Footballing Legends: Len “Lefty” Wright

From my friend Lee comes this piece of juvenilia, dating from 1995 and unseen in years. We were beginning to become increasingly involved in the nascent activism amongst supporters of Doncaster Rovers, who could see the disastrous season of 1998 looming on the far horizon. This isn’t about that, but instead is a somewhat clumsy attempt at satirically draining the miasma of hagiographical bullshit, which is often drawn upon when discussing the achievements of sportsmen and women long after they have ceased to be relevant. This was published in the defunct Rovers’ fanzine Keegan Was Crap, Really, which was an apposite choice, considering what we were attempting to say.

Later Lee and I would launch our own fanzine, hawking copies in the freezing drizzle outside Belle Vue. We lasted for a few years, until I bailed and Lee carried on, a broken and dessicated husk of a man without me. Long since under a new editorial regime, it’s still being published, even if it isn’t remotely funny. Despite what EMAP say.

Whilst I would resile from using such a broad brush now, an uncharitable part of me still finds this funny because an equally uncharitable and cynical part of me knows that old footballers were shit. They were. You know it. You do. Duncan Edwards was shit. Alick Jeffrey was shit. Stanley Matthews was shit. Dixie Dean was shit. They were all shit. They might have stood out at the time – and here a small tendril of rationality curls around my brain reminding me that they can only be compared to the alumni of their respective eras – but in comparison to today, Clinton Morrison would have bestrode the primative game like the Colossus of Rhodes (and let’s face it, a giant statue probably had more pace than Stanley Matthews and actually, come to think of it, would have scored more than the hapless Morrison) and Ben Thornley a winger of such finesse and speed he would have appeared to have been borne aloft by Zephyrus.

I give you the life and career of Lefty Wright:

You can have your Matthews, Pele, Best, Maradona, Stapleton etc, true they were all great players…

Yet to me the greatest of them all was Len ‘Lefty’ Wright. His name was  enough to strike fear into the opposition even before the whistle had gone and the ball had been kicked.

Len was born in Chorley, Lancs on March 2nd 1901. He hailed from the cobbled streets to become one of footballs great legends. Incredibly, his main sport in his youth was not the beautiful game but athletics – namely sprinting. In the 1912 ‘King George 200 yards dash’ he recorded a time of 3 minutes and 12 seconds, beating the great Jessie Owens in the process. His pace was soon noticed as scouts from all over Lancashire battled for his signature.

At just 12 years and 46 days of age he made his debut for Preston North End against Accrington Stanley (still a world record even today.) A massive crowd of 174, 000 watched Lefty open his account with twelve goals in a 12-7 victory. His main position throughout his career was Inside-outside-half-centre, yet in his career he played every position including a few games as a goalkeeper.

International recognition came quickly, England secretary Walter Winterbottom giving him his debut as a raw thirteen year old. Hungary were the team on the receiving end this time as they were thrashed 12-3 with Lefty netting fifteen. After the game the Hungarian team were hung in Budapest town square.

Some feel his best years were missed during the great war years of 1914-18. He participated in the Somme battle and tragically whilst brushing up on his skills in ‘no mans land’ he was hit by a German mortar bomb. It resulted in the amputation of both his arms and his coveted left leg. Whereas to most people this would be a hindrance, to Lefty it was a minor inconvenience.

On completion of World War One, Lefty resumed his career when signing for Blackpool in a 2s 4d and Ha’penny deal (around 11p.) It was in this spell that his greatest moment came, the 1924 FA Cup Final against Burnley, now dubbed the ‘Lefty Wright Shuffle Final.’ Blackpool were triumphant 14-9 that day, Lefty netting 13 goals , including the famous ‘Shuffle Goal’ where he shuffled past Burnley half-back Danny Blanchflower to score past keeper Fatty Foulkes.

Len was a man of superstition. In his 2098 league games he always wore a steel spike on his right boot. It was said that this was to remind him of his family’s steel making humble background. The spike, around 14 inches long, always went on last. Former strike partner  Frank Worthington recalls of a time when Blackpool were playing Burnley in 1938. Lefty had ghosted past Blackburn’s left-wing-half-centre Stanley Blackston and accidentally caught him with the spiked object. ‘Lefty was the first person to send Blackston’s widow a wreath’,  said Frank. Lefty was a joker as well as a gentlemen. In 1935 during an FA Cup tie with Workington Town, Lefty was foraging down the left-wing and the linesman judged the ball had gone out of play. Lefty promptly punched a ball-boy and knocked him out cold in a ‘mock’ display of disagreement.

In 1956 he moved to Burnley for the sum of Thru’pence Ha’six-pence (around 47p in real terms using a base index of 100.) He thrilled the Turf Moor faithful with his dazzling ability. Sadly, the cruel hand of fate was to touch Len again, losing his right leg in a freak trawler accident, whilst hunting seals in Morecambe bay. King George, a personal hunting friend and fan, heard of the latest tragedy and ordered the Ministry of Defence and Science to construct a portable purpose built trolley bus system, enabling Len to move around freely on the football field. You can still see the electric generators at Turf  Moor today. At weekends, Len, as ever the gentleman, would give free rides to children using Burnley’s tram network.

Len had a short lived spell at Arsenal, but the shortage of decent hot pots was blamed for his inability to settle. Lefty left London for Wolves in a 5s 4d deal in 1973. Even after the advent of decimalisation Lefty insisted on payment in old money. He still refused to accept more wages than his usual shilling and a Hovis biscuit per match, putting to shame the money mad players we see today. It was at Molyneaux that he won his final England cap. He came on as a substitute for Tom Finney, scoring four times in a 16-9 victory over Wales. Lefty played 197 times for England in all. Some people thought it would’ve been more had he not played for Northern Ireland as well.  He alternated between countries and if they both played each other he would play a half for each.

His illustrious career was brought to an abrupt end by a violent heart attack as his trolley sped towards the Stoke City goal. Sadly no-one noticed until rigormortis set in five games later; a challenge at the near post caved his face in.

The 1990’s has seen a renaissance in football and recently opened by former Manchester United legend Bobby Charlton is a theme park dedicated to footballers of old. One of the attractions is a team of mummified corpses of past football geniuses. Entitled ‘Dixie Dean’s Dead Dynamoes’ Len’s body has been brought back to life thanks to modern technology (pulley systems and remote control devices) so that everyone can see his wizardry once again. Also given the treatment are Stan Mortensen, Billy Wright, Natt Lofthouse, Jackie Milburn, Bryan ‘Pop’ Robson, Tommy Lawton and Carlton Fairweather. There is also talk of a re-run of the ‘Shuffle’ Final, using all the players involved by digging them up from the respective cemeteries.

Scouts have been flocking to watch the Dynamoes in action. Who knows, we might soon be seeing Len ‘Lefty’ Wright playing league football once again.

Reefian

An inseparable man federation

Is Depeche Mode an
Inseparable man federation?
Surely somehow but
I felt much more frequent
In the past than one course.

Separated of the others,
Therefore it is also so important that
We group musician us before
Each concert to a circle,
Seize us at the hands and realise us ours.

Because you do not forget one:
Even if volume against-strikes like us a sympathy,
Then we are nevertheless few against 60,000,
If we arise at a place like the citizen
of Berlin Olympic Stadium.

An interview with Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode, translated by Babelfish and rendered, by the berk of this parish, into quite possibly the worst poetry ever written since Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings perished.

The titles Kubrick rejected

I Married an Armenian

If Only the Führer Knew

Hot Sheets

Leg Candy

Leg Magic

Feel Tight

Partition Magic

Only Ministers of the Third Reich May Use Green Ink

Coffin Not Included

Dr Strangle-Glove

Osmiroid and Oblivion

Other Barrels, Other Knibs

Twig the Enhancer

Nightclubs, Morgues, Hospitals

In the Penile Colony

One Bag, One Notebook

The Wizard of Auschwitz

Auschwitz and Me

Sharp Shadow on the Wall

The Two Wallies

Sight Gags for Perverts

Some Like It Cold

Jack the Sniffer

Speaking Alarms

Keira the Karaoke Girl

From The Stanley Kubrick Archives, published by Taschen

Mutato nomine de te Fabula narratur

People don’t like being preached at.

Stephen Green of the religious pressure group Christian Voice, in response to the British Humanist Association’s Atheist Bus Campaign

Pottersville

It is time to revive anti-trust to break up all excessive concentrations of corporate power and particularly the banking conglomerates that have been fueling speculation in global financial markets. To meet the financial needs of Main Street create a system of federally regulated, community banks that fulfill the classic textbook function of acting as intermediaries between local people looking for a secure place for their savings and local people who need a loan to buy a home or finance a business.

John Brissenden quotes David Korten

Community banks eh? I worked for the Bradford & Bingley Building Society between 1997 to 1999. In June 1997, as the Halifax membership voted in favour of demutualisation we were opening a hundred new accounts – each meeting the £1000 minimum deposit imposed to supposedly deter carpet baggers – per day at the branch in which I worked. We had to photocopy the application forms and leave a stack of them on the counter, such was the demand. People would fill them in, staple their cheques to the application and we’d work into the evening to open the accounts. Consider that this was in a northern town licked to a splinter by the loss of its traditional industry and you’ll get an idea of the fervour, greed and venality on display that summer.

When the inevitable happened, and a proposal was tabled by Stephen Major, the Country Antrim plumber and carpetbagger, to convert the Society into a PLC, we were expected to enjoin in the campaign to persuade the membership of voting in favour of remaining a mutual society. It was far too little, far too late. Every one of those thousands of new members had joined with the hope of another payout and were only ever going to vote one way. The board, led by Christopher Rodrigues, should have acted much sooner and more effectively, pace Nationwide, who introduced a clause that any potential windfall would go to charity. I suspect Rodrigues knew he’d walk away a very rich man regardless and very probably wanted it to happen.

None of this is to claim that the Bradford & Bingley was a latter-day Building & Loan, nor that the staff were as noble as George Bailey, nor to deny that Rodrigues and the board weren’t paid handsomely, nor that it always offered the best mortgage and savings rates (although it was never very far off), nor that we weren’t expected to flog travel insurance, contents insurance, to upsell, to maximise opportunities, as the lunchtime queue snaked to the door.

Rather for me it is the principle of returning profits to the membership, of not risking everything, of ultimately being rather staid and conservative when it comes to the responsibility of looking after peoples’ savings, that still appeals. So the Bradford & Bingley is mortally wounded and is surely now being predated as they come circling and sharking in for the kill. 370 jobs are the first to go.

Was it worth it Stephen Major? How much did you make? Did you keep your shares? Do you care? You went for the Nationwide next but mercifully you failed. Was it the money or the principle you objected to? God rot you and everybody else who wanted a quick buck.

The Grand Tour

Overheard at the cigarette counter in Sainsbury’s:

Yeah, I went to Rome. Saw the Pope. Where’s he live? Vatican innit? And I went to that Trevi fountain. Bag of shite.

I don’t need a lecture from David Cameron

I need David Cameron lecturing me on moral responsibility in much the same way as I need a layer of icing applied to my lasagne. Cameron had the gall to give this speech on the eve of the Glasgow East by-election campaign, in a deprived city licked to a splinter by the economic policies pursued by his party in the 1980s.

He said:

We as a society have been far too sensitive. In order to avoid injury to people’s feelings, in order to avoid appearing judgemental, we have failed to say what needs to be said. We have seen a decades-long erosion of responsibility, of social virtue, of self-discipline, respect for others, deferring gratification instead of instant gratification. Instead we prefer moral neutrality, a refusal to make judgments about what is good and bad behaviour, right and wrong behaviour. Bad. Good. Right. Wrong. These are words that our political system and our public sector scarcely dare use any more. Of course as soon as a politician says this there is a clamour – “but what about all of you?” And let me say now, yes, we are human, flawed and frequently screw up. Our relationships crack up, our marriages break down, we fail as parents and as citizens just like everyone else. But if the result of this is a stultifying silence about things that really matter, we re-double the failure. Refusing to use these words – right and wrong – means a denial of personal responsibility and the concept of a moral choice.

David Cameron (via anarchaia)

You want to know why we’ve seen a “decades-long erosion of responsibility” David? You couldn’t have a better recipe for rising crime and social decay than ripping the industrial heart out of a community and then leaving it to rot. This demented and wicked act, borne out of the Chicago School and the worship of Milton Friedman, has been repeated throughout the world and always with the same result.

In Glasgow, as with my own city of Sheffield, the resulting resentment of this disastrous encomium to capitalism was left to ferment for a couple of decades by a polity that has now fallen so far wide of reality that it is irrelevant to all but Nick Robinson et ses amis. The urban regeneration of Glasgow city centre in the 1990s never reached here and the concomitant social problems that always come whenever an entire community is thrown overboard spreads its tendrils far and wide. Boarded shops and broken windows; drug abuse and despair; alcohol and violent crime; life expectancy below that of a resident of the Gaza Strip; twenty Bensons and a scratchcard (“How will you feel if you win?”) and above all the feeling that the good times are happening somewhere else.

This is the reality for the residents of Glasgow East and from this fractured society come the feral, illiterate, innumerate children of those broken homes, who have seen what society served their parents and are now so filled with hatred and confusion and incomprehensible rage, that they wander the streets in gangs looking for something to fuck or fight.

This is the legacy his party bequeathed to Glasgow East from their last period in office, a legacy built upon by the New Labour project, seriously relaxed about the rich and pretty fucking comatose about the poor, whom they knew would have nowhere to go as the triangulation began to squeeze. And whilst they are not standing in Glasgow East, almost everywhere else come the fascists, knocking on doors, crowbarred into their suits, with undiagnosed colorectal problems causing a persistent itch, drawing from the same deep well of hatred as Cameron himself hoped to do just three years ago, when he penned one of the most sinister party manifestos of recent times.

No, I don’t need a lecture on self-discipline and respect from a bully. I don’t need a lecture on responsibility from somebody who had it handed to him on a plate. I don’t need a lecture on instant gratification from a political party whose entire ethos, as with that of the world from which it draws much of its funding, is predicated on us buying more and more of that which we do not need. I don’t need a lecture on morality from a fucking PR man. I don’t need a lecture on “fail[ing] to say what needs to be said” from a man who used immigrants as a punch bag when it suited him.

No, I don’t need a lecture from David Cameron.

This piece was also published at Liberal Conspiracy.

Kidulthood

This afternoon, whilst engaging in a thorough rearrangement of my living room furniture, I happened across a plastic figurine I had bought on the internet.

I often find myself spending an inordinate amount of time and an unhealthy proportion of my meagre income on what might charitably be described as juvenile tat. My recent purchases include, but are not limited to, a sticker from 1982 of the French footballer Michel Platini (£3); two small Be@rbrick figures, one in the French drapeau tricolore, the other in the Argentinian Bandera Oficial de Ceremonia (£5 each); a canvas print of a pair of Adidas trainers (£50); an XBOX 360 (£200); a pair of miniture Adidas SL72 trainers in a metal box (£30) and a Star Wars AT-AT toy (£80). I won’t debase myself further here but believe you me, the list could be so much longer.

I am very nearly 33 years old. In other words, I am a man. If I live to be as old as my father lived, I am over halfway through my life. By my age he had emigrated, fought a war and started a family. I’ve got a Scalextric and a guitar. And a plastic figurine, still pristene in its plastic bubble, still affixed to its backing card, onto which the vendor, clearly recognising a fellow traveller, had written the following statement before posting me it from New York:

YOU’RE AN ASSHOLE FOR BUYING THIS.

Come, marvel at my solipsism

When I’m not around here, you’re likely to find me here. If my life is a house, then this is the front room with the Royal Doulton on display and those fucking doily things – I’m reliably informed they’re known as antimacassars – over the back of the sofa. The back room is where I’m mostly to be found, scratching a bollock or two through my underpants on the settee, shouting at the television and fishing Chocolate HobNob® crumbs out of my chest hair.

You’re more than welcome to come over.