing to you. For the children of that era however, the very word (it’s Latin, and for reasons which remain pleasingly opaque, translates directly as ‘Falcon’), is enough to transport us back to the ‘Toys and Games’ section of our local Big Town Department Store, where on a Saturday morning visit armed with that week’s paper-round money, we would enter an Aladdin’s Den filled with row upon row of tempting delights, cased in the firm’s trademark lime green boxes of various shapes and sizes. No visit to the Third Floor of Fenwicks (Newcastle-upon-Tyne) was complete without extensive perusal of the long, thin containers piled high across most of the display, each of them housing a team of tiny footballers, club colours sorted by their catalogue serial numbers (8- Newcastle United, Notts County, Juventus. 24- Aston Villa, Burnley, West Ham United. 41- Blackpool, Holland ). On other occasions, an hour may be spent among variously-sized boxes containing equipment and ephemera ranging in character from the functional to the decorative: netted goalframes in a range of domestic and European designs; matchballs and corner flags (in packs of three and four, respectively); a black-clad referee with his two linesmen; a towering floodlight pylon topped with miniature electric bulbs (for those wintry midweek replays; batteries not included).

Back home, you’d carefully empty the lime green box containing that week’s purchase, adding its contents to the growing collection of footballing collateral which served the purpose of imparting dramatic realism to the marathon session of carpet-based action which would fill the hours between the end of Juliet Bravo and the start of Match of the Day. Upstairs in your bedroom, sprawled/crouched across a three-by-two foot expanse of floor laid with a pitch of green cloth successively representing the home turf at Anfield (Liverpool), Ayresome Park (Middlesbrough) and the Molineux Grounds (Wolverhampton), you would play that evening’s fixtures out to their conclusion, to the accompaniment of your own commentary- the tone of which would rise at moments of goalmouth drama, drowning out the household’s other regular weekend ambient noise: BBC snooker from the downstairs living room TV; Prince and the Revolution’s Purple Rain on top-volume mono vinyl from your sister’s room next door; and the cat, scratching and mawling at the front door every half an hour- wanting in, then out, then in again (he didn’t mind being outside doing cat stuff; but what he really liked was to watch the snooker on the BBC with my dad, even if, try as he might, he never could find the balls that disappeared off the table where he thought they should end up, ie among the wires at the back of the set).

The scores, scorers etc would be written up in the notebook at the conclusion of each encounter. Much of what found its way onto those handwritten pages had to be left to the imagination. I’m not just talking about the attendance figures (I’d saved up for the floodlight pylon, but never bothered with the cantilever stand or the 12-packs of spectators to gradually fill it with: they were too cumbersome and expensive, respectively, and would have just ended up getting in the way of my fingers/being eaten by the cat). The belief in the appearance of the teams also commonly required a leap of faith, given that my stock of serial-coded team line-ups, although surely among the most impressive in the NE4 postal district, never constituted an exhaustive itinerary of the Football League’s roster of ninety-two clubs, and moreover those squads who had been subjected to heavy usage grew to show alarming signs of wear. Consequently, an FA Cup draw twinning Notts County and Manchester City would inevitably feature a home midfielder with the left leg amputated at the knee, and a visiting outfit whose bodies were apt to leap out of their bases when overly pressed/flicked into energetic goalmouth action, sending their miniscule frames skittering over the sidelines, to be recovered with some difficulty from under the bedframe.

In marked contrast to such barely-functional analogue fun, today’s football-obsessed teenagers have it all. Their FIFA 2020-enabled mobile phones brim on demand with moving computer-generated versions of any living footballer who they may care to add to their starting line-up. Our boy’s current squad for the globe-conquering video game, for example, includes a curious assortment of characters plucked from the real-life rosters of Real Madrid, Barcelona, and, er..Stockport County. As for the lithe, athletic movements of these digitally created figures- well, suffice to say that at the superdextrous command of your modern-day youth they make for a compelling spectacle, whose technical gameplay, right up to the vein-bursting rapture of their close-up-displayed goal celebrations, may easily be mistaken (at least by me) for televised screenings of actual live matches.

15 year old Frankie, then, has grown up in a world where such hyper-realism comes as standard. So I was initially sceptical when Charlotte suggested a starter-set of Subbuteo (yes, the game is still available online) as a Christmas present. Surely the boy would view this clunky amusement from his parents’ era as hopelessly quaint, and comfortably below the credibility threshold for serious contemplation as a way to spend his leisure time? Such fretful thoughts continued to play on me, even as I watched him unwrap the attractively-packaged ‘Continental’ set (2 European elite teams, a pitch, two goals, four corner flags, a ball) on the morning of the 25th.. Would he even be bothered enough to give it a go?

It turns out I needn’t have worried. Well- not unless I was overly proud of that long unbeaten record established way back then in the upstairs bedroom (although admittedly, during an era consisting of 1500 extensively-chronicled matches played against myself, the establishment of a long unbeaten record was more or less a given). Because- perhaps unsurprisingly given the practiced agility of a full set of fingers honed on his FIFA-enabled device- Frankie turns out to be not a bad little dab hand at the old game. Indeed, once he has worked out the surprisingly small amount of muscle-application needed to send the players scuttling to effective purpose across the kitchen-table-laid pitch (and so consequently stopped firing them twenty foot through mid-air and into the sink), his darting Olympique Marseille forwards (resplendent in white with pale blue trim) begin to constitute a lively threat to my expertly-marshalled AC Milan defence (red-and-black striped shirts, black shorts and socks).

A couple of friendly games in, and he was ready to take it seriously. And so, an empty half hour yesterday afternoon saw us making the draw for the inaugural Kitchen Table FA Cup, starting at quarter-final stage, and featuring the eight teams we judge most likely to emerge from the present last sixteen round of the Actual Real Live FA Cup, if such a queasiness-inducing combination of real-world and fiction makes any sense at all. Last night the first game took place, with no small amount of imagination required by the two of us in envisioning our French and Italian teams as the line-ups of Tottenham Hotspur and Portsmouth FC. Under the floodlights (the kitchen lamp) I played the part of the North London-based hosts, with Frankie as their visitors from the South Coast. A close-fought encounter ended thus:

FA Cup, 6th Round. Tottenham Hotspur 3 (Kane (pen 2), Alli (39), Moura (103) Porstsmouth 3 (Curtis, 30, 118,Harris, 90+1)). After Extra Time. Tottenham win 2-1 on penalties. 49,312. **** .

Have those details been written down in a notebook yet? I think you know the answer to that already. Indeed, something tells me I might be needing to be a new one soon. Game on.

Asymetric

Monday morning. I’m an hour late for work because it turns out I’ve somehow got to the age of 52 without apprehending the fundamentals of how rechargeable domestic electrical devices work, and so have managed to drain the battery in my beard shaving/trimming machine by leaving it connected to the mains electric for the entire weekend in what I had presumed to be a virtuoso display of uber-work-preparedness, but turns out to have been a schoolboy error (a schoolboy error in the subject of elementary Physics, at that). I say ‘drain the battery’, that would have actually been fine, an annoying but manageable and ultimately inconsequential workaday inconvenience. Instead there was actually twelve seconds of misleadingly vigorous life left in the ergonomically attractive contraption, just enough for it to unerringly apply a 2mm length shave to exactly one half of my face (the left half, if you were looking at it in a mirror, so I suppose actually the right half), before expiring with a whirring death-rattle, leaving everything points East of the nose liberally covered with two weeks’ worth of shaggy salt-and-pepper growth worthy of Captain Birdseye in his pomp.

It’s an asymetric look with, I reflect as it reflects back to me, a certain daring post-modernist anti-bourgeois motif, and I fancy I wouldn’t look out of place in a Warhol-curated New York Attic-staged ‘Happening’, or perhaps as the subject of one of Picasso’s more playful etchings. As the Monday morning grooming style of choice adorning the visage of a lowly clerk within the offices of a present-day Northern English Housing Association, well- let’s just say I would have been the talk of the 5th floor watercooler area. And not in a good way, unless the prospect of your work colleagues gathered huddled together in the mid-morning corridors mouthing to each other words to the effect of ‘What the hell has that odd Geordie bloke off Social Investment done to his face?’ features on your quarterly personal objective grid.

It doesn’t on mine, for some reason, so it is with a heavy heart that I crouch down in front of the bedroom mirror (the bathroom doesn’t have a mirror, just to complicate matters) to dedicate the 845 to 915AM slot that I normally spend battling with the M60 instead hacking away at the Eastern reaches of my face with a pair of nail scissors, occasionally interspersed with the tactically-placed three-second bursts of life I can still cajole out of the moribund beard machine in return for short helpings of mains voltage. Much clipping, whirring and spluttering later I adjudge myself to look- well not exactly presentable, but at least not quite so obviously like the result of late-night hotel-room stag-do high-jinks at the practical joking expense of a slumbering groom- or indeed like that episode of MASH where the white-haired one falls asleep drunk and wakes up with only half his moustache on. So I decide I had better get to work, given that it is nearly 10 oclock and I’ve got my regular one-to-one with my manager at 1030. I make it just in time, and think I catch her casting a quizzical glance at my features as we sit down. She says nothing though, and neither does anyone else during the rest of the working day- at least not to my face (either half of it).

I do give the water cooler a wide berth until hometime, mind you. One of my objectives in the appraisal document might say something about ‘Raising my profile within the department’, but I don’t think that it continues ‘… by adopting without explanation an outlandish physical appearance in such a way as to send your colleagues dashing for the fire exits in a mixture of alarm and mirth’. A pity really, it would have been nice to get one of them ticked off. Bottomed out. Notch up a quick win. Harvest the Low Hanging Fruit. Stop me, someone, please.