Thread: Prologue: if you like Thailand, football and really strong booze you might like this

Needs a picture.

A good start, Slap.

Good stuff Slaps, but

Originally Posted by somtamslap

I wasn’t here on a philanthropic assignment, you understand. No, I was here because I had been on a holiday

Are you gonna mention the best bit of your story in your book this time?

The part that remains an enigma- The holiday

The bit where it all obviously went terribly wrong

We're all family on here mate and all been backdoored by some tidy bird with a cock

^ A surprisingly accurate portrayal of proceeding events

But this only touches South-East Asia, alas, most of it is Woking-based and therefore not very interesting at all.

Nice work Slaps, looking forward to the rest!

Dill you slag, is nothing sacred

missing some sluts and a dodgy old thai grandad, Dilli?

Outstanding book cover

Looks like a regular night at the Mai Arse Emporium.

And for anybody wondering..

here is that goal

I like two out of the three in the title, so read a bit.

Keep at it, Slap.

*If you don't mind a critique.... I find the paragraphs awfully long. I am good at doing that as well.

^ Cheers Peeb.

Have a go at this one. Relevant if you were born in the Eighties, like football, and being English will definitely help a few things fall into place. :yup"

Just a random chapter...

Chapter two
West Germany ‘88 aka school fete aka the day today

I Owe You Nothing by Bros was playing on the radio before I went out. I remember this as I was still reeling at the revelation that the person crooning this tune was in fact a man and not the husky female I’d assumed it to be for the past six weeks. Indeed Matt Goss, it transpired, was a chap; but he didn’t owe me nothing, he owed me an apology; he’d confused me. And the less said about Tracey Chapman at this stage the better. Goss also owed the nation’s population of teenagers an apology too, for it was Matt and his twin brother Luke who took it upon themselves to festoon their footwear with Grolsch beer bottle caps, and soon, within in a week or two of the track entering the Top 40, every teenager who didn’t wish to be labelled an outcast was duty bound to somehow precure a bottle or two of this premium German tipple, remove the metal clasp caps - a laborious task in itself - and attach them to their shoes. Teenage boys back in 1988 didn’t walk, they clanked. They clanked and sung in effeminate tones. They clanked and sung in effeminate tones and held their hair in place with entire tubs of gel. All at the behest of the brothers Goss, and another little fellow who played the bass.

I, on the other hand, had just reached double figures, and hadn’t bought into the hype. I didn’t have the time or the inclination to be quite frank. Besides, I’d just been made captain of my middle school football team and bossing the back line was far more pressing an issue than making my shoes look pretty. Yes, although a certain Mr Lineker was still very much the apple of my young eye, I had been unable to duplicate his role on the pitch to the letter, and due to my height (read: lank) at the time, our coach/headmaster had concluded that I’d be best utilized in the centre of defence, and match by match I made the role my own, growing to love it. I’d always see a lot of the ball you see, in the main this was because we weren’t very good, and all of the action was concentrated in the centre of our defence. Sure, we’d won a handful of games that season, but more often than not we’d find ourselves on the end of some pretty torrential spankings — 13-2 against Hermitage Primary is currently ringing some pretty sombre bells.

Speaking of spankings, England were looking like a world class side heading into the Euros in West Germany that year. Qualification was a straightforward run-in which included an 8-0 drubbing of Turkey, with a hat-trick from Lineker and further goals from Neil Webb, John Barnes and Peter Beardsley. On paper, the team were sound, and our first group game against the Republic of Ireland should be nothing more than a formality.

It was the day before England’s opener which fell on a Sunday and my middle school fete was in full swing. I’d managed to shirk maypole-dancing duties this year; by no real design of my own, I might add, and rather more because last summer I’d heard the choreographer mutter something along the lines of “I simply can’t work under these conditions anymore,” while bringing his forearm to his forehead and feigning a theatrical swoon. “Deal with it!” I thought a little abashed, while once again weaving my ribbon around totally the wrong individual. I just couldn’t get to grips with it; and happily this was noted by all the right people. And thus this year I was delegated the position of staying in the corner and shutting up while all the clever and more coordinated kids organised the fete activities.

I was pleased. This meant I could spend the duration of the event playing football on the school’s pitch. We — myself and a group of classmates cut from a similar screw-everything-else-and-let’s kick-a-ball-about kind of a cloth, put our usual game of headers and volleys on hold and instead tried to replicate Andreas Brehme’s free-kick against the Italians in last night’s game — the first of the tournament — which eventually finished one a piece, with Brehme’s strike negating an earlier goal from Roberto Mancini. It was a fairly uneventful match; but the hosts West Germany had fielded a side liberally spotted with talent. Lothar Matthaus, Jurgen Klinsmann, Rudi Voller, and Brehme himself helped fashion a formidable line-up. The Italians weren’t exactly lacking in flair either; players like Gianluca Vialli and Paolo Maldini were in their prime and ready to stun the opposition with excessive passion and great arcing swan dives into the penalty area.

We were prepared though, and when one of these sides was inevitably happened upon in the later stages of the tournament I was confident that they would be suitably dealt with.

The reenactment of Brehme’s strike against the Italians kept us going for an hour, before I was hauled away by a teacher who demanded I help man the coconut shy. How utterly thoughtless.
And no one won a coconut of course. No one ever did. The chances of anyone bar Curtly Ambrose dislodging one of these hulking great nuts from its hoop was practically zero; and even if by some minor miracle connection was made and, defying one of the more fundamental laws of physics, the nut became unseated, to the unlikely victor what were the spoils? Yes, a nut. A large, hairy nut. Yet, for reasons completely unfathomable to the leisure and entertainment industry, the queue for the coconut shy was the longest in the entire fete, surpassing both the lucky dip and the bouncy castle. The mind boggles. You are guaranteed, no guaranteed, to walk away from the lucky dip with at least a small, if totally useless, return for your twenty pence; and the bouncy castle… well, you get to bound about on something large and colourful for 10 minutes; which, stop me when I’m wrong, is a massive win in anyone’s book.

Yes, the chances of success were low to non-existent, but still, the coconut shy remains, to this day, an English institution. Should an American, for example, be faced with the same impossible task year on year, they’d probably be sufficiently moved to unholster a glock and shoot the entire fete to pieces. Germans wouldn’t trouble themselves with such a pointless task, and the Italians would fall to their knees, and with palms turned to the air and deeply furrowed brows, simply ask ‘why?’ . The Brits, however, seem to simply beg for a chance to fail. But as tedious a task as manning the coconut shy was, it had one hugely redeeming factor; it wasn’t maypole dancing.

The day of the England v Ireland game dawned and I raced out of my pyjamas and into my football kit, ready to start the day. Unceremoniously tossing a soft boiled egg and two toast slices worth of soldiers down my gullet, I made haste to the green opposite our house in the woods and played football for about three hours until lunch. I always played football. It’s what I did. My fitness levels back in ‘88 must’ve been through the roof. There would often be a decent number of other kids to play with, but I could quite as easily play alone: dribbling the ball around trees and taking free-kicks into unmanned goals was an incredible ego booster, and adding your own commentary and the crowd going wild was the icing on the cake. Although today I must’ve been pre-occupied as I lost possession to a silver birch stump on several occasions and missed a sitter from six yards after some boisterous heckling from clump of gorse on the sideline.

Lunch that day, if I remember correctly, was roast lamb. Remember correctly or not, that’s exactly what lunch that day was. Because that’s what it always was on a Sunday. And now, suitably repleted, I could concentrate on the day’s main event - namely, England’s resounding disposal of the Irish.

Everything was in place. I took my seat on the sofa, lamb flesh and a full-bodied Bordeaux on the belch , and watched with interest as the Irish took to the pitch in their emerald green livery. I watched with further interest as the whistle blew and the game kicked off, both teams eager to stamp their authority on the match early doors. And I watched with, perhaps. the most interest of all, which could have quite easily been mistaken for unrestrained horror, as a dinky little chap called Ray Houghton scored for the Irish after six minutes. Oh. Oh dear. That wasn’t supposed happen. But it did happen; the celebrations were taking place before my very eyes which were a quarter twist away from springing an enormous leak. How dare you, Ireland! How dare you, Houghton! How dare anyone that have the gumption to ruin what was supposed to be a textbook afternoon in front of the telly. But there was nothing I could do. And as the minutes quickly ticked by, and the English were time and time again thwarted by Packie Bonner’s ‘heroics’ in the Irish goal mouth, I eventually made peace with the fact this this wasn’t to be our day. Redemption could and would be found when we played our next games against Holland and the USSR.

But the fact that those two teams actually met in the final of the tournament might suggest that we didn’t put paid to their progression in the group stages. On the one hand, that we were beaten by the championship’s victors and runners-up in the opening stages, could’ve simply meant we were drawn into the so-called group of death and fought toe-to-toe with the greatest two footballing nations in Europe. But I had quite an urgent enquiry: why weren’t we one of the two greatest footballing nations in Europe? Indeed after 3-1 defeats by both the Dutch and the Soviets, with token goals from Captain Marvel (Bryan Robson) and The Donkey (Tony Adams), we had been knocked out of Euro 88 with a grand total of zero points. Naturally, I was disappointed, a little numb perhaps - but this was a valuable life lesson; one must prepare to have the wind taken from their sails from time to time, and the English football team, I was coming to learn, were very efficient at putting the overly optimistic back in their place. Two years time in Italy though, and the next World Cup, would be a different story - we were obviously going to win that.

I watched the final. Of course I did. This was a Sunday in Britain in the 1980s - the TV guide wasn’t exactly bristling with premium listings. When the Beeb or ITV threw out one of their sporadic televisual treats, you chowed down on it voraciously. Sunday’s fare was particularly bland. Bland to the point that, while watching, you could actually feel yourself turning anemic.
The day would usually kick-off after six hours of white noise (yes, the television actually stopped being a television every night) with a show called Open University. This was quintessential Eighties viewing; a duller, more vapid collection of visuals you could fail to piece together. It was genuinely depressing to watch. Even at the age of 10, I would wake up, flick on the television and immediately find myself in a state of woeful despair, fighting back tears as I sat perched on the edge of the sofa in my Action Man pyjamas. How could anyone be so cruel as to air this shite; a collection of study materials narrated by someone with no soul, and filmed by people with an eye for the insipid.

Unless you were a religious man or a fan of heated altercations in fictional pubs then the rest of the day proceeded in the same tedious fashion. Articles of Faith, This is the Day, and What on Earth... comprised the bones of Sunday morning, while Eastenders - just three-years-old in 1988 - was a Sunday afternoon staple. Beacons of light came in the form of Fraggle Rock and Bullseye, and Last of the Summer Wine was a real rose among thorns. But the beginning of Howards’ Way, just prior to bedtime, invariably left something of a sour taste, and the weekend would be forever tainted with fake tans and huge hair. When would I learn to turn off the television as soon as Nora Batty started chasing Compo into the sunset with a broom?

So the final was a welcomed respite from the sustained volley of tedium. I suppose, even though they’d played a complicit part in England’s premature demise, I wanted the Dutch to win. They’d been entertaining throughout, and who could resist Ruud Gullit’s dreadlocks. It must have been a feat in itself to arrive at the ground on time with a thick jungle of wilting bullrushes impeding his vision, let alone commanding the field during decisive games of football. Yet it was the head sporting this mass follicular entanglement that actually provided us with the first goal of the final; and what an absolute belter it was. Never has a header been met so sweetly and with such devastating power, with Mr Gullit snapping back his head in preparation for contact before driving his forehead through the ball, introducing it at speed to the back of the Soviet net. Stunning. Still one of the most iconic headed goals to this day.

If that was good, then Holland’s second goal, which sealed the tournament win - was a revelation. Impeccable timing, breathtaking skill and raw, unbridled power combined to make Marco van Basten’s 54th minute volley a moment of total footballing beauty. It was so good, so audacious, that even Van Basten himself looked totally bemused during his celebration. A looping Arnold Muhren ball found our protagonist just inside the Soviet 18 yard box to the extreme right and he sent it home from an impossible angle. Brilliant.
My faith in football had been suitably restored. Now I just had two years to kill until Italia 90.

Well done, Slap.
Looking forward to more installments.

Cheers...