9. The Aces

It came to Lilliput while she was in the chiropodist’s clinic. Arsenal at tea the previous evening had expressed his disappointment caused by the paucity of candidate team nicknames going before the Board of Directors. From the shortlist only one humdinger would be lucky enough to receive official sanction. The team’s app and website were to be promoted based upon the final selection. Fans had come up with most of the potential epithets, but a question of relevance was at play for the majority of submissions. Merchandizing contracts were in the offing and lots of dinero was at stake. Would Anstruther’s populace really take to a club called the Wombats? The Cantilevers, maybe, given the proximity of the iconic engineering triumph, the Forth Railway Bridge. Speaking of the Forth, howze about Venture Forth, too commercial perhaps? Fireflies, the local entomologist suggested, were out of season in Britain twelve months of the year. There were too many Saints in Scotland already, witness the Love Street shower, those from Perth and the unrepentant Bhoys’ Supporters’ Club. Well then The Sinners? Non-solicited input from the Commissioner of Police for Fife and Tayside underlined she did not have the resources to provide beefed up security details on match days when Saints would confront Sinners. That was potentially several times a year and did the club want to have the inevitable debacles on its conscience? She also weighed in on the potential to tag the team as The Force, thinking that term was sacrosanct and should apply only to her constables on patrol, COPS, the one true and trusted force in the region. Compliance with the Commissioner’s wishes of course would mean that play on words such as “May The Fourth Be With You” or better still “May The Forth Be With You” would have to go a begging. It was too bad since the Isle of May lay only a few miles offshore from Anstruther in the Forth estuary although only an occasional wind blown cormorant from there would show up for matches. Lilliput ruminated on all this as she had her cuticles attended to.

 

Her train of thought passed through many stations. Finally, she alighted at this one. Why not the Aces? Leuchars RAF Aerodrome was just up the road and Lilliput was a sucker for high flying men in uniform. Why Arsenal himself reverting to his native language had often referred to the players as ‘les as” meaning he thought of them in positive terms. “Les as,” aces in French, top notch, number one. Lilliput shared her brain wave with Arsenal who resolved to bring the name before the Board. Arsenal’s original French term had been subject to some titters and smothered laughter for quite a time. Generous allowance for his English language limitations was made nonetheless, few people catching on to the fact Arsenal was complimenting his team, not denigrating them by thinking of them as asses. The  Anstruther Aces, AA, at your service, whether you were a drinker searching for sobriety or an automobilist in roadside difficulty on a Saturday afternoon! And so it came about. The Aces!

 

Arsenal dearly wished to field a team whereby he was not gambling with the club’s future by being forced into selections whose quality was dubious. He had always done the best he could with the hand he was dealt. Now at least he would have a few aces up his sleeve with which to test fate. And the long anticipated “Wednesday week’ was now upon them. Rosyth Shipyard Navvies arrived from up river by water. There they were all decked out on the superstructure of the Royal Navy dreadnaught HMS Knotty MacNaughton. Before docking they limbered up using exercises they had revealed to the world at the previous year’s Edinburgh Tattoo. On the Castle’s esplanade their displays had won them more crowd applause than even the ever popular Burmese Burhkas had attained. But to-day it was a question of football, not military exhibitionism. Arsenal had found himself engrossed in “Softly, Softly” reruns at home on the settee the night before and he turned up at the ground slightly woozy after this bout of binge viewing. In front of the assembled team he did a gut check and then started into what unintentionally became a diatribe. He wound it up by saying “Listen, lads, we need to show truculence out there. Don’t be intimidated by what you see transpiring on that ship. Like Britannia they rule the waves, but make no mistake here at our ground we rule terra firma. To quote our inspirational revolutionary Emiliano Zapata <Better to die on one’s feet than to live on your knees.> Now let’s get out there and send them packing.”

 

The Navvies poured down the gangway to the wharf in Anstruther harbour to the accompaniment of the bosun’s whistle. The nuts and bolts of their approach to winning games was to put the screws to the opposition early on and not let up. They had developed a keen sense of when to put the hammer down. Indeed they had downed tools in a work place dispute some three weeks ago. Unlike when they were on strike, however, for this game they were all business. A flotilla of yachts carrying their supporters docked at the marina. The local constabulary was out in force checking for illicit whatevers. A stringer from the Kirkcaldy Fife and Drum newspaper button holed Callum Chisolm, the Navvies central defender, for an impromptu interview on the dock. “Spitting crickets. We’re going to knock their blocks off” was the gist of Callum’s considered opinion. Sometimes the comments of the Navvies’ rear admiral were unfathomable but that made him all the more endearing to the football aficionados. Everything seemed set for a real knock ‘em sock ‘em encounter. Word had gotten out to the sharpshooters on both the Aces and the Navvies that accredited photo journalists from Fleet Street were in attendance and ensconced behind the two goals. Apparently they were competing in the British Sportwriters’ Shot of the Year competition and they had high hopes for candidate images to be generated that very afternoon. Shots to be heard around the world if you want the long and short of it. Talk about pressure! Roman Macaroni felt this could be his coming out party and Jinky was all jiggy with it. From the Aces’ perspective the narrative from the game entailed a deflected header from a corner kick and a second soft goal with twenty minutes remaining, together constituting the nails in the coffin Rosyth had predicted. The Aces made an undignified exit from the Ochil Hills Challenge Cup falling in this the semi-final at the penultimate hurdle. Woe is me. Punters at the betting shop next to the Royal Hotel made a killing wagering against the home team and their exuberance was in stark contrast to the deadpan silence that overcame the loyal spectators as they filed out at the final whistle. Arsenal knew now that the regular season would have no extended cup run and that the balance sheet had just taken a direct hit midships thanks to the navy navvies top guns. Edinburgh’s Pink News which hit the newsstands only 90 minutes after the game terminated dedicated a mere paragraph to the game which was indicative of a general malaise in terms of interest in club fortunes.