Articles of Faith (13 page)

I think the England thing is quite weird because I’ve been to lots of England matches and you’re always sat beside a different person every time you go. It’s more of a family thing with England. But it’s strange to think how England are seen by the rest of the world. I went to the World Cup in Germany and it’s almost like this circus coming to town and doing interviews with German television in this bar and you’re on live German television. And er they’re going
(jovial German accent)
‘Will you be urinating in the street later?’ Oh yes, yes.

RB:
We’re on schedule here, we’ll smash up this bar.

NG:
62 minutes, 1–0, prepare to fight, fight! Urinate, then deportation.

RB:
So say you could pick and choose, City win the Premiership or England win the World Cup?

NG:
Oh, City win the Premiership. The thing that just pisses me off, we were in America when we found out Croatia had been beaten 4–1 and Theo Walcott had scored a hat-trick and it’s like when that little girl won that junior tournament at Wimbledon, now she’s gonna win five Grand Slams in a row. It’s typical of this fucking country, any time that there’s any modicum of success it’s like, ‘We are gonna be the greatest sporting nation in the world,’ and as soon as it goes wrong it’s, ‘They fucked it up for us! We could’ve been the greatest nation.’ Well, hang on a minute, Theo Walcott’s not the greatest footballer in the world, that much has been proven already, and you know when it’s his next game playing for England he’ll be shit. In England we don’t do common sense, the press set the tone for everything in this country and fuck me, they cock it up. Theo Walcott, he’s the saviour of English football and at this rate we could actually win the next World Cup – we’re not gonna win the World Cup, if we get to the fucking semi-final we’ll be lucky.

RB:
Most likely we’ll get to the quarterfinals and then go out. I don’t understand that phenomenon at all, because you’d think after doing it so many times experience would tell you after a win like that, then you go to a major tournament, struggle to qualify then get past a dodgy team in the first round, then go out in the quarter-finals. It’s almost like that pattern is so often repeated.

NG:
You’d think these football experts that sit round that table on a Sunday morning on Sky Sports debating all sorts of manner of all shit, you’d think that they know that England on paper have a pretty good first eleven and after that you’re fucked. So if you’ve got more than two injuries in that first eleven, we’ve had it. Because with the best will in the world Jermain Defoe and fucking Jermaine Jenas and all these people. They’re not world class. You’d think they’d know that.

RB:
Jermaine! We’re bringing in the Jermaines, there’s Pennant, Defoe and Jenas!

NG:
But because they’ve got fuck all better to talk about and they’ve got to talk about something. What I can never understand about England is what the lions are all about, there’s no lions in England.

RB:
There’s no lions.
(Laughter)

NG:
There’s no lions in England, why are there lions on the badge? They should be called the three seagulls or the three salmon, there’s no lions in England.

RB:
The indication is of grandiosity, the detachment from reality, we are the lions of England! Where are these lions?

NG:
We have three lions at Whipsnade Zoo, three lions. It’s all bollocks. I don’t know, you see those guys on the television and one minute they’re going, ‘Fabio Capello he really should learn the fucking language,’ the next Sunday they go, ‘Well, he says it in his own way.’ (
Italian accent
) ‘You no good. You’re fucking shit, you’re not playing.’ You’re just talking out of your fucking arseholes constantly. Back to the point though, if England won the World Cup, I don’t think we could deal with it.

RB:
Why, what do you mean?

NG:
Well, because anytime an English team wins anything it always seems to be a full stop. They never go on and do it again. Like when the Argentinians and the Germans would win the World Cup and then the European Championships and then defend the World Cup and get to the semi-finals. Every time an English team has won the Ashes or the World Cup or anything it always seems to be, ‘That’s it, we’ve done it now,’ and we take our foot off the gas and all get on the piss and then they’re never heard of again. I don’t think English people are ready for a World Cup winning team – everybody would get knighted.
Everybody
would get knighted – anyone who went to that game is gonna receive a knighthood.

RB:
Do you think there’s something integral to the identity of this country that couldn’t handle a victory, like it would be too monumental and contrary to the way we see ourselves? So like City fans only going when City are losing, so it’s like almost as if it’s in opposition to how they see themselves?

NG:
We actually spoke seriously about this, what would we actually do if they do win the League? And we were like. ‘I’m not quite sure how I’d react to that.’ I’m more used to just celebrating coming fourth bottom so we live to fight another day. I’m not sure how I’d react to somebody picking up the trophy. I’d be shell-shocked – I wouldn’t know how to handle it.

It’s like when West Ham got to the cup final and we were saying to West Ham fans, ‘Oh, it’s going to be great, what are you going to do if you win?’ And they were like, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ You all accept before you go there you are going to get beaten by Liverpool, you must’ve accepted that before you went there. It’ll be a great day out, if we score first, brilliant.

RB:
It’s really weird that you say that, because when we went 2–0 up and at that point I just sort of went, ‘Oh no. Oh, come on! Get one back.’ And when they scored and it levelled it out a bit it and went into extra time, they’re gonna score, they’re gonna score’, and then Stevie Gerrard scored.

NG:
I guess because it’s always been this ‘thirty years of hurt’ and all this shit with the England team and the World Cup, if we actually won it, what would be the point of carrying on after that?

There’d be no point. We’d have won it, we’d have lived to see it, they’d repeat it endlessly on television, they’d all get a knighthood and it would be like right well, what now, we’d have to say England are officially pulling out of football, the quest is now complete.

RB:
Right. That’s true you know, I see that makes sense. Because the legend of English football needs constant failure to carry on.

NG:
Football fans wouldn’t know what to do if England were in Johannesburg at the 2010 World Cup Final and won on penalties. They’d be like, ‘Well, we’ll just get to smashing things up now. What should we do? Do the samba? We don’t know what to do here…honk a horn?’ You know the England psyche is to get beaten on penalties, preferably by the Germans, or any other country we’ve gone to war with, you can put Argentina in there. We were at war with those fuckers. I don’t think England fans would be able to deal with winning the trophy.

RB:
This all makes sense. I realised then that I’ve probably never thought of it as an actual possibility when you see England go out to Portugal or Germany or in 96 as well, when that happens, that in itself is the fulfilment of your expectations, that is the trophy.

NG:
If you close your eyes, it’s like with the City thing, if I close my eyes I cannot see that trophy being lifted by a guy in a sky-blue shirt, I cannot see John Terry holding that trophy up. I just don’t fucking see it. The amount of times I’ve switched off the TV if England have been knocked out and gone, ‘I can’t wait for the papers in the morning, that’s brilliant, like fucking fifty pages, fucking ‘kill ’em all’! Portuguese bastards! English bastards! And me missus going, ‘You love it and it’s better than going “Oh, we won…oh we’re in the semi-final, er…we’ve never been here before, oh, we don’t know what to do.”’ There’s the fall out of the game, there’s the referees address, there’s the violence of the city afterwards, ‘We were robbed.’

RB:
Effigies burnt.

NG:
I prefer all of that. I wouldn’t know how to deal with success for England.

RB:
And I think that’s part of our whole national identity. I don’t think that’s just you and me, I think that’s a country that feels like that.

NG:
Well, it’s that thing that I’ve never quite understood, England always likes a gallant loser. And they say that around the world, ‘Oh, fair play always does for the English.’ But I think somewhere down the line that must be right, that we’ve never really been able to deal with success.

RB:
’Cos if you’re Brazilian or German that’s sort of part of you – winning.

NG:
Yeah, you know when you put eleven Italians or Germans on a pitch in a tournament, where there’s something just clicks that they’re gonna fucking win and that’s the end of it, unless they play each other, the winner of that is gonna go on and win the World Cup. That’s usually the way it works. But with the England team it’s like, ‘We’re gonna get as far as the quarter-finals and then we’re gonna get beaten,’ and everybody kind of goes, ‘England’s gonna get beaten, we’re gonna smash some stuff up and then we’re gonna go home,’ and we all know where we stand and we’ll all come back in four years and do it again. That’s England’s role in world football.

RB:
That’s why I think if you’re a West Ham fan or a City fan that is then replicated at club level. You might get to the final, you might have a good cup run, you might avoid narrowly relegation or win the Championship, but you know you’re never gonna win the Premier League, that’s not gonna happen.

NG:
No, of course not.

RB:
So it must be weird to be a Man United fan or a Chelsea fan because then on club level you have that experience of victory and winning things and on a national level it’s a different thing.

NG:
They take the winning of it all really seriously and my old fella said to me once when we were kids and Liverpool won the title eight times in a row or something, and I was saying, ‘Why doesn’t it happen to Man City?’ And he said, ‘What, would you rather be a Liverpool fan and knowing you were going to win every week?’ And I was like, ‘yes…I would actually, you know.’

And once you get older you think, well you’ve got more to lose really. The kind of the magical journey of the likes of West Ham and City fans of getting to the Cup Final, ‘Oh fucking hell, I’d wonder what we’d do if we won.’ Like on Saturday, we were watching the game and Robinho gets the free kick and he scores, and you’re just thinking, ‘Is he actually gonna get a hat-trick? Could that fucker…?’ I don’t know why, what to do if he has the best game of his life and he scores a hat-trick and we beat Chelsea 3–0 and the papers are all…I wouldn’t fucking be able to deal with it. I’m kind of glad we got fucking beat in a way, it’s like, yeah we’re still Man City.

RB:
(
Laughter
) It’s like football’s representative of something in football fans, something as a person. And if their game changes too much – it don’t matter if there’s loads of money or loads of European players coming in, if you’re a City fan you’re always gonna lose, if you’re a West Ham fan you’ll have a little run, and then England are always going to disappoint you and you need those things to be consistent to provide stability.

NG:
There is a stable law of have and have-nots in world football and in British football. I don’t think you can change the
fact that England sit about fifth or sixth best team in the world always. But for some reason, whether it be the Italians going to that World Cup match fixing, it’s a fucking scandal or the fucking chairman getting put away, Juventus have been relegated, but they’re going to win the World Cup somehow. You knew they’d fucking win it somehow. The Germans always get to the final, somehow. The Argentinians are always there, and the Dutch play their role as the gallant fucking wizards who always go out just before they should have. Even in European football, no matter how shit Milan are perceived to be or Real Madrid or Barcelona, they are always there. Particularly in our lifetime, apart from Chelsea who’ve kind of bought it, there’s never been a club that’s muscled their way in and been a powerhouse in European football. I think it’s pre-ordained.

RB:
(Laughter)
It’s pre-ordained, it’s destiny, it’s in your blood.

NG:
I never felt I was supporting the wrong club. I think the people that change when they’re like seventeen or something, ‘Oh you know we used to support Leicester and now we support Man United ’cos, er well…’, oh, fuck off. I was born to be in this situation, with this shower of idiots playing this fucking game.

RB:
Like the colour of your eyes or your hair, and like at my school it was mostly West Ham fans, one or two Arsenal fans and it just feels right.

NG:
I was born to be a City fan, I never chose City because, when my dad was taking me they just happened to be the best team in Europe at the time, they’d just won the UEFA Cup and the FA Cup and the League the year before. But…there it is, big floodlights, that’s my team. But I think you’ll find Arsenal fans have all got this kind of demeanour about them, they look slightly like they’re shit dancers.

Every time Tottenham get to the Cup Final you can’t get a taxi for love nor fucking money, seriously, and Chelsea fans some of them can be fucking nasty…the only time I’ve ever been seriously abused was at Chelsea, not in the ground, outside the ground by 50-year-old fucking fascists. West Ham fans, they range from, well there’s yourself, there seems to be a lot of musicians who like West Ham and artistic people who like West Ham, plus there are Ray Winstone types. But I think Arsenal fans are…

RB:
You think they’d be shit dancers?

NG:
I mean, if you look at them, no chance.

RB:
That’s brilliant, nice one.

Who’s your favourite ever City player?

NG:
I’ll probably say Colin Bell, but of the modern era I’ve gotta say Shaun Wright-Phillips or Ali Benarbia, go Shaun Wright-Phillips because he’s fucking little and he means it.