Business Unusual (The Simon Bognor Mysteries) by Tim Heald

Author:Tim Heald [Heald, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781480463127
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2013-12-31T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

A Game of Two Halves

THE BOG WAS NOT one of the country’s great football grounds.

That, however, was very far from being the whole story. In 1893 when Scarpington Thursday first joined the league and the Crankover Colliery was in full production and the antimacassar factory had not gone bust and the Etna match factory had not burned down and when Sinclair’s and Moulton’s employed more men than machines, then tens of thousands had crammed into the Bog to see Thursday play the likes of Preston North End and Bolton Wanderers and Blackburn Rovers. They had stood at the Sludgelode End in their flat caps and shapeless coats and they had understood the game and appreciated its finer points and even applauded the opposition. If you believed old men in their cups, some of them had even worn clogs.

Men had been men then. The early managers of Scarpington Thursday had only to go to the mine and whistle, and up came another of the burly, baggy-shorted, Brylcreem-slicked centre forwards for whom the team was famous. Men like ‘Slogger’ Harris or ‘Titch’ Nisbome or Alf Hattersley, the man they called ‘the Wizard’. Scarpington Thursday had been a name to conjure with in those days. They had gone to Wembley. Scarpington men had played for England. Wherever a Scarpington man travelled in the civilised world strangers would nod respectfully when the town was mentioned and they would say ‘Ah, Scarpington Thursday!’ with a voice full of something not far short of awe.

Then the lean times had come to the town and to the club. Thursday plummeted downwards until one dreadful season when they finished at the very bottom of Division Three North. The old stands mouldered and festered and crumbled and rotted and rusted until the one at the Sludgelode End was condemned as unsafe and had to be demolished, leaving only an empty uncovered terrace of concrete steps. The huge crowds drifted away and went to bingo instead. Or stayed at home to watch the telly. Those few who did come only came for the fighting and the drinking and the being sick and the chanting of ‘Out, out, out’ at the board of directors, presided over for too many years by Nigel Festing’s father, the late and unlamented Alderman Festing.

And finally there had been a revolution, not unlike that which overtook the Bridge Section of the Artisans. Out went fusty, crusty old Festing and his musty board and in came thrusting, dynamic, trendy, cigar-smoking, velvet-collared, entrepreneurial, Thatcherite, you’ve guessed it, Sir Seymour Puce. A stealthy buying of the old farthing shares, a vulpine swoop at the AGM, a couple of well-concealed and tellingly aimed stabs in the back and the deed was done.

That was five years ago. Since then there had been three new managers and a number of expensive and not wholly unsuccessful signings of players. The team had risen. Not all that far, and not as far as Sir Seymour would have wished, but it had risen. There had been ugly rumours that he was to sell the Bog for an office development.

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