Читать книгу Mad for it: From Blackpool to Barcelona: Football’s Greatest Rivalries - Andy Mitten - Страница 15

It is billed as the ultimate hate match, but is the eternal feud between Millwall and West Ham really just a chirpy Cockney squabble?

‘DON’T do it, chums! DON’T throw soil, cinders, clinkers, stones, bricks, bottles, cups, fireworks or other kinds of explosives, apples, oranges, etc. on the playing pitch during or after the match. DON’T barrack, utter filthy abuse, or molest in any way the players of the visiting team.’

Millwall warning notice 1949–50

‘Oh, Wisey! Woah ah ah oh! Oh, Wisey! Woah ah ah oh! He’s only five-foot-four! He’ll break your fackin’ jaw!’ Flooding out of the New Den into glorious afternoon sunshine, you’ve never seen so many cheerful, rosy-cheeked and twinkly-eyed south Londoners. ‘From henceforth, Mother’s Day shall be known as Scummer’s Day,’ chortles a wit. Millwall have just beaten West Ham and dozens of delirious dirty (and not so dirty) denizens are on their mobile dogs, imparting this information to a woman apparently called Anne.

‘Four-one! ANNE it could have been seven! ANNE we missed two penalties! ANNE their keeper got fackin’ sent off!’

I’m trying to fit in. By not looking like a soft, middle-class, Northern homosexual who likes opera, real ale, and kittens. I’ve done me homework. I’ve got a copy of the Millwall fanzine The Lion Roars in me sky rocket. Inside is a savage attack on an Evening Standard article entitled ‘50 Things Every Londoner Should Do This Year’. Number 17 is ‘Go for pie and mash’. To which a disgusted reader replies: ‘Do not do this as a novelty, do this as part of everyday life.’

EIGHT GREAT HATE DATES

1903

West Ham 1 Millwall 7

After reaching the FA Cup semi-final for the first (but not the last) time, Millwall also reach the semi-final of the Professional Charity cup. Where they thrash the Hammers 7–1.

So there I am. Trying to blend in. Trying to look like the sort of tasty geezer who has lavverly-jabberly pie & mash (& ‘licker’) on a routine basis. And who hates West Ham, not because they’re Cockneys but – get this – because they’re not Cockney enough. Which they achieve by, er, being too Cockney (choke on THAT, surrealism fans).

Of course nobody in football really needs a reason to hate the scum from up the road. But Millwall make a pretty decent fist of it. The Lion Roars fanzine hates West Ham ‘because they won the World Cup and are the “Academy of Football” and are loveable, cheeky barrow boys and that lovely Alf Garnett, wasn’t he funny? Grrrrr!’

From the Millwall perspective, says Garry Robson, author of No One Likes Us We Don’t Care – The Myth And Reality Of Millwall Fandom, the rivalry with West Ham ‘is played out entirely in terms of toughness, virility, and cultural authenticity within Londonness.’

John, a Millwall fan quoted by Garry Robson, states this in plainer language: ‘They’re all fakers over there – the “East End”, all that “loveable Cockney” bollocks. And this thing with the Krays, and it’s gone on and on and on and on. Like they’re all loveable Cockney rogues. They all love the Queen Mum and it was bombed during the war. With us it’s, like, they’re all thieves and gangsters over there, but with them it’s, oh they might be thieves, but they’ve all got hearts of gold and they all have nice street parties and they’re not really bad lads. Like they keep saying about the Krays – you could always leave your door open. It’s all bollocks.’

West Ham, on the other hand, would ‘rarver fack a bucket/wiv a big hole innit/than be a Millwall fan/for just one minute’. And tend to look down on ‘Scumwall’ as ‘pikeys’. ‘They really are scum,’ explains Hammers fan Pete. ‘I mean, I was on the train once and there was this Millwall fan. He was asleep, he was about 60, really revolting looking. And he had “I Love Sex” tattooed on his hand. That says it all, really.’

So you get the picture. This is Ronnie Kray vs Charlie Richardson. Martin Kemp vs Luke Goss. Dirty Den vs Del Boy. Jim Davidson vs Hale and Pace. Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson vs Nick Heyward from Haircut 100. This is an argument with no real rhyme, reason, or rationale. Two predominantly white tribes – both increasingly drawn from far-flung suburbs in Essex or Kent – at loggerheads over which best represents an ever-more multicultural East London. Total bollocks, really, when you think about it. So it’s a good job nobody really does.

‘Where were you at Upton Park?’ sing the 2,000-odd visiting West Ham fans, all apparently pointing at me. I blush. Because this is actually my second attempt to see a West Ham vs Millwall game this season. A furious West Ham press officer refused me access to the first.

‘Why do you want to see the game?’

‘I’m doing an article on the rivalry…’

‘There IS no rivalry! There is NO rivalry between West Ham and Millwall! It’s just a game! OK!? It’s JUST a game!’

‘Yes, but…’

‘I said – “IT’S JUST A GAME!”’ (end of conversation).

OK, OK – so it’s just a game. So why am I feeling just a little bit nervous? Well I’ve done me research, see. And most fans, academics, journalists, and media pundits agree – visiting Millwall is like walking naked into a pit full of grizzly bears. With a sign saying ‘grizzly bears are puffs’ around your neck. While on really bad acid.

EIGHT GREAT HATE DATES

1904

West Ham 3 Millwall 0

Ten thousand see the first ever game at Upton Park. Local lad Billy Bridgeman scores West Ham’s first goal at their new home.

Arsenal’s Gooner fanzine babbles about the ‘Dickensian surroundings with water dripping from the dank viaduct’ and claims that leaving the ground is ‘like being on manoeuvres in some enemy infested outpost in Vietnam’.

And here’s Billy, a West Ham fan, recalling his first trip to Millwall: ‘We all got there early, and we was singing and shouting and that, having a great time. Millwall was really quiet. We was well taking the piss. Then all of a sudden this noise started, like moaning, they was all sorta moaning. I thought, what the fuck’s going on here? It was so fucking loud, and they was all doing it, and it went on and on and on…West Ham just shut up.’

John King, in his seminal hoolie novel, The Football Factory, gibbered that Millwall has a history of ‘a hundred years of kicking the fuck out of anybody who strays too far down the Old Kent Road’.

Which shows how much Mr King knows: 100 years? Try 400. In the 17th century panicking Puritan pamphleteers condemned the area as a bolthole for every species of ‘dissolute, loose and insolent’ wide-boy, ruffian, ‘evill dispozed person’ and ‘sturdy beggar’ on the planet. South London, wrote bible-basher Donald Lupton in 1632, is ‘better termed a foul den then a faire garden’ (and the name kind of stuck). In 1837 Charles Dickens set Fagin’s den on Jacob’s Island in Bermondsey: ‘the very repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot and garbage.’ And in 1996 the US State Department ‘red-flagged’ the area as a ‘no-go’ zone for American tourists, claiming that it was as dangerous as Guatemala (which, at the time, was overrun by right-wing death squads).

This, as former Millwall player Eamon Dunphy so eloquently put it, is quite simply ‘the wrong part of London’. And – if the press are to be believed – Millwall FC are the living embodiment of unredeemed sporting evil. ‘The New Den, like the old Den, remains unparalleled, a uniquely poisonous, malevolent, ugly, depressing venue,’ hyperventilated Keith Pike of The Times. ‘To watch Millwall is to journey into a valley of hatred,’ blathered Ken Gorman of the Daily Star as he stared fearfully at ‘a sea of scowling vengeful faces bounded by beer-fuelled loathing for any outsider. To talk of hatred in people’s eyes,’ ranted Ken, his nostrils dilated in animal terror, ‘is not to exaggerate the most evil stench of wretchedness I have ever encountered.’

So that’s why I’m doing my breathing exercises and fingering my energy crystal and trying really hard not to shit myself as I walk from the tube station, past the yuppie-flat building sites (with all the bricks and scaffolding poles conveniently shrink-wrapped and stacked for easy access), down past the railway lines and under the dank, dripping, graffiti-covered Victorian brick arches. Past evil-looking crows that go ‘Caw!’ And the glue-head wobbly scrawled sign that reads ‘west ham will not make the den!’

EIGHT GREAT HATE DATES

1957

Millwall 1 West Ham 3