Shyton United

Prologue4th May, 2013. This date is important. This was the date of the most important day in Shyton United’s, and indeed Shyton town’s, history; the day that changed everything. Shyton. My home. It was where I was born, where I was raised, and where I quickly left when opportunity arose. It’s a grim former industrial town that used to be surrounded by smoke-spewing factories, manufacturing anything from plastic switches for vibrators to plastic toilet roll holders. To the untrained eye just noticing Shyton’s rolling green hills, the occasional flock of sheep, the two-up and two-down red brick houses and a permanent grey sky that refused to let in the sunshine; it could almost seem quaint. There’s grime in the air and in your lungs. It’s the kind of place The Smiths would’ve sung about and the perfect setting for a Ken Loach film. The population the other day was 52,000, but having spotted yet another family hatchback with a roof-rack full of luggage, I had no doubt that the population had yet decreased… by four. Yes, it’s hard to believe that this town in the north of England used to be an industrial powerhouse… a town that once rivalled Oldham. How times have changed, much like the A160 connecting the A180 with Immingham Docks is about to. One of the former factory owners, one of the factories that made those little black switches for vibrators, was a fella that went by the name of Jack, nicknamed ‘Huge Jack’ as he was a big lad. You couldn’t miss him as he drove a yellow-painted Rolls, wore a sheepskin coat much like my good friend, John Motson, smoked Cubans and had a handlebar moustache. The handlebar moustache made him look a little like a porn star, quite similar to Hugh ‘Le Coq’ Mongous. He certainly was larger than life. When Shyton could no longer compete with Taiwan in the competitive plastic-switch-for-vibrators market, the masses fled. Today, the high streets looked like the streets in a nuclear test town, and not far off Chernobyl. The shops were abandoned, terraced buildings boarded up, and outside every other block a tramp could be seen begging for some rope. Seeing as hardly anyone wandered the streets, you wondered why tramps even bothered to beg there. The only remaining shops were a butcher’s selling meat only fit for dogs, a Greggs selling its normal depressing fare only fit for dogs, and a s*x shop—the best in the north of England and owned by Huge Jack. Huge Jack was now 55, and wore a toupee that the character Morris from the Martin Scorsese flick Goodfellas would’ve been proud of. Huge Jack was one of the biggest makers and distributors of amateur porn in the country, just a few leagues behind Dirty Desmond. Huge Jack was the man behind such titles as ‘Shyton Me’, ‘Shyton: When the Curtains Close’ and ‘Shyton Housewives: Whenever, Wherever’. Yes, the amateur porn industry in Shyton was thriving like the blind army ants in southern California, and was one of its few big success stories. Huge Jack’s film ‘Shyton Me’ even won a ‘Hardie’ for best film, and the town itself had been honoured with having the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in England. The other surprising success story of Shyton was the town’s football team, Shyton United. Having made its way up the lower leagues, the team was now in the Championship battling Wolves for second place and automatic promotion to the Premier League. Its home was Creek Alley, a 20,000 all-seater football stadium mostly financed by Huge Jack and the rest of Shyton’s porn industry. Interestingly, the site of Creek Alley dates back to Celtic times when it is believed it was the site of a popular brothel. Then, when the Romans invaded, a fierce and bloody battle took place. The Romans won and turned it into an even bigger brothel. In the year 1850, a Roman coin was discovered. According to calculations, it became the price of a Roman era hand-job. Depravity ran through the streets and veins of Shyton. Years later, the site was turned into a fudge-wrapping factory, hence Shyton United’s nickname, ‘the Fudge Packers’. And it’s this football team that has heralded my return. My name’s Stanley Gobsen, though certain friends called me ‘Gobby’, not just because of my name but also because I could half prattle on. Friends and uncles would quite often stick a red ball in my mouth and leave me prone in the basement for days on end, I prattled on that much. Gobsen is a Danish name and all my Danish ancestors were fisherman, of trout specifically. They say that in our family we just needed to hold our hands out over water and fish would jump into them—our family had even been compared to Jesus Christ as we could get a load of fish with very little bait. In fact, the real secret behind our family’s success with the chickens of the ocean—and something I’ll reveal here even though it could mean my head—was that we’d soak the bait in a cocaine solution. It drove the fish batty to try and get the bait, it was easy pickings from there. When the Gobsen clan migrated to England sometime in the 19th Century and settled in the north because of the familiarity the cold brought, it was not long before they took up their rods, their nets, their cocaine and established a fishing empire that stretched 35 miles Eastwards from Goole all the way to Spurn Head. Fishing remained big in my family (and subsequently cocaine, though for very different reasons), even when my father brought my mother inland to Shyton and set up Shyton’s premier fishmonger’s. With daily imports of semi-fresh junky fish delivered by his brother Brian, the business flourished; though mother was none-too-happy, complaining of the smell of fish, spending two hours a day scrubbing her hands and threatening to leave father for the butcher, who had been making advances, as well as the best pork and apple sausages north of Birmingham. When I came of age, I was expected to take over the fishmonger business by first spending a couple of years with Uncle Brian and his crew out at sea or on the river. I steadfastly refused as I was never one for fishing (too many days at sea with a bunch of horny men with nobs like frozen fish fingers). Frozen fish fingers + horny men = frustrated, pissed out of their heads fishermen. Though this upset my father and uncle, I was a firm believer in choosing our own destinies and clean, non-fishy hands. Plus I was pretty sure that the Narcs were onto them. No, what I was interested in were documentaries and that was one of the reasons why I didn’t linger in Shyton (apart from father and uncle threatening to stab me with fish hooks), and instead went straight to Manchester. Not much call for documentarians in Shyton, pornographers though was another story. With my Danish hair, I was ripe for the visual medium. I was the Steve Ryder of documentaries long before Steve Ryder became a household name on BBC Sport. After leaving Shyton I made numerous award-winning documentaries that were the toast of film festivals of cities such as Hull, Gdasnk and Torquay. Perhaps you’ve seen ‘Hamsters: Man’s True Enemy’? With Shyton United on the brink of achieving promotion to the Premier League however, I thought it was time to make my return to my hometown and chronicle, if they made it, their first season in the top flight of the English football league structure. The club were also very willing for me and my top snooper, Bob, to document their historic first season in the English top flight. Even more so as one of their players was, like me, born and bred in Shyton and had almost single-handedly dragged them up from non-league obscurity. Of course, I was talking about local bad boy Tommy ‘Machine’ Gunn. With unprecedented access, and through recordings made by me and Bob, extracts from blogs, Twitter, round-the-clock illegal surveillance, and interviews, we were able to document their story, warts and all. What we documented was without precedent, in both sporting and legal history. So, sit back, unzip and enjoy, as there really was only one ‘Shyton United’.