Six Stickers

Adam Carroll-Smith

Description

Adam Carroll-Smith never completed a football sticker album as a kid. Try as he might, he was always a few stickers short. Six Stickers tells the story of Carroll-Smith's bid to complete his childhood album and rediscover his love for the game. After uncovering one of his long-lost, almost-finished albums, he decided now was the time to break that duck. Disillusioned and out of love with the modern game, he attempts to track down and photograph the six players missing from his Premier League 1996 sticker book. Featuring previously unpublished interviews with the subjects of the book, Carroll-Smith looks back at their time in football and how their lives have developed since; he also looks back at a time when English football was going through a transitional phase, prior to Euro 96 and at the dawn of the modern era, and examines the changes of the last 15 years.

Sujets

• Antiques
• Antique

Informations

• Publié par: Pitch Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 14 octobre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781909626133
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2013
Pitch Publishing A2 Yeoman Gate Yeoman Way Durrington BN13 3QZ www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
Adam Carroll-Smith, 2013
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.
eISBN: 978-1-909626-13-3
(Printed edition: 978-1-90805-182-0)
eBook Conversion by www.ebookpartnership.com
Contents
Preface
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Epilogue
A final realisation
For my wonderful family, but most of all, for Sharpie and Pip
Thanks
Thank you for buying, borrowing or stealing this book. I hope you enjoy it. Although if you did steal it, be warned most shops have excellent CCT-Vision these days, and always prosecute shoplifters. And prison is no piece of cake for a book thief.
Jokes
There are some jokes in this book. You can find them, collated and numbered, at the start of most chapters. Some you may enjoy. Others you may not. To be honest, I m not entirely convinced by the one about CONCACAF myself. But that s alright. Comedy is subjective. Although if you don t enjoy the Redknapp one, I will never, ever, ever forgive you.
Parental Guidance Warnings
Violence - None. Foul language - None. Scenes of a sexual nature - One.
Music
There aren t many songs in this book. There is one, but that s not many. But there is a playlist of all the songs I listened to while writing this book available online. You can find it by searching for Six Stickers. Some Songs on Spotify. Think of it as scene-setting for the book. I know, I should probably do some of that with the actual writing, but writing is hard. Even this sort of writing.
One more thing
To protect the reputations of various people, some of the names have been changed in this book. Very occasionally, the dates have been moved about too - never by much, and only to help the story flow and keep you interested. I think that s fair. I was joking about the sex scene, by the way.
Preface
W HEN I started writing Six Stickers , I talked to the real-life woman in this book, Anna, about what I wanted it to be.
I told her the plan was to write something that poked fun at all those immature man does a silly challenge stories. I wanted to write a warm, funny, unusual little book about navigating the move from adolescence to adulthood. Some ex-footballers would weigh in on whether something special had been lost among all the game s huge financial gains. There would be stickers too. Six. Sometimes book titles fall in your lap.
After the book came out, I spoke to a lot of people about football stickers. Almost everyone asked me where I bought mine, who I swapped with, and how close I was to finishing my latest collection. I told them that I didn t collect stickers anymore. When they asked why, I said it was because I was a fully-grown man. Most of them thought I was weird for giving up something I had recently been obsessing over.
Fair enough, and I expected that some people might mistake me for an adult-sized sticker nut. What I didn t expect was just how much people still love collecting football stickers.
For nostalgic reasons, yes, but also because collecting stuff - building a collection of things to the point of completion - is fun. And there s always room for that. In fact, if you don t like frivolity, you probably won t like what follows. This book is not a serious look at the psychology of collecting, or a discourse on the nature of obsession. There are jokes. Lots. Some might say too many. Not me.
There is one bit in particular, at the very end of the book, which involves me making a strange ritualistic sacrifice. All will become clear and you ll find out what I did. But know this: it made me happy to do it, and I would definitely recommend doing it yourself at least once. The same applies to football stickers.
Anyway, here comes the book. If you enjoy it half as much as you enjoyed finally finding Iain Dowie or the Oldham Athletic club badge shiny, then I ll feel - wait for it - complete.
Adam Carroll-Smith Piccadilly, London January 2018
Prologue
I HAD BEEN at sea for a few hours. I had browsed duty-free. I had wandered the food court. I had ducked and fired my way through a few levels of Time Crisis 2 in the arcade. And now I was standing, alone and bored, on the deck outside. The sun was shining, the sky was blue: roughly Pantone Sky Blue 14-4318 TPX if you ever feel like recreating the scene on canvas. A marrow-cold wind whipped salt water spray across my cheeks. My face cheeks.
Beneath me, the ferry engines grumbled away, dull and insistent, like an unseen choir of Mick McCarthys. I stared into the distance and waited for the Dunkerque shore to appear on the horizon. A man, about 5ft 3in tall, wearing a blue shirt, unbuttoned to reveal a tuft of dusty silver chest hair that looked like an old robot s wiring come loose, appeared beside me. He dropped an attach case at my feet and slipped something heavy and gun-shaped into my pocket. A gun, probably.
Holiday? he said.
The man was French. And probably still is. I told him this trip was more of an adventure than a holiday , and that I was less a tourist, more an intrepid explorer. I was on my way to Belgium to meet a retired footballer.
A footballer? he asked.
I nodded.
In Belgium?
Yes. I m going to take his picture.
He looked unimpressed. I performed a bit of amateur mime - is there any other kind? - squinting one eye shut and holding an imaginary camera to the other. Click . The man frowned and looked out to sea.
Does he know?
Does he know ?
Does he know you are coming to take his picture?
Basically, yes.
You are sure?
Pretty sure.
The man looked back out to sea: OK.
I opened my bag and pulled out my book. The sun reflected quickly across the front cover and the man shuffled closer, like a little French magpie tempted over by the sight of something shiny. He watched over my shoulder as I turned through the first few pages. Every three seconds or so, he sniffed. His nose was running.
I found the page I was looking for and pointed to the solitary empty space among the otherwise neat rows of mug shots. I looked at the Frenchman, held my imaginary camera to my eye and performed a little more mime photography. Click-click. He lifted the book from my hands, with absolutely no tenderness or respect for how important it was, and began to flick through it with one tobacco-stained finger. Not his own, but a severed one he carried around with him.
After a few seconds he was satisfied. He handed the album back, took a packet of Gauloises from the top pocket of his shirt, and put one into his mouth. He turned his back to the wind and lit up. He puffed six quick silver plumes of smoke into the air, then dropped his cigarette and stamped it out. It seemed wasteful. I guessed he was trying to maintain a 50-a-day habit and was running a bit behind.
A few minutes passed, during which I realised there was no gun or attach case, after all. 1 The Frenchman repeated the routine with another cigarette. I thought about asking him to pair up for a run at Time Crisis 2 - if he showed the same callous disregard towards pixelated gangsters as he did to his smokes, we would probably complete the game pretty quickly. Ernesto Diaz s diabolical plan to launch a nuclear satellite into space would be foiled in no (i.e. 30 or so minutes) time.
In the end, I didn t bother. The ferry was approaching port and soon we would have to disembark. The noise from the engines suddenly became rougher, more gravelly - as though the belowdeck McCarthys had become a chorus of croaky-throated Andre Villas-Boases. An announcement over the public address system asked passengers to return to the main assembly areas. We both ignored it. The Frenchman continued to smoke. I flicked through my album.
I landed on the Manchester United page, where I found rows and rows of Red Devils smiling out at me. Schmeichel, Neville, Giggs, Cantona, Cole, Keane - all the big names were there. David May and Terry Cooke were also present.
To my left, the Frenchman sniffed back his runny nose, coughed, then spat something on to the deck which appeared to have one of his organs (possibly heart) in it. To my right was just loads and loads of sea. Overhead, the sun (which I should have said earlier was roughly a Vibrant Yellow 13-0858 TPX) ducked behind a cloud (Pantone White Alyssum 11-1001 TCX). A seagull squawked loudly. And then a splat of bird waste (you can re-use the white you used for the cloud) landed on Brian McClair s face.
Instinctively, I dropped the album. It landed in a puddle, faces and faeces down. I swore loudly and repeatedly. I shouted at the seagull. The Frenchman burst out laughing. He watched as I picked up my soggy, seagull-soiled album and he giggled as I cursed aloud some more, and angrily swore vengeance on the bird who had done this. He lit another cigarette. This one, he seemed to enjoy.
For a few miserable minutes, I attempted a desperate clean-up operation. I was furious, and becoming more so with each passing moment. Little beads of sweat trickled down my forehead. Brian McClair, however, remained a picture of calm. He continued to grin stoically through the whole ordeal. That s Scotsmen for you.
I turned around and saw my French friend stood a few feet away. He chuckled. I smil