From Reviled to Respected

Neville Copley

Description

July 1986. Leeds United are the most hated club in English football. Drowning in a tide of apathy and self-pity, relegation to the abyss of the Third division has only been narrowly avoided, much to the dismay of a hostile national media. Meanwhile, Neville Copley is to leave his teen age years as a lazy, unemployed, uneducated - yet opinionated - drop out. His only passion is the much-maligned football club that everyone else hates. Both are derided with equal contempt and as the new football season approaches there is little hope of success for either. Neville starts off desperately trying to avoid meaningful employment whilst his club seems intent on avoiding success. A disgraceful riot plunges the club and its supporters to new depths, and both Neville and the club seem to have reached rock bottom. Can this prove to become a watershed moment for both?As results pick up, Neville rides along on his new optimism, deciding he'd quite like to be a member of society after all as he looks for work, friends and maybe even a personality. Leeds United are looking for promotion and cup glory. Can Leeds United climb the ranks of the division? Can Neville lose his first name term status at the job centre? As the season reaches its climax, who will come out on top?

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Memoir
• Leeds
• Bradford

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 28 octobre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781803139883
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Copyright © 2022 Neville Copley

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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ISBN 9781803139883

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
Photographs copyright, Andrew Varley photography.


Contents
Any Random Weekday Between 1984 and 1987
Leeds United v Liverpool, Saturday 15th October 1977
Fear and Loathing in South and West Leeds
Leeds United v Blackburn Rovers, Saturday 23rd August 1986
Leeds United v Stoke City, Monday 25th August 1986
Huddersfield Town v Leeds United, Saturday 6th September 1986
Bradford City v Leeds United, Saturday 20th September 1986
Leeds United v Hull City, Saturday 27th September 1986
Leeds United v Crystal Palace and Portsmouth, Saturday 11th and Saturday 18th October 1986
Leeds United v Derby County, Saturday 29th November 1986
West Bromwich Albion v Leeds United, Saturday 6th December 1986
Stoke City v Leeds United, Sunday 21st December 1986
Telford United v Leeds United, FA Cup Third Round, Sunday 11th January 1987
Swindon Town v Leeds United, FA Cup Fourth Round, Tuesday 3rd February 1987
Leeds United v Queens Park Rangers, FA Cup Fifth Round, Saturday 21st February 1987
Wigan Athletic v Leeds United, FA Cup Sixth Round, Sunday 15th March 1987
Coventry City v Leeds United, FA Cup Semi-Final, Sunday 12th April 1987
Leeds United v Bradford City, Saturday 28th February 1987
Leeds United v Ipswich Town, Saturday 18th April 1987
Leeds United v West Bromwich Albion, Monday 4th May 1987
Leeds United v Oldham Athletic, Play-Off Semi-Final First Leg, Thursday 14th May 1987
Oldham Athletic v Leeds United, Play-Off Semi-Final Second Leg, Sunday 17th May 1987
Leeds United v Charlton Athletic, Play-Off Final First Leg, Saturday 23rd May 1987
Leeds United v Charlton Athletic, Play-Off Final Second Leg, Monday 25th May 1987
Charlton Athletic v Leeds United, Play-Off Final Replay, Friday 29th May 1987
The Aftermath, and Moving On
At My Workplace, Any Given Friday Between 2003 and 2012
Leeds United v York City, League Cup Second Round First Leg, Wednesday 23rd September 1987
Acknowledgements


Any Random Weekday Between 1984 and 1987
The job interview wasn’t going particularly well. They rarely did in the north of England under Margaret Thatcher’s government. I was underqualified for and unsuited to the post of optical technician, but I applied for virtually anything to fake my interest and remain able to claim the benefits that in the mid 1980s had become a necessity for a listless teenager with few prospects.
To be fair to the interviewer, a pleasant man of early middle age, he was paying me more courtesy than I deserved. Patiently, he went through the process of telling me about a position he had no intention of offering me and I had no intention of accepting in the unlikely event that he did want a sullen teenager with no design qualifications to make glass lenses for him. I sat adjacent to him in a chair clearly designed for eye testing and batted away his questions with as much civility as I could muster whilst trying to hide my complete lack of interest. We both had better things to do – well, he probably had, anyway – and I had no wish to take up any more of his time than I had to.
It was time to cut the meeting short in the tried-and-trusted fashion. “OK, that’s as much as I have to tell you about the job – do you have any questions?”
“Just one: would I be required to work Saturdays?” I asked.
“Yes, up to 1pm. Is that a problem?”
“Oh, no problem; I just like to go watch Leeds United on Saturday afternoons.”
His countenance changed from weary indifference to open contempt. “Oh, you watch that rubbish, do you?”
“Each to their own. They may be rubbish, but they are my rubbish,” I retorted, rolling my eyes at the inane, predictable comment; about the eighth of this nature I’d heard that week.
“I suppose if we give you this position, you’ll be late every Monday morning while you wait to be released from the cells?” This guy had obviously missed his vocation. With such searing wit, how was he not doing stand-up?
I bridled. “Some of us do go for the football. I know you think that is unusual, but it does happen.”
“Yes, well, I have other candidates to see, so unless you have any more questions, we’ll finish here and we’ll be in touch.”
Yes, of course he would. At least I’d saved him the bother of showing me around.
This isn’t a totally verbatim conversation – it is cobbled together from the numerous interviews I attended around that time – but the context is ultimately the same. Following Leeds United in the 1980s was a thankless task. The team had excelled in mediocrity for over a decade and had a following whose reputation was renowned throughout the country for violence. Although among a significant minority – if you can forgive the oxymoron – the reputation was largely deserved, we were all labelled with it however little we contributed to the trouble. Being unemployed, a teenager, and a supporter of a football club famous for hooliganism, falling into the role of social pariah was, for me, easy. I was apathetic yet deemed violent, personally oversensitive yet with little empathy for others, lacking in drive in one area yet excessively passionate in another. It was a pigeonhole but, paradoxically, a wide and varied one. A lot of it was fair: I was lazy and uninterested in just about anything that didn’t involve football or chasing girls.
My only experience of regular paid work had left me unimpressed. A few months after leaving school, I’d winged my way into computer programming via a Youth Training Scheme. For those unfamiliar with this ’80s innovation, the Tory government decided to get school leavers out of the unemployment figures by offering all sixteen– and seventeen-year-olds a position on a year-long training scheme which paid the princely sum of twenty-five quid a week (approximately sixty pence an hour). In those days the concept of a minimum wage would have been regarded as outrageous blue-sky thinking. The scheme had the added bonus of providing cheap labour for local companies with no promise of a permanent job after the training period finished.
After my initial astonishment at acquiring the position, I stuck it out for eight months but proved to be as competent in the job as many Leeds United signings of the time were in theirs. I was hopelessly out of my depth and lacked interest. Therefore, my experience ended badly with my rightful dismissal. This was partly due to my reluctance to actually turn up, but the fact that I had zero aptitude for technology didn’t help either. In my present job, my status as the company Luddite is legendary. Watching me struggle to master even the most basic of tasks, my colleagues are staggered that I started my working life as a computer programmer. I was neither bothered about the loss of that job, nor keen to take another. On unemployment benefit I received only three pounds a week less than I’d been paid at work. Factor in transport costs and working paid less. At eighteen I lacked the foresight to see that sticking it out would lead to a better, well-paid job with a promising future, and decided that a life on unemployment benefit topped up by the occasional side job would be more lucrative. If anyone asked me what I did I used the vague retort of “Freelance worker subsidised by the government.”
Many years later it became almost cool to be unemployed, especially around the time of the financial crisis of 2008 and the resulting credit crunch. As businesses folded empathy was in abundance for those out of work, and even the long-term unemployed managed to find sympathy. But that was not how things worked in the ’80s, when many people could remember the days of full employment and Harold Macmillan’s 1957 “never had it so good” speech. Children were brought up differently – from the late ’90s onwards, everyone was Mummy and Daddy’s little star and nothing was going to be beyond them, however mediocre their talents. Ability was no substitute for entitlement. The ’80s and early ’90s perhaps approached this better, with children told that hard work was the way to get along in the world and, if you’ve got the talent, go for it. I caught the tail end of the ‘you are useless and will never amount to nothing, no matter what you do’ parenting style. Yes, the double negative is deliberate on my part and was unintentional on theirs, but nevertheless accurate. How heartily my family laughed when for my nineteenth birthday a girlfriend bought me a book titled 101 Uses for the Unemployed . It contained a series of crude drawings of unemployed people in humiliating positions, helping the community by being used as doormats for entry into public buildings, or crash test dummies.
Political correctness was still a distant concept in 1986 and my extended family were never slow to undermine my