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while Christoph did his best to ignore it, scoring a peach of a goal that left Dynamo’s otherwise brilliant keeper, Anton Shunin, looking about as agile as a Douglas fir that someone had planted in the goalmouth, I could see from the way he didn’t even celebrate his goal that the crowd was getting to him. At the team captain Gary Ferguson’s suggestion I took Christoph off at half time and told Bekim Develi to go and shut the crowd up with another goal; he did, twice, in the space of ten minutes.
    Normally, when Bekim scored a goal at Silvertown Dock, he adopted a sort of spear-chucker stance that put me in mind of Achilles or the Spartan King Leonidas in the film 300 ; sometimes he even pretended to hurl an invisible javelin at the away fans; but lately he had started biting his thumb, which left me puzzled.
    ‘Is that some sort of Russian insult?’ I asked our assistant manager, Simon Page.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Bekim biting his thumb like that. That’s the second time he’s done it today.’
    Simon, who was from Yorkshire, and as blunt as a muddy tractor tyre, shook his head.
    ‘I haven’t a bloody clue,’ he confessed. ‘But there are so many fucking foreigners in our side that you’d have to be Desmond fucking Morris to know what the hell’s going on out there sometimes, what with all these quenelles and fucking R4bias and cuckold horns. And giving people the bird, is it? In my day you flicked some bastard a V-sign when he tackled you off the ball and most referees were clever enough to look the other way. But nothing’s missed these days; fucking telly sees everything. BBC’s the worst for that. They love to stir the PC shit-bowl when they get a chance.’
    ‘Thank you, Professor Laurie Taylor,’ I said. ‘I certainly wouldn’t have missed that explanation.’
    ‘Bekim doesn’t bite his thumb when he scores,’ said Ayrton Taylor, who was still recovering from his broken metatarsal and the disappointment of England’s World Cup. ‘He sucks it. Like Jack Wilshire.’
    I hadn’t seen Jack Wilshire score that many goals – certainly not for England – so I was still puzzled.
    ‘What the fuck for?’ asked Simon.
    ‘Because of his new baby boy. It’s his way of dedicating the goal to his son.’
    ‘Fucking hell,’ muttered Simon. ‘You’d think a tattoo would be enough. I think I preferred the spear chucker he used to do. That looked a bit more becoming for a man. Sucking your thumb like that just makes you look like a twat.’
    ‘I think I preferred the spear chucker, as well,’ I said.
    ‘He’s stopped doing that because Prometheus said he didn’t like it,’ explained Ayrton. ‘He said he thought it was insulting to Africans.’
    ‘He said what?’ Simon was appalled.
    ‘Prometheus asked him to stop doing the spear chucker. He was very polite about it, to be fair.’
    ‘Fuck him,’ said Simon. ‘Who’s he? Just some Johnny-come-lately who’s yet to prove he can hack it in English football. Bekim’s the real deal.’
    But the serious trouble began not on the pitch but in the dressing room after the match; and it wasn’t the Dynamo supporters who caused it but one of our own players.
    ‘Those Russkies blowing kisses, and showing us their bare arses,’ said Prometheus. ‘Do they think we’re queer or something?’
    ‘Forget it, son,’ said Gary. ‘They were just trying to needle you. To piss you off.’
    ‘Makes a pleasant change from a banana, I’d have thought,’ said Jimmy Ribbans.
    ‘I’m not so sure about that,’ said Prometheus. ‘People want to call me a black bastard then that’s okay. As anyone can see, I am black. And as it happens I’m a bastard, too. At least according to my mother. What’s more I like bananas. But what I don’t like, man, are batty boys. In my country you call someone a batty boy, that’s enough to get you killed. Is it because we’re an English side that they think we’re queer?’
    ‘Something like that, probably,’ said