The Scout or Welcome to South Bermondsey - стр. 11
It was almost midnight when I got back to London and I immediately fell asleep. In the morning, I had twenty-nine thousand new messages on my smartphone.
As soon as I read the first one, the phone rang.
"Alex, you owe me one." It was O’Grady, "What's going on at the club? Are they filming Harris?"
"Sean, bloody hell, I just got up. I got in really late last night."
"Alex, stop whining!" He was insistent. "You know if it's true, I should write about it first!"
"Sean, what are you talking about? We’re on the way up, they have never been in better form and the blokes are ready to carry the old man in their arms. What possible dismissal?"
"Bloody hell, Alex. You are a real arse!" He didn't seem to believe me.
It looked like it was going to be a hot day. It was worth getting ready. I had a couple of whiskies at breakfast. I took a taxi right to the stadium as it was better not to go to the base.
Our bus arrived at the stadium forty minutes earlier than it was supposed to and I have never seen anything more heart breaking in my life than the way our blokes crawled out of it. Iron Mikey led them to this match as a playing coach and neither Harris nor Johnny Martin was with the team.
I didn't go to the locker room as I had nothing to do there. I walked around in the stands, met a few friends from the club, and talked to them about Harris. One of the doctors told me that Johnny also seemed to have refused to stay on with the coaching staff, although this may have been a rumour. I watched the warm-up from the bench. The blokes were running around nervous and they were all wound up. It was like there were electric shocks in the air. Something was going to happen.
From the very beginning of the game, the pitch was covered with smoke, one of our loudmouths lit something which produced serious smoke and in response the hooligans from Cardiff lit their own flares. They must get them into the stadium in their arses, I thought, for me it was always a mystery. As far as I could see no one actually watched the football match for the first twenty or even thirty minutes. The stands roared with curses at the Welsh and the guest sector kept pace. In general it was just the usual thing for such matches and that was mostly what any decent audience was going to watch. After all you can't really watch football when there is such line-up as Millwall vs Cardiff City. It was definitely not Barcelona vs. Real Madrid.
Towards the end of the first half, when the flares seemed to have run out for both our idiots and the dear guests of «Den», the smoke finally cleared and it became clear that there was nothing but complete rubbish taking place on the pitch.