Evil Surfer

Oh no, what am I going to do now? I’ve watched 52 live games, some of them from behind the sofa. Three weeks of my life have revolved around it, a whole routine with its own rules and rhythms, eating and sleeping football, all will now be emptiness and pointless Hurrah, ordinary life will return, thank God for that. But who wants ordinary life? Bugger ordinary life; ordinary life will be a big vacuum, sans football, sans England, that shit team, what have they done, trampling all over my emotions That’s football, eh Loving and hating it, all at the same time. Now, it’s over, England-wise, I still can’t get my feelings in order.

I think I’m in shock, doctor, combined with fury, topped by confusion. Just a few days ago I was thinking, hey, they’re amusing, those WAGs – the Wives and Girlfriends Don’t knock them, they’re a bit of light entertainment. Why shouldn’t they go around drinking £1,000 bottles of champagne, buying £10,000 bags, dancing on tables, singing songs, good luck to them, they’re just lasses who happen to have millionaires for boyfriends. Now, post England’s exit, I think how tawdry, how cheap, acting like that when all along their lads were rubbish, giving us nothing at all to celebrate.. Shanni Taylor, only 13, once had a young, fresh face. Indelible, long slashes now run from her forehead, interrupted by an uncomprehending eye, then carry on over her cheeks You wonder how the eye was not sliced in two. The scars are livid memories of a frenzied attack on her by another young girl, a fellow pupil who cannot be named for legal reasons My daughter is the same age.

If her life was cut up like this, I would want to both kill and die. The assailant was a Somali child, who arrived here when she was 10, an orphan, with an IQ of 45. It all happened at the Myrtle Springs secondary school, in Sheffield, last autumn. The attacker, let’s call her A, was not given a custodial sentence because of her age, though the judge, Alan Goldsack, clearly would have preferred her behind bars. “You walked up to another girl in your class and, under the nose of your teacher, slashed the girl three times in the face,” he said.