Sarfraz Manzoor

this is from today’s article in G2

I was a teenager during the 1980s, uninterested in football and suspicious of the ferocious tribal loyalty it inspired. The football ground in my hometown, Luton, was located in the heart of the Asian community and on Saturday afternoons our parents would warn us to be home before the football match ended. The day would be meticulously planned, so that all the shopping and errands could be completed in good time, before quarter to five. We would then wait at the bus stop, willing the bus to arrive to take us safely home, desperate not to be stranded in town when the fans filed out from the terraces.

Who were these drunk, violent young men who rampaged through that decade? The history of football hooliganism repeats itself first as tragedy, second as entertainment. Next week sees the release of Cass, the third film in recent years to tackle the subject of football hooliganism. Like The Football Factory and Green Street, Cass features lovingly recreated scenes of bone-crunching violence set to a carefully selected soundtrack. But where those two films had current-day settings, Cass revisits the 1980s, a time when, as its author charmingly puts it: “We still had proper summers and girls looked proper horny in cheese cloth.”

Both The Football Factory and Green Street were based on hooligan memoirs; indeed, over the past decade a thriving industry has developed as former hooligans have exchanged knives for publishing contracts, recalling their glory days with bloodcurdling affection. Cass, which is based on the autobiography of former West Ham hooligan Cass Pennant, is typical of the genre: “All four had blades, but I didn’t care - I was going to rip them apart with my bare hands,” runs the quote on the cover of the book.

So far, so what. Except that Pennant is black, and his tale is far from the norm. He was adopted by a white family, and his search for a sense of belonging led him to become the leader of the notorious Inter City Firm, before he finally turned his back on violence to become a successful author and publisher. Pennant’s office in Soho, London, resembles a converted cupboard. The shelves are lined with books his company has published, the bulk of them crime and hooligan memoirs with titles such as How to Rob Banks and Influence People. He says he is delighted with the film and praises its attention to detail - perhaps unsuprisingly, given that new director Jon S Baird spent a year with Pennant before writing the screenplay.

There are strong parallels between Cass and Shane Meadows’ This Is England, which also recreated the early 1980s and focused on a working-class boy searching for an identity. In Cass, a young black boy is put up for adoption at six months, taken in by an elderly white couple and raised in a town where he is the only black person. “There weren’t any laws to protect black people then,” Pennant recalls. “We would watch Love Thy Neighbour and Alf Garnett on the television, and when I went to the football there would be two hundred fans screaming, ‘Sieg Heil’ in front of the police.” As a young boy, he was subjected to racial abuse; in the film, we see the actor who plays him as a child, scrubbing his skin, trying to wash the black away.

Pennant’s original first name was the decidedly unmanly Carol; he called himself Cass after seeing Cassius Clay fight. In the film, we see how the young Cass tires of being harassed and lashes out at his tormentors. On discovering that he is gifted with an ability to beat the daylights out of others, Cass begins drifting towards local gangs. “They were violent times,” says Pennant. “We would go to class in Dr Martens and braces. We were reading A Clockwork Orange in school, where the teachers were hippies who had come out of that whole peace-and-love era. The skinhead and gang culture was a reaction to that.”

Pennant has boasted that he has been involved “in more violence than most people will experience in a hundred lifetimes”. But the most intriguing theme in this film is the way football fulfilled a need for an identity. When he is barred from a pub for being black a fellow fan ushers him inside, saying to the bouncer, “He’s not a nig-nog - he’s West Ham.”

When Nick Love’s The Football Factory was released four years ago, there was controversy over the fact the director had invited former hooligans to a special screening. This ambiguous relationship between film-maker and the violence he depicts is also evident in Cass: three generations of West Ham fans, including former Inter City Firm members, played roles in the film, which veers between warning against and salivating over the consequences of violence. Pennant denies the film glamorises football hooliganism. “What about the people buying books on the second world war?” he asks. “Are they all potential Nazis? “

It’s a reasonable point, but I’m not convinced. Nick Love defended The Football Factory on similar grounds, arguing that the film depicted the consequences of violence, and did not celebrate it. And yet both Love’s film and Cass reheat the suggestion that football hooligans are somehow proud inheritors of an English warrior tradition. The more mundane truth, surely, is that football firms offered identity, loyalty and belonging to young disaffected men who had nothing better to do.

The film ends with Pennant turning his back on hooliganism when he meets a woman with whom he has a child. “For the first time, I had a woman carrying my kid,” he says, “and I had to accept that my path was going to affect others. When you have lived the life you have lived, there is only one way it would have ended. That’s what spurred me to change my life.”

Today, it is not football firms that inspire moral panic, but street gangs. Watching Cass, I felt almost nostalgic for the days when football thugs beat other football thugs; the violence in British cities is now more random, and the perpetrators even younger. For all its flaws, Cass is a reminder that people can choose to change, offering hope that today’s rash of teen gangsters might one day turn their backs on violence.