Seven deadly sins of football: Sunday service by Paul Smith
Sunday league is pure malice a lot of the time. When I was in art college I played for a pub in Stockton, where I was born, one of the roughest places on Teesside. Because the team was so bad I was playing midﬁeld because I was the only attacker and I wanted to get on the ball. We couldn't quite get it out of defence so I would run from the halfway line and try my best just to get hold of the ball.
I was on a team with some pretty rough people. There was certainly a criminal element. And when we used to go out for the odd team-bonding session on a Saturday night in Stockton, certain members of the team had to cover up the tattoos on their faces with their girlfriends' make-up, just so they could get into the nightclubs.
Before one match in Port Clarence everyone was in the car park where we got picked up, waiting on one bloke, who shall remain nameless, and we were just thinking, "Well, where is he?" when the manager, Nige, came along and said, "Oh, his house has been raided by the police, we won't be seeing him today."
Just as we were getting set to leave he came across the car park barefoot, in his pyjamas and t-shirt. Sure enough this guy had had his house raided. He'd gone out of the back door as the police went in the front and he had nowhere else to go so he came to this car park where he knew his mates would be. So we went along to this football match with a fugitive in the back of the car.
You don't see the police on a Sunday morning but I guess you do in Port Clarence. We were on this really long road to this town that's in the middle of all the industry next to the transporter bridge, and this police car was following us for a good ﬁve or 10 minutes, and this guy was sweating in the back of the Ford Fiesta and we were thinking, "Oh dear, this is going from bad to worse." The beautiful thing is he played in the match. We found him some boots and he played because we only had 10 men.
It was one of the weirdest days because once we'd got to Port Clarence – as I say we were a rough side – we found a team that was actually rougher than ourselves. There were people on the sidelines with alsatians and pitbulls, which were growling away. These kids were throwing rocks at our 'keeper behind the goal. The 'keeper wasn't a man to be triﬂed with but even he was saying: "This is insane."
In our league the game was generally played well and usually the refs would stamp anything out, especially with swearing and stuﬀ like that. Even with the hardest man on the football pitch, as soon as the referee threatens to send you oﬀ that's it, you behaved. The problem was that day we had a soft referee. In Sunday league you can tell what a referee's going to be like from the moment they come into the car park and here comes this young lad, you know, a really skinny fella. He was completely intimidated by the other team because they were so aggressive, properly taking people out and starting on anyone who dared look at them. It was a really strange match.
I think we got a draw. They were as bad as we were – just a bunch of ﬁlthy guys playing a dirty game with the odd ﬂair player. Unfortunately the fugitive was eventually arrested. I think he went to jail. It's funny, really. It might sound like a rough league but really it was just ﬁt young lads from a tough area who loved playing football.