Three Furlongs to Go

OLAS 438 April 26th 2008

Get ready for our biggest game of the season. Our cup final. It’s a three horse race now (OK, two donkeys, one mule) and we’re out in front but there are still three games to go. Remember the “team” we quite rightly booed off the pitch last week? Today we’ve got to get behind them big time to help them win the MTM championship 2007-2008. Forget all the negativity. It’s now or never.

MTM? – Mid Table Mediocrity. And battling it out for the coveted 10th spot are the Spuds, Kevin’s calamitous Toon Army and our very own heroes - the Hamstrings.

We’re in pole position – five points ahead of our rivals with nine points at stake. Stuff Newcastle and we can’t be caught, whatever kind of a pasting we get at Old Crapford or against Mad Martin’s Villa who are pretty rampant right now. Though, if we play like we did last week, we’ll lose about 5-0 to Newcastle, which will be embarrassing to say the least.

Of course I can recall booing West Ham off the pitch various times over the years, usually when we’ve thrown away a lead near the end, or when we’ve been totally hammered, but never ever when we’ve won a game. So that was a real first. And Curbs, if you are scraping the barrel looking for achievements from this miserable season, you can honestly say you are the very first West Ham manager to take a winning team off the pitch to the boos of the Upton Park faithful. Marvellous.

I didn’t join in but I don’t condemn those who did. They have my unconditional support. Me - I just felt numb. When I got home from the game and sloped in, my family assumed from my mood and body language that West Ham had lost. And it felt like a defeat because you just couldn’t tell which team had 44 points before the game and which team had 11. If Derby had drawn level or won even, it would not have been an injustice. Derby were totally inadequate but they had spirit. We were just inadequate. And it gave me the willies because it is absolutely clear that unless there is a dramatic change at many levels in the club, then we are going to be the Derby County of next season.

However, I am also experienced enough to know that the only thing that is completely certain about coming to Upton Park is that nothing is certain – so it may be that we will really turn up today, fight for every ball and send them back to Geordieland with a brutal hammering courtesy of a Dean Ashton hat-trick. You heard it here first. Although the key to that happening might be to kidnap Curbishley before he gets the chance to announce that his shining star Boa Morte is in the starting line up.

I’ve got a serious admission to make here, and I hope the OLAS community will show tolerance and understanding. It all happened on a Tuesday night quite early in the season. Every Tuesday I play “Male Mid-Life Crisis Footie” with my companions mainly over 40, some over 50. A few of us go for a beer afterwards where conversation ranges from the maybes of the game we have just played to the music we enjoyed 25 years ago, to current work issues, to our kids, to what’s going on in the football world. It’s a pretty mixed crew – West Ham, Arsenal and Spurs fans, and one holding the torch for the people’s team, Ebbsfleet United (see www.ebbsfleetunited.co.uk - interesting!).

Anyway I got into a stupid discussion about what was going to happen this season. My mate Lu – a Gooner admittedly but a totally sound guy – was absolutely convinced that Newcastle were going to be the team from the middle of the table that would plummet in the second half of the season and get caught up in the relegation scramble with the newly promoted clubs. I disagreed. I fancied Newcastle, however inconsistent they were, to pull off enough results to stay in the middle of the table – winning one week and losing the next. No, Lu was completely convinced they were already heading for meltdown. I said – look West Ham have got points but they are playing the most unimaginative, rubbish football and half the team are crocked by injury. If anyone is sure to plummet, it’s us. And so it went on until, and I don’t quite know how these words exited my mouth, “I’m willing to put money on that West Ham will finish lower than Newcastle,” I said.


I still can’t believe it happened. But I just felt that with occasional exceptions, the points we were stacking up were on the back of almost completely unconvincing performances. We would get found out and Curbishley has nothing else in his drawer. No sooner had the bet been sealed than Newcastle went into crisis, slipped down the league, heading for oblivion, and West Ham continued to stack the points up and beat Man U into the bargain. And then KK returned on a magic carpet to Geordieland. Good for my bet I thought – but first few games Newcastle couldn’t beat anyone.

So that is the story of how, having supported West ham since 1966, I came to bet against my team. The only thing I can plead is that it was a moment of madness and I was suffering deeply under the leaden weight of Curbishleyism – I just couldn’t see a way forward. And to be honest it’s still pretty misty. Am I forgiven?

Today, of course, I want us to smash my bet to smithereens and grab that 10th spot. (And besides, I won three times as much as that silly bet will cost me on this year’s Grand National).

A top half finish might yet enable some gullible top class players from overseas, who want to play in the premiership, to think we are worth a punt. And if we get rid of our gormless leader – and install, preferably, someone alive from the neck upwards, unlike the present incumbent, then, who knows, we might be worth a punt. And the opportunity to finish above Spurs is much too enticing to ignore.

Well today won’t be my only trip east this weekend. Tomorrow I’m going to be in Victoria Park for bit of nostalgia and a bit of serious stuff. There’s a free carnival put on by Love Music Hate Racism to mark the 30th anniversary of the Rock Against Racism/Anti Nazi League carnival in April ’78.

I was there in ‘78 and remember what a turning point it was in the fight for unity among black and white youth and against the poisonous racism and nostalgia for the Third Reich of the National Front. Some of the musicians who turned out that day to nail their mast firmly to anti-racism, will be back alongside the bands that excite young people today. Of course some heroes can’t be there. Joe Strummer – may he rest in peace – has gone to the carnival in the sky, but his spirit lives on. And the serious stuff? Well if we’re not careful the truly dangerous and barking mad dogs of the BNP, or is it the mad BNP dogs of Barking, are going to be turning up as representatives on the London Assembly as regularly as Hayden Mullins does back passes and Lucas Neill is caught out of position. And you can’t get more regular than that.

There was a time in the early 80s when to get to the ground you had to get past the leafleters of the NF giving out their poisonous leaflets on Green Street. When I came to the Portsmouth game I was half-expecting to have to dodge past BNP leafleters preparing for the May election. But instead the people soliciting support around the ground were collecting for AMREF – the African medical and development charity that Nick Bull has been writing about. Quite a turnaround if you look at it in the long historical view. But we can never be complacent about racism and it’s all too easy for people’s grievances to find a racist outlet, especially when the tabloid press eggs them on.

So today I want the claret and blues to put one over the black and whites but tomorrow I want us to remember, as we said in 78, “we are black, we are white, together we are dynamite.”