Dirty Northern B*st*rds And Other Tales From The Terraces E-Book

Tim Marshall

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 321

Beschreibung

"This is a book about football and Britain, and Britain and football. You can't fully understand one without the other; and if you haven't got a sense of humour it's not worth even trying. "My name's Tim Marshall and it's been a week since my last match. I support a football club. That's not just five words; it' s a life sentence." Why do so many of us attend football grounds, rain or shine, week in week out, to bellow at our fellow countrymen? Because we love it. Football chants are the grassroots of the game, from the Premier League all the way down to the Conference and beyond. They're funny. And they're sharp. And in the UK they run very deep. In this witty and insightful account, Tim Marshall tells the story of British football through the songs and chants that give it meaning. This is a book about the fans, written for the fans, with all the flair and banter that bring the beautiful game to life. No other sport has a culture quite like it. This is an enhanced ebook that contains many of the chants, so you can listen as you read!

Leseprobe

Contents

Introduction

PMT (Pre Match Tension)

First Half: Football Chants in Britain Today

Second Half: If You Know Your History

Extra Time: ‘You’re ’Avin’ a Laugh’

Acknowledgements

Index

Copyright and Song Credits

Dedicated to Mickey Deane,

shot dead in Cairo, 14 August 2013.

Despite not being fussed about football, he was a great

photojournalist, and a wonderful lion of a man.

Introduction

This is a book about the wisdom of the masses, and the madness of the crowd. It’s about football and Britain, and Britain and football, because you cannot fully understand one without the other. If you haven’t got a sense of humour it’s not worth even trying, as wit runs through both like the Clyde through Glasgow and the writing through a stick of Blackpool rock.

It’s about people with a little education and a lot of intelligence, and vice versa. Unfortunately, it also has to be about people with little of either. Crucially, it’s not supposed to be too serious, but at times you must bear with me – the songs and chants will start again. They always do.

My name’s Tim Marshall and it’s been a week since my last match. I support a football club. That’s not just five words; it’s a life sentence.

I came late to the game. You do hear some fans recounting how they first heard the roar of the crowd from within their mother’s womb, aged minus four months. More plausibly, others will tell you about being hoisted onto their dad’s shoulders, aged five, or being passed over the heads of fans to get to the front of the Kop, aged seven. I confess to being a johnny-come-lately ten-year-old when, armed only with a pair of Joe 90 NHS specs and an impressionable mind, I first clicked my way through a turnstile, mounted the concrete steps and emerged into another world.

It was love at first sight, and my first sight was at 2.30 p.m., Saturday, 18 April 1970.

The old adage ‘The past is another country: they do things differently there’ was only ever partially true – and so it is with football.

For the first few years, when I began going, the game was usually on a Saturday afternoon. The crowd was 90 per cent male in the standing areas and the ground would already have been half full an hour before the 3 o’clock kick-off. By then the singing would be well under way – the PA system didn’t bother blasting pop music at us to distortion levels and things would build to a natural crescendo.

By 3 p.m. we were jammed together so tightly that it was difficult to turn around, as your shoulders would be pushing into the people each side of you and there was pressure from front and back. We never thought about these conditions. It was all we knew and, until Hillsborough, all we would know. Behind you there would be a surge of people and you would stagger down three or four steps, struggling to keep your footing, before surging back up the terraces, sometimes having moved across to the left or right by several feet.

The noise was deafening, wave upon wave of songs crashing along the terraces and surging out onto the pitch. The Kop at our ground held 17,000 people, the ground 50,000. Sometimes, in the second half, the PA would announce the attendance. When it came out as being in the 30,000s, and yet we could barely move for the crush, a knowing laugh would go up. It was cash at the gate and we always reckoned that the club, for obvious reasons, might want to knock a few thousand off the attendance figures.

Those were also the days when two of you could push through the turnstile together as long as the guy taking the money got something out of it. Another way of getting in was to slip some money to the man on the sliding gate at the end of the stand. In extremis, you could try to crawl through your friend’s legs while he fiddled for the right money to give you time to get through the turnstile, but this often ended with a bruised forehead and deep embarrassment when the turnstile man looked down and said, ‘What you doing down there, lad?’ In that event you’d have to go along to the next turnstile and try again.

If the stand behind the goal was sold out, you could try the most difficult trick. Pay the cheaper price for the family section along the side of the pitch, work your way to near the corner flag, then jump over the barrier, sprint across the grass, and dive into the Kop. If you made it, the crowd would part, you would disappear, ducking down as it closed behind you and you worked your way up to where you might, or might not, find your friends. The stewards didn’t really care and the police had better things to do than push through hundreds of people in order to catch you.

Try doing that in an all-seater stadium these days. You’d never make it to the stand and you’d probably then be arrested and banned for life. I’m not defending my various attempts to defraud my club of money, and will be happy to send a cheque for the £5 or so I might have saved over my first few years of attending. But in that culture you didn’t think of these practices as wrong, and certainly not as breaking the law. You just chanced it. If you got away with it – fine. If you didn’t – no harm done.

As a young teenager you were stuck more or less in the same spot once the game began. The old stories of the terraces running with urine are true. I never saw anyone ‘piss in your pocket’, and think that commonly told tale is a myth, but it wasn’t unusual to head across to the nearest pillar holding up the stadium roof and urinate against it. To get from near the back of the Kop to the toilets under the stand was a twenty-minute battle many of us didn’t bother fighting. Most of the older, bigger guys would push their way through the crowd to reach the urinals, but people would often refuse to move for a scrawny teenager. When you reached a stanchion, the wall of legs in front of you was impossible to duck under or through.

None of this mattered. It was part of the day and it was about the team. I was lucky – supporting one of the biggest clubs in Europe during a successful period. The crowds were huge, the atmosphere febrile. There would be lads standing on the stanchions leading the singing, with just about everyone behind the goal joining in, their 17,000 voices making a wall of noise. That’s when and where I first felt that community spirit, that sense of singleness of purpose, diamond-sharp focus and sheer energy.

All this was replicated on the pitch. The passion for the game was intense, the skills at the highest levels. As young schoolboys, our version of football was to kick the ball, and then run after it. Suddenly I was confronted with passing systems, marking, tactics and creating space. I was dazzled at the patterns being woven across the pitch. It was breathtaking to see one player run five yards with no intention of receiving the ball, but take a defender with him and thus leave a gap for a team mate to run into. This was the beautiful game. When I came across Johan Cruyff’s adage that ‘football is a game you play with your brain’, the whole thing fell into place. If you doubt the Dutch master’s word, then watch a top team, in arrogant cruise control at two–nil up, turn into panicked Sunday leaguers if it goes to two–one with fifteen minutes to go. It happens every time.

I came from a family of staunch Methodists, a religion and community I still admire, although as a child I felt stifled by a blanket of non-conformist conformity. Humour and passion are not high on the list of Methodist traits, but now I had found a place where the opposite was true and where revelation was not just a book in the Bible. Soon I was going week in, week out, home and away. I learned more about the geography of Britain from travelling to games than I ever did at the comprehensive school I occasionally frequented. It was the same for all the guys I went with. We all finished our education at sixteen with a thorough grasp of where Coventry is, and where West Ham were in the league table (towards the bottom usually), but little else.

For that the blame lies partly with us for our behaviour and partly with the school. Those years taught me a valuable lesson – the difference between education and intelligence; if you have intelligence, and can be motivated, then you can be taught.

We were self taught because we were motivated. We knew the name of every single one of the ninety-two league clubs. We knew their nicknames, their managers, the names of their stadiums, where they were in the leagues, how many games they had left. We could calculate how many points club X would need to avoid relegation if club Y won two more games and what the goal difference was for each. We knew who had won the FA Cup and League Championship for each of the past twenty seasons. If there had been GSCEs in football facts, we would all have got straight As.

I’ve kept the lesson all my life. Your social background is not the determining factor in your abilities or knowledge, and your intelligence can be better judged by what you say than how you say it. You may find these truths to be self evident, but I am not convinced that, in our class-ridden and increasingly status-obsessed society, this is evident to everyone. There is snobbery towards football fans and players to a degree not seen in other sports.

This brings us back to why the past is only partly another country. Sure, we do things differently now, but at heart, it’s the same – in some ways better, in some ways worse, but the same.

The flow of people heading in the same direction, the camaraderie in the pubs, the clicking of the turnstiles, the communal singing, the sense of purpose, the loyalty: it’s all the same in spirit if not in detail. Oh, and the game – that’s more or less the same as well. The ball is still round and the objective is still to get it into the goal, even if at times that’s hard to believe. The tactics are now more complex, but it’s still a simple game and it’s still the beautiful game.

When my publishers asked why I wanted to write this book I was at first caught out, then stumped, but I recovered in time to remember that I wanted to write a book about football and not cricket. So, here it is.

PMT(Pre Match Tension)

It starts with one voice, one word. Within a second, hundreds of people hear it. By the third word they are joining in. The song tumbles down the terraces, spreads across to left and right, and by the end of the first line it is one voice again, only this time there are thousands combining as one.

And with it comes that unity of purpose, of belonging, of identity, tradition, history – and the unspoken knowledge that without it, the reality it creates would vanish.

Without this, the cameras would never come, the working-class multi-millionaires from the Mersey, the Thames, and the Tyne, now glittering like stars across stadiums and TV screens the world over, would go back to their housing estates, and the dazzling skills of the boys from Brazil would shine only in the favelas.

Imagine a Premier League match played without a crowd. It’s the football equivalent of the old Buddhist question: never mind whether a tree would make a sound if it fell in a forest but no one heard it; if Ronaldo scored in an empty stadium, would it still be a goal?

The tales we tell each other on the terraces create something you cannot see, only feel, but it is very real and it goes very deep. In our great stadiums, week in, week out, an atmosphere is created. From the four corners of the country people pour into the four corners of the theatre. Sometimes at night the green of the pitch is so brilliant in the glare of the floodlights that it almost hurts, and nothing exists apart from the great game. The night sky is erased behind the lights, outside the world stops, the worries of everyday life are gone, and all eyes are drawn to the magical field upon which dreams are played.

But let’s not forget. . . this togetherness, this depth of purpose and unity? It’s also a right laugh.

First Half

Football Chants in Britain Today

It’s cold, wet and muddy. Perfect conditions for Chelsea v. Newcastle on a Saturday afternoon in late February at Stamford Bridge.

The Chelsea midfield genius, Bobby von Dazzler, five foot six of pure talent, is busy sashaying through the Newcastle defence – the term ‘silky skills’ is being used by the talkSPORT commentator – when suddenly the Newcastle centre half enforcer, Ernst Strongman, six foot six of solid oak, decides ‘that’s quite enough of that’: a tree trunk of leg scythes down the gazelle. The injured party utters a scream that can be heard in row Z, collapses like Bambi on ice and then rolls over four times, which is three times too many for a real injury, but one less than is required for even the home fans to start laughing at the acting skills.

And then from the Shed End comes the chant: ‘You dirty northern bastards! – You dirty northern bastards!’1

By now the beautiful game is heading towards World Wrestling slam-down levels of theatricality. Ernst has both hands at his head, then palms outstretched in an ‘I never touched him’ gesture and, finally, a look of sheer incredulity on his face when the referee blows for a foul. (This can progress to holding one’s head in both hands and even sinking to one’s knees at the injustices of life if a yellow card is produced.) Ernst’s team mates are by now either surrounding the referee, wagging their fingers in a ‘no, no, no’ manner and pointing to other parts of the pitch where various alleged transgressions have taken place without such punishment, or are holding their foreheads against their rivals’ foreheads as though trying for a part in a new TV wildlife programme. At least one goalkeeper will race towards the mêlée to act as peacekeeper and then get involved in a pushing match with a player, possibly one from his own team.

Von Dazzler is still on the floor holding various parts of his anatomy, including his head, even though it had been a yard above the tackle. Unless restrained by the club doctor he may still get the odd roll or two in.

Four slightly overweight men in yellow fluorescent jackets have appeared on the pitch carrying a stretcher and are accompanied by an anxious-looking woman from the St John’s Ambulance Brigade. At this point the Newcastle fans, 100 yards away at the other end of the pitch, will have convinced themselves that Ernst never touched Bobby and so break into the correct response to the ‘Dirty northern bastards!’ chant, which is: ‘Soft southern bastard! You’re just a soft southern bastard!’ This is based on the belief that even if Ernst had shot Bobby with a Kalashnikov rifle, Bobby should still just get up and get on with the game, because that’s what a northerner would do.2

The Newcastle fans, to a man, woman and bairn, are 100 per cent sure about the iniquity of the home team and their tendency to cheat. It is 20/20 vision, rock solid clear to all of them that von Dazzler had not been fouled. Even the ones who had been under the stand buying an overpriced meat pie know for a fact that it was a fair tackle because their mate told them so when they got back to their seat.

Now, ignore for a moment that Soft-Southern-Bastard Bobby might actually be from the Netherlands, which is slightly to the north of Chelsea, and that Dirty-Northern-Bastard Ernst hails from Nigeria, which is south of the King’s Road. What is important here is the Industrial Revolution.

The broad-brush reality of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has left us with a residue of the idea that the North is the land of coal fields, ship-building, steel factories, rows of red-brick two-up-two-downs and dark satanic mills as far as the smoke-filled eye can see. Think Lowry, the Jarrow March and Coronation Street.

The South, meanwhile, is awash with stockbrokers in country mansions who live up the hill from a million characterless Barratt houses inhabited by people who, to a man and a woman, vote Tory and dream of escaping to the country. Counties such as Wiltshire, Devon and Dorset do not appear in this mental map of the south. There are a few cheeky chappies dotted around as well, but they are all down the Queen Vic wearing coats festooned with pearls and asking each other if anyone wants to buy a motor. Think the Chelsea Flower Show, To the Manor Born, EastEnders and Only Fools and Horses.

The modern realities of the north and south need not trouble us once we enter a football stadium, or indeed any conversation about football; the old stereotypes are much more satisfying and lend themselves to far better, indeed funnier, chants.

So, by signing for Chelsea, or indeed any club south of Leicester, honorary soft southerner status is conferred, and honorary dirty northern bastard is conferred on anyone signing for a team north of Peterborough. Between Leicester and Peterborough? No one knows where that is, but some have driven through it and lived to tell the tale.

Question – Why dirty northern bastards? Answer – Because legend has it that northerners keep coal in the bath. The fact that no one does that any more, and that the practice was never that widespread even back in ‘t’old days’ is immaterial.

Why soft southern bastards? Because legend has it that the southerners are less hardy and play a soft version of football, unlike northern teams which ‘get stuck in’. This ignores generations of hatchet men playing for the London clubs, typified by Ron ‘Chopper’ Harris at Chelsea in the early 1970s.

Before the Industrial Revolution, the north/south divide was not as pronounced. Once it began, the differences accelerated. The need for coal expanded that industry more in the north and Wales than in the south. The move from the countryside into the urban areas created the great northern cities, and the industries they produced made the north dirtier than the south.

When the job losses of the 1980s hit the northern cities, a thousand news reports and documentaries brought out the footage of the General Strike and the Great Depression. This gave us context for what was happening, but also reinforced the stereotypes (at the same time Harry Enfield came out with the character ‘Loadsamoney’, reinforcing the stereotype of the London wide boy).

We can leave to one side the fact that the south has areas of hardship matching those in the north; that it used to have mining communities, docks and great satanic factories. We can ignore this because we all know that the natural order of things, viewed from the north, is that the south is populated entirely by effete, theatre-going, middle-class softies who probably drink wine and watch foreign films despite them having to be subtitled.

The north, on the other hand, is full of real men who are hardy enough to go through a winter clad only in a cap-sleeved T-shirt with maybe a whippet around the shoulders to keep out the cold.

Mind you, if you look at the south from a southern football fan’s viewpoint it is full of sharp, tough Cockney types with a ready wit and a surfeit of diamond geezers. Viewed from the south, the north has a population of barely educated troglodytes who converse in a language comprised mainly of grunts.

The stadium is where the old rivalries, the stereotypes, the identities and the collective memories – some grounded in reality, some not – burn the brightest. Here, in a modern mass-culture, partially homogenised society, the tribes survive and revel in their differences. Anyone seeking to understand this small island off the coast of the Eurasian continent, which has given the world so much, could do worse than to go to Anfield, Old Trafford, Villa Park and White Hart Lane, watch a few games and ask a lot of questions – because some of the answers are there.

In the stadium the differences surface with an exaggerated vengeance. Every stereotype is magnified, and in the religion of football songs, nothing is so sacred that it cannot be sacrificed on the altar of wit. The songs of praise are offered up to the gods on the pitch, while the songs of abuse are usually directed at the opposing tribe with the funny accents from up the road.

It follows, in the logic of football fans, that if you talk different, you are different. The alleged moral deficiencies of the north were recognised by Plymouth fans a few seasons ago when they displayed a remarkable concern for that partially hidden blight in our country, domestic violence, with the chant:

Go to the pub – Drink ten pints.

Get fucking plastered – Go back home.

Beat up yer wife – You dirty northern bastards.

Beat up yer wife – You dirty northern bastards.

Mind you, their definition of north is somewhat generous. Bristol City and Bristol Rovers fans, for example, are accused of being ‘Dirty northern bastards’ by visiting supporters from Devon.

There was a time, not so long ago, when the type of beer drunk before a game could come in handy as a measure of moral worth and degree of masculinity. Sadly, the north has begun to limit its intake of Tetley Bitter, Newcastle Brown and John Smith’s. In the future, everyone will drink that great leveller – lager. Lots of it.

Accents, industry, geography, even perceptions of weather all play a role in the banter – everyone thinks Manchester is the wettest place in the world, even though it’s only ranked eighth in a list of Britain’s rainiest cities. All these perceptions are reflected back through the media in a process that has kept them refreshed. The stereotypes sometimes fade, but then along comes another news event, another documentary, and another comedy regional character that slows the forgetting.

We partly live in another country – the past. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, if you leave to one side accents and a few culinary delights, our lives, north and south, are mostly lived the same way. We accentuate our differences for the purpose of football and/or comedy, but it’s mostly pantomime. There’s no real deep resentment of each other. I find we mostly like each other, especially if teasing is allowed, preferably with a resounding chorus of ‘Soft southern bastards!’ Other sports don’t have this, but let’s face it: golf and lacrosse aren’t currently well suited to it.

The stadium with its crowd cover, the residual working-class culture and the acute tribalism of football, all lend themselves to the equivalent of ‘He’s behind you’ calls, but with a lot more swearing. The pantomime is partially based on the same group experience and on which audience it attracts. Like pantomime, football can be a laugh, not to be taken too seriously. However, as we know, everyone in the north is on the dole. Reading fans mistook the Madejski Stadium for a job centre when they taunted visiting Leeds fans with the little ditty, ‘You’re only here to find a job’. The response of ‘We filled your ground for you’ met the counter chant: ‘We pay your benefits’.3, 4

According to some southern fans, there’s ‘one job in Yorkshire, there’s only one job in Yorkshire’. Northerners are at a disadvantage when it comes to the ‘one job’ chant because there’s no riposte. As anyone emerging from Euston or King’s Cross for an away game can tell you, there’s a McDonald’s across the road advertising for a cleaner, and a TGI Friday’s nearby wanting a waiter, and so ‘Two jobs in London, there’s only two jobs in London’ simply doesn’t work as a football chant. (Middlesbrough had a nice twist on the ‘one job’ chant with ‘One Job on Teesside, there’s only one Job on Teesside’ in honour of their striker Joseph-Désiré Job, who had six seasons with them in the 2000s.)

The actual rates of unemployment, of course, are more complicated than the chants born of the stereotypes. For example, in early 2014 unemployment in the north-west was running at 7.9 per cent and in London at 8.1 per cent. In the enclave of York, unemployment frequently stands at a quarter below the national average. However, the north-east (10.3 per cent) and Yorkshire/ Humberside (8.4 per cent) were both higher than London. If you did do a straight north/south divide you would get higher rates in the north, especially as the south-east as a whole had the lowest rate in the country at 5.3 per cent. These statistics are of no real use to fans from London clubs when visiting Yorkshire because a chant of ‘Your unemployment is 0.3 per cent higher than ours’ isn’t going to get much traction. It is far more fun simply to wave £20 notes and sing ‘Stand up if you’ve got a job’.

Scousers, on the other hand, tend to be accused of having criminal tendencies. This is so well known that even northern fans will happily respond to Liverpool’s ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ with ‘Sign on, with a pen in your hand, and you’ll never work again’, before demanding to know ‘Does the Social know you’re here?’5, 6 Cockneys, which for these purposes means everyone between Stevenage and Southampton, can accompany this inversion of the classic by waving £20 notes at the Liverpool fans. Northerners, especially those from Yorkshire, would not be so foolish as to risk the notes blowing away in the wind and so do not indulge in this practice.

The anti-Scouse songs became fashionable in the 1980s, a decade when Liverpool FC was on a high and Liverpool the city was on a low. Unemployment hit the area very hard and the antics of the local council, led by the sharp-suited, hard-left Socialist Derek ‘Degsy’ Hatton, who was accused by the former Labour leader Neil Kinnock of wreaking ‘grotesque chaos’ in the city by ‘hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers’, ensured Liverpool was on the news bulletins on a regular basis. Mr Hatton went on to burnish his left-wing credentials by becoming a male model, a PR man, chairman of his son’s website company and, currently, a millionaire property developer living in Cyprus. Nice work if you can get it.

The Toxteth riots reinforced the negative image of Merseyside, and fictional figures such as Yosser ‘Gizza job’ Hughes from Alan Bleasdale’s TV series Boys from the Blackstuff became synonymous with Scousers.

The loss of life at the Heysel and Hillsborough stadium disasters (in May 1985 and April 1989 respectively) made things immeasurably worse. The death toll was, of course, the biggest tragedy, but both events, in different ways, reinforced the negative stereotypes. Heysel made some people think there was something particularly vicious about the Liverpool fans, even though the behaviour of the hooligan element, leading to the wall collapse, was typical of many followers of the big English clubs at the time. As we know, at the time and subsequently, Hillsborough was blamed on the victims, and the years of searching for justice were met with either indifference or the belief that the Scousers were whinging again.

Liverpool and Everton fans venturing south have been greeted (to the tune of ‘Feed the World’) by ‘Feed the Scousers, let them know it’s Christmas time!’7 If they get bored hearing that, they can also enjoy ‘Does the Social know you’re here?’ and, during the days when Paolo Di Canio played for West Ham, they could head to Upton Park to hear that old favourite, ‘We’ve got Di Canio, you’ve got our car stereos’. Then there’s the cheery – ‘Heeeeey eey Scousers! Ooh ah! I wanna know – where’s my stereo?’

It’s no surprise, therefore, that some Liverpool and Everton fans have been known to turn inwards with the chant ‘We’re not English – we’re Scouse’. There’s also the reverse humour song to the tune of The Scaffold’s ‘Thank U Very Much’ – ‘Thank you very much for paying our giro, thank you very much, thank you very very very much’. You’re welcome.

Tranmere Rovers fans may be from Merseyside, but are keen to point out that they are across the Wirral from the Liverpudlians by singing ‘We hate Scousers!’, in case anyone mistakes them for a curly haired, moustachioed, tracksuit-wearing, jobless car thief. One of the Tranmere Rovers fans may even be posh. I’ve never met him or her yet, but you can’t rule it out. If so, they may tell you about the Wirral Riviera. The Wirral Riviera? Give over. It doesn’t exist. Like the English Riviera, it’s a reverie. The Wirral, and the area around Torbay, are perfectly nice places that don’t need the Italian word for ‘coastline’ at the end, but again this appears to be the Tranmere types making damned sure you don’t mistake them for a Scouser, or a ‘woolly back’ from Lancashire. The Scouse accent is possibly the most geographically compressed in the UK. Most of us would be hard pressed to tell a Newcastle accent from a Sunderland one. But move a few miles out of Merseyside and it’s instantly recognisable as not Scouse.

As for so much, for that we can blame, or thank, the Industrial Revolution. In the nineteenth century, Liverpool turned into a major international port and attracted a mass influx of workers from north Wales and Ireland. That lies behind what I think is the most distinctive accent in the rich soup of voices within modern Britain.

In the summer of 2011, with the football season over, I was bereft of ideas of how to fill my time, and so I cycled from Land’s End up to John O’Groats while waiting for the fixture list to be announced for the following season. It was one of those awful summers when there was neither a World Cup nor a European Championship. One of the joys of the twelve-day trip was to hear how the regional accents changed as the miles passed, sometimes up to three times a day. We like our accents. They bring a comfortable familiarity. It’s a tribal thing, as is so much, but not necessarily negative. For the purposes of football songs, however, it’s yet another weapon in the never-ending War of the Banter.

This is why, having heard the Geordie Massive chanting ‘Soft southern bastard’, in an offensively northern accent, the ranks of the Cockneys will respond, to the tune of ‘She’ll be coming round the mountain’, with ‘If you can’t talk proper – shut your mouths’. This is not only rude; it’s not even proper grammar, innit. This leads to the recent Chelsea chant directed at the hordes from Newcastle – ‘Speak fucking English! Why don’t you speak fucking English?’ The answer to this question is ‘Haway an shite bonnie lad we speak Geordie English like’.8

So whereas Cockneys might describe the British currency as the ‘pahnd’, Geordies will say ‘poond’. Instead of ‘brarn’ for brown it’s ‘broon’, and instead of ‘tarn’ for town it’s ‘toon’. By the way, Newcastle Brown Ale is not Newkie Brown, as most of us know it, it’s simply ‘broon’, as in having ‘a broon down the toon’. That’s worth remembering if you walk into the wrong pub at 5 o’clock on a Saturday afternoon after a home game at the Acrylics “R” Us.com stadium and Newcastle have lost.

Geordies can appear very inquisitive to non-Geordie speakers, as so many sentences appear to be a question, with their tendency to inflect up at the end of the sentence? Most of us hear what we think is Geordie when anyone north of Darlington and south of Holy Island opens their mouths. For example, several newspapers have referred to the ‘familiar Geordie tones’ of Marcus Bentley, aka the voice in the Big Brother ‘Hoose’. The problem with this? Mr Bentley is from Stockton, which is forty miles south of Newcastle and thus well beyond even a generous definition of Geordiedom.

There was a time when you could almost tell which street someone was from by the first syllable out of their mouths. Before radio, and TV, and the modern transport system, our accents were far stronger than they are today and so very few localised words or expressions would be understood outside of the region. Service in the military brought a few members of the regional tribes together, but until the twentieth century, the numbers serving in the armed forces were relatively small.

These days we recognise some of the Geordie words passed down from TV generation to TV generation. The Likely Lads was followed by When the Boat Comes In, then came Auf Wiedersehen Pet and now Geordie Bore. This allows people all over the country to attempt to imitate the accent and come out with something approximating Geordie as it might sound if it was spoken in New Delhi, as opposed to Newcastle. As in most regions, it is softening, but you can still hear it in chants such as ‘Toon Army’ and songs such as the ‘Blaydon Races’ – the north-east folksong from 1862, which has passed down the generations partially through the terraces.

Some of the old words can still be heard, i.e. ‘bairn’ for child, ‘marra’ for mate, ‘wor’ for our, but just as the accent is softening, so mass media and transport have ‘smoothed’ out some of the lesser known terms. It’s because of words like ‘marra’, ‘ha’way’, ‘la’, ‘bizzies’, ‘ginnel’, ‘lakin’, ‘ey up’, ‘dibbles’ and the rest that some southerners believe Geordies, Scousers, Glaswegians and others to be Neanderthals living in caves and speaking in no known language. I’ll have them know that these days the caves have baths and inside toilets, but I’ll go there in a moment. In reality, the south has as many accents as the north, but such is the predominance of both ‘received pronunciation’ and ‘Thames Estuary’ that they are overlooked.

Our accents, and shrinking dialects, partially define us. Are you sat reading this or sitting reading this? Do you take a bath, a baath, a barf – or indeed a shower? It doesn’t matter, it’s just interesting. It used to matter more in the 1970s, when we didn’t move around the country for work or study as much as now. Then an accent from another part of the country would be instantly noticed, and if it was noticed by the wrong sort of person in the wrong sort of pub, it could spell trouble.

There are two phrases in the English language which to this day cause a chill to run through me. One is ‘And if I may say in conclusion’, because you know at that point the speech is going to drone on for another twenty minutes. The other is ‘You got the time, mate?’ By the 1970s, most of us had emerged from our caves and discovered a thing that you fastened to your wrist and which did away with the need for portable sun dials. So the only reason, if you were at an away game, that someone might ask you if you had the time was because they suspected that you supported the away team and wanted to hear you speak.

I’m still not sure which is more difficult: saying whole sentences in a regional accent, or just one word. If you doubt me, try saying ‘No’ in a broad Cockney or Scouse accent, and then ‘I’ve not got a watch’. Either way, you might get caught out. Remember the film The Great Escape? The bit where the Gestapo officer says ‘Good luck’ in English to the escaped Brit in order to catch him out? Well, apart from the leather coat and the genocidal tendencies of the Nazis, being asked if you had the time at an away game in the 1970s was the football equivalent.

Accents are just one of a thousand sometimes hidden means by which we identify ourselves and others. The north/south identity divide is manifest in many ways. Few supporters in the south will define themselves as southerners, for example, but most northerners will happily be identified as such. Huddersfield, Leeds and Barnsley fans will cheerfully bellow the chantastic ‘Yorkshire! Yorkshire!’ at the drop of a cloth cap, but I have yet to hear of Watford supporters hymning praise to the great county of Hertfordshire, nor do Gillingham fans break into chants of ‘Kent, Kent, Kent!’, as far as is known.

I have seen many a White Rose of Yorkshire tattoo adorning the arms of football fans. Indeed, there may even be one on my right shoulder with the word ‘Yorkshire’ beneath, now faded thirty years after I fell drunk out of a London tattoo parlour with my best mate Paul from Cardiff. There may be, but I can’t confirm it. In the event that there is one, it would be there because of the contract you sign, but don’t read, before you join the Armed Forces because you’re seventeen and unemployed. The small print, hidden under the burly, hairy and tattooed forearm of the recruiting sergeant major, says, ‘At some point in your service with the Armed Forces of the United Kingdom, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the Seas, Queen, Defender of the Faith etc. requires that you must get at least one tattoo, preferably an ugly one you may regret for the rest of your life. If this tattoo is the name of a girl with whom you later lose touch, and is not the name of the woman you marry when you are older, then you qualify for extra pension.’ Always read the small print.

This explains why the only people to have more rubbish