A Question of Sport

A Question of Sport 

    I'd just finished my tea at half-past six when I remembered that I'd invited my niece Julie to tea the very next day, and I hadn't got anything in for her.  Julie likes Indian food - curries, samosas, poppadoms and all that kind of thing.  I'm not all that keen on curries, I'm more your steak pudding and mushy peas type of bloke, but when I do have one I normally have a rogan josh.
    What I usually do when Julie is coming to tea is get one of those Indian takeaway meals for two from Asda.  Although they're seven quid a throw, it's a lot cheaper than ordering a home delivery from The Kashmir Kitchen.
    Anyway, what with me having to go and sort out my Council Tax rebate in the morning, and then take the cat for his injection in the afternoon, I knew I wouldn't have the time to go to Asda the following day, so with them being open until eight-thirty that evening I decided to pop down there before I got settled in front of the tele.

    I was walking down Lloyd Street, heading towards the bus stop on Grace Road, when I saw Mr Chanderpaul from next door but one standing at the traffic lights.  He was looking down Grace Road in the direction of The Pavillion.
    'There's a right ding-dong going on over there,' Mr Chanderpaul said as I approached him.  And he pointed in the direction of two young men who were confronting each other some fifty yards away on the opposite side the road.  Although you could hear them shouting at each other, they were too far away for me to hear what they were actually shouting about.
    'What's it all about?'  I asked.
    'The little man has got a mobile phone, and the bigger man is trying to take it away from him.'
    'He's mugging him?'
    'No, no,' Mr Chanderpaul said, shaking his head. 'The bigger man just wants to stop the little man using the mobile phone.'
    'Mobile phones, eh?  They've been nothing but trouble ever since they first brought them out,' I said, preparing to continue my walk to the bus stop. 'I wouldn't have one if they were giving them away and delivering them to your doorstep.'
    Mr Chanderpaul nodded as I moved on.
    I stood at the bus stop opposite the entrance to Barrington Close and looked over the road at the two young men, who were now some thirty yards away from me.  They were still arguing fiercely, and it was only then that I noticed they were of Asian, or Arabian, origin.  The little bloke reminded me of Marne Maitland when he played the role of Mr Mohammed in “I'm Alright Jack”.  He was wearing a white sweater, cream-coloured trousers and a pair of brown shoes - they could have been brogues, but I was too far away to be able to tell for certain.  The big bloke, who had his back to me, was wearing a yellow football shirt, black shorts and a pair of black trainers - I also noted that he wasn't wearing any socks.  I had only a rear and partial side view of him, but with his height, build and body posture he bore a striking resemblance to Imran Khan.
    While I was trying to figure out which football team's replica shirt Imran was wearing - although it had a number nine on the back, there was no name emblazoned across the shoulders, and it was too yellow to be a Wolverhampton Wanderers shirt and not pale enough for Norwich City (and in any case, there were no green bits on it), the Everton away strip was the one that immediately sprung to mind, but I wouldn't have put money on it - the two men began pushing and shoving each other.
    The physical stuff started when Mr Mohammed, holding Imran at arm's length, began shouting into his mobile phone. Then Imran brushed Mr Mohammed's arm aside and made a grab for the phone.  Shielding the phone behind his back, Mr Mohammed used his free hand to push at Imran's chest.  And in retaliation, Imran gave Mr Mohammed's chest a hefty two-handed shove.
    Oh dear, I thought, fearing the worst.  There's always a lot of traffic on Grace Road at that time of evening, and on that particular stretch most of it is travelling at a fair lick. It would only take an over-exuberant shove on the part of Imran or Mr Mohammed and a subsequent loss of footing by the one on the other end of it to send him hurtling into the road and under the wheels of one of the oncoming vehicles.
    To his credit, the driver of the leading car in the new convoy coming from the Lloyd Street traffic lights slowed down when he saw what was going on, causing those behind him to do the same - looking back on it, perhaps it was the driver's inquisitiveness rather than his concern for road safety that led him to take such action, but at the time I felt obliged to pay him due respect.
    While all this was going on, a young girl came running out of Barrington Close.  She had long blonde hair and was wearing a purple woollen jumper, denim jeans and a pair of white trainers - it occurred to me that if she had been wearing a pair of Wellington boots instead of the trainers, she would have been the spitting image of Hayley Mills in “Whistle Down The Wind”.  When she reached the pavement outside Barrington Close, she stopped and looked concernedly in the direction of the two men. 
    Hayley Mills's appearance was quickly followed by that of a short, chubby woman with curly blonde hair, scuttling along as fast as her chunky little legs could carry her.  She was wearing a tight-fitting shiny black blouse, a knee-length white skirt and a pair of black leather medium-heeled shoes - she looked remarkably similar to Shelley Winters when she played that man-mad floozies in “Alfie”.
    Shelley Winters soon caught up with Hayley Mills, and they hastened along the pavement together towards where the kafuffle was taking place.
    It could possibly be a foreign club, or perhaps it's an international team shirt, I thought, as Imran Khan knocked Mr Mohammed's mobile phone out of his hand, sending it spinning into the gutter.  Mr Mohammed was so incensed that he immediately delivered a fierce right hook to Imran's left ear.  (He really gave it some clout, I almost felt it myself)  Such must have been the pain it caused, Imran's left hand flew straight up to his ear, yet he still retained the fortitude to use his other hand to land a fearsome blow on Mr Mohammed's jaw - a punch not dissimilar to the right-hander that Brian Pringle threw when he floored Norman Wisdom in “The Early Bird”.  The sheer force of the blow was more than enough to spark out Mr Mohammed - he went down like a bag of tripe. 
    By that time Shelley Winters and Hayley Mills had arrived on the scene.  On hearing the clatter of Shelley's heels as she approached him, Imran turned to face her.  She ran up to him and, seemingly, began pleading with him not to inflict further damage upon the now horizontal Mr Mohammed.  Hayley Mills stood a couple of yards behind them, quite rightly realising that although her presence may indeed have some bearing on the outcome, there was little else that she could do to help bring an end to the whole unsavoury episode.
    At that point it crossed my mind that Imran's shirt might have been that of a team involved in some sport other than football - but that particular possibility just didn't bear thinking about.
    Surprisingly, it didn't take much persuasion on Shelley's part to get Imran to forget about the prostrate Mr Mohammed and accompany Hayley and herself back to Barrington Close.  In fact it was Imran who led the way on their return - he still held his hand to his ear, but otherwise appeared satisfied that the dispute had been brought to an honourable conclusion.  Shelley Winters followed, trotting at his shoulder, giving him an earful of how 'out of order' his actions had been, and in return he was giving her an equal measure of 'leave it out', while young Hayley walked a couple of paces behind them, looking somewhat relieved now that the fisticuffs were over.
    I was weighing up the implications of the fact that Imran's shirt didn't have a corporate logo on the front - it merely had a thin black vertical stripe down the left-hand side of the chest - when I realised that he wasn't the former world-class all-rounder cum Pakistan skipper after all.  He was dark and swarthy all right, but the closer he got the more apparent it became that he was a white bloke with an all-over suntan - making him more your Keith Miller than your Imran Khan.  In fact the closer he came the more he began to resemble Ralph Bates when he played the leading role in the Hammer classic, “Doctor Jekyll and Sister Hyde”.
    As the trio disappeared into Barrington Close, I turned my attention back to Mr Mohammed, just in time to see a black car come to a halt a couple of yards past where he lay in a dishevelled heap on the pavement.           
    Two Asian men got out of the car.  One was wearing a navy blue blazer, charcoal grey flannel trousers and black leather shoes; and apart from him wearing white trainers, the other one was dressed exactly the same as Mr Mohammed.  It wasn't just their facial characteristics, it probably had as much to do with the manner in which they approached their comatose colleague - as though they were going through the motions of running down the wicket, whilst keeping one eye on the ball as it sped towards the boundary rope - but there was no doubt about it, they were dead ringers for Sunil Gavaskar and Javed Miandad. 
    Sunil and Javed carefully lifted Mr Mohammed from the pavement.  Happily, he appeared to be coming round.  He still looked a bit groggy, but he had regained partial use of his legs as they assisted him towards the black car. 
    Just then my bus arrived, so I wasn't able to see whether or not they retrieved Mr Mohammed's mobile phone from where it lay in the gutter - but it definitely wasn't there when I got off the bus on my return journey some three-quarters of an hour later.

    I've still not worked out which team's shirt the Ralph Bates character was wearing.  I'll just have to hope that Willsie can come up with the answer.  Willsie is the captain of The Pavillion's Pub Quiz team, and Association Football is his specialist subject.  Willsie will know whether or not it was a replica shirt - and if it turns out that he says it wasn't and that it's more likely to be some local pub team's shirt, then Kenny Harrison, whose specialist subject is Local History, will possibly be able to name the pub that the chap plays for.  So, I won’t give up on it just yet,  I'm thinking,  I'll eventually get to the bottom of it.