Football Crazy by Terry Ravenscroft, Ravenscroft Page B

losses. “Actually I was thinking of sleeping with it between me legs tonight as well, Mr Price.”
    “ Do that.” The situation resolved to his satisfaction, Price got down to business. “Now pay attention, t' lot of you. Here is t' Do's and t' Don'ts as will apply from now on. T' Do's first. There's only one. Do as I tell thee. Now t' Don'ts. One....”
    Briggs interrupted him. “I fink Barrel should wear a barrel between his legs as well, Mr Price.”
    Barrel turned angrily on his team mate. “What?”
    “ Well you're called Barrel, in't you,” reasoned Briggs. “So it's only logical you should have a barrel between your legs.”
    Barrel glared at him. “What the fuck has being called Barrel got to do with it?”
    “ A lot,” said Briggs. He turned to Price. “Innit it, Mr Price?”
    Barrel didn't wait for Price's opinion on the subject. “Oh no it has not! Anyway if what people were called had anything to do with what they had between their legs you'd be called Darren Smallpenis, wouldn't you!”
    This below the belt riposte elicited sharp intakes of breath from about a third of the players. The rest laughed and jeered.
    Briggs turned on Barrel. “Bastard!”

    Stanley hadn't gone to Price straight away with his great idea. After all he'd never had a great idea before and he felt the need hang on to it, to possess it for a while before he gave it up to someone else; to take it out every now and then and stroke it, as though it were a new puppy or one of his treasured old Frogley Town football programmes.
    Of course it wasn't really his great idea, it was Sarah Jane's, but he now considered it to be his as he had since rewarded his wife by buying her a new frock in the Frogley Town colours. True, she had said she wouldn't be seen dead in it, and had told him in no uncertain terms where he could shove it, but he was sure she would soon be wearing it with pride once the Town had won a few games.
    In fact Stanley had once had a great idea on a previous occasion, sometime in the long ago, when he had been out marching in a procession with the Boys Brigade as a fourteen-year-old bugler, but the effect of trying to hold on to the idea until he could write it down whilst at the same time marching next to the boy with the big drum had given him a headache, and by the time the procession had ended he had forgotten it.
    But whatever it was, it certainly couldn't have been as good as the idea he was now in possession of. After all there were over three thousand workers at Price's Pies, and hardly any of them attended the Town's matches, so to get them through the turnstiles would represent an increase in the gate of three thousand, or as near to it as made no difference.
    Stanley had conjured up in his mind what this would mean in extra gate money, in the extra bounty it would bring to the club. There was three thousand at an average of ten pounds a throw for a start. Thirty thousand pounds! A veritable Aladdin's Cave of riches. And that was without the spin-offs, replica shirt sales, programme sales, meat pie sales, tea and coffee and Oxo sales and the Golden Goal competition. Forty thousand pounds at least he reckoned! Aladdin's Cave with knobs on!
    Of course Stanley knew as well as the next football fan that forty thousand pounds wouldn't even amount to a week's wages for many of the players in the Premiership. But this wasn't the Premiership, this was Frogley, and for teams like the Town forty thousand pounds was wealth untold. But just as important was all the extra fans who would crowd into the stadium to support the team.
    As he gave the WC pedestal another coat of red paint he took a guess as to what the attendance figure at the Town's matches would be after his great idea had been put into practice, after taking into account the extra interest there would also be now that Mr Price had bought the club. Six thousand? Seven? He sighed with contentment. When the team ran out onto the pitch in a couple of weeks time