The Day John Henry Electrified My Nipples

FREE READ: *The confessions of an #FSGOuter*

Winter, 2010. I waited in the fine, arrowing rain for the black limo, windows tinted with gangster élan, to pull over to the kerb; a door quickly flew open, and in I jumped.

That’s when the nightmare began.

Blindfolded like Al Pacino in the opening scenes of the seminal ‘The Insider’, I was first driven through a network of streets, hearing the engine’s variations of hums and thrusts, and whose differing echoes told of main roads and back streets, speeds slow and fast.

Eventually, gravel scrunched under the tyres, the engine cut. I soon found myself led, still blindfolded, up some stairs and to a room, with the sense of meeting The Big Boss.

Some secret location, I was told; I’d never recognise it. Albeit the sound of footballs being kicked, and the shouting of players, drifting up through the open windows, told me it was probably Melwood. I’d spent the day there a year earlier, chatting football with Rafa Benítez. I knew the layout, the sounds, the smells. I could hear Roy Hodgson’s distinctive south London drawl.

“Four facking four facking two. Eight of you stay back, boot it up to the two at the other end. It’s not facking rocket science, for fack’s sake. They understood this at Örebro in 1983. Anyway, promoted team at Anfield on Saturday, so nothing silly early doors – keep it tight for the first 91, 92 minutes. If it’s still 0-0, we can push forward, and then one of the midfield can cross the halfway line.”

The blindfold was removed, and there was who I took to be John W Henry, alongside Mike Gordon and several other Bostonians.

“Hit Les!” Came the cry from the training pitches. “Hit Les over the top.”

“But we don’t have anyone called Les,” a Scouse voice said.

Henry turned to me, shaking his head. “We need a patsy.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Basically, we’re short-sellers. We have a ton of big bets – worth billions – that Liverpool will fail. Only, this brand new #FSGOut crowd, on to us from day one, have worked it out, as they’re very cunning and on the internet all the time, these guys – day and night, no time to waste on trivial stuff like showering or changing into clean clothes, so they’re really smart people. They wear diapers, so they don’t even need bathroom breaks – they’re that smart. They’ve twigged that we take out these bets for Liverpool to fail.”

I couldn’t fathom what I was hearing. “That makes no sense.”

“Look at it like this. We just got Liverpool for £300m. It’ll never be worth much more than that – everyone knows that – so we can just let the club go to ruin, and hedge our bets by watching it sink. Make more money that way.”

I sat and listened, incredulous.

“We have no interest in soccer. We can’t work out when the touchdowns happen, and how the home-runs are counted. It’s like, literally, almost a totally different sport. And the umpires, they make up the rules as they go along. We need someone who knows about the game, but not a proper expert.”

“A ‘blogger’,” Gordon said, using his fingers for the air quotes.

“You must be mad if you think I’d agree to such a thing,” I said, in my whiney not-quite-Cockney drawl.

The next thing I knew I was strapped to a chair, a crazed stare all I could muster, courtesy of Clockwork Orange eye-clamps. I couldn’t look away. I feared Un Chien Andalou, but I’d had radial keratotomy in 1991, where I had to stare into a light for four minutes while the surgeon cut eight lines into my cornea – so my retina had seen about the worst thing imaginable: a razor-sharp blade, closing in, making incisions.

But this was worse. I was forced to watch Hodgson’s Liverpool on a loop: 0-0 Utrecht, 0-2 Everton, 0-2 Stoke, 1-2 Blackpool, all on VHS tape.

I held strong. They seemed to be expecting resistance. Taking it up a notch, they burned the tape in the open fire, the smell of hot plastic heavy and toxic in the greying air, and without allowing them time to cool, injected the hot ashes into my eyeballs.

Still I refused.

“No!” I screamed in my whiney not-quite-Cockney drawl, my sinews taut as I gripped the chair. “I won’t do it! I won’t accept this! I won’t be your facking stooge!”

In that room, before the chance for the ‘post’ part of PTSD to kick in, I would not be broken.

Cut me open, and I bleed red; they even told me as much at the hospital once, when they cut me open, and I bled red. That was absolute proof of my diehard Liverpool fandom. You can’t argue with facts like that.

John Henry nodded. “We feared as much.” It was time for Stage Two. He looked to one side and nodded.

A goon took the signal, and attached the nipple clamps to where nipple clamps usually go, and flicked the giant switch to the electricity. Henry, standing to one side, put his fingers in his ears, slowly and deliberately, with a smirk, so as to only partially hear my screams; he has very sensitive hearing, after all.

And that’s when I finally snapped, my spirit broken; I slumped like Joe Cole five minutes into a game, as if ready to throw up. I’d gone full Charlie Adam.

From then on, it all moved so fast. I was successfully brainwashed into doing FSG’s bidding.

(For months after I awoke at night screaming “Christian Poulsen!”)

“I’ll be your patsy,” I said, my voice cracking. “I’ll be your FSG fanboy.”

“Perfect. The #FSGOut crowd can never – NEVER! – be allowed to realise that they’re right.”

Fourteen Years Later

This summer, almost 14 years on, I managed to infiltrate an informal meeting in a Boston bar: John W Henry and Mike Gordon smoking fat cigars in the rear pool room. In the dimly lit space they lounged in leather armchairs (ripped from the backs of some unfortunate beasts), shooting the breeze.

Someone in the main saloon was at the piano, singing “Kelly Kelly Kelly Kelly K-E-L-L-Y” and I thought back to the Liverpool right-back on those video tapes – Martin – who they were surely serenading. Utrecht, the horrors of Utrecht.

By this time I’d undergone plastic surgery, to try and look vaguely normal, and had one of those hair-replacement therapies that make it look like roadkill has been reluctantly lasered onto your head; but still better than being a bald, bespectacled loser. No way would the evil FSG duo recognise me.

Not that they would know it, but in my mind I was undercover, living as “Dave”, a key player and new hero of mine in the #FSGOut brigade. I purposefully didn’t wash my clothes for a week and kept the used diaper on, to give off that distinctive #FSGOut aroma.

FSG’s brainwashing – to defend everything they did – had gradually worn off, and I now saw through the facade, to the gross negligence of the owners.

They’d got me to look the other way, and believe what I saw when averting my eyes from the truth. I felt my diaper swell with pride, and another 100ml.

“We’re not a cult,” Dave had recently told me at a gathering of five guys in Dave’s mum’s basement. “We think for ourselves. We can leave any time that FSG-Anon says we can leave.”

“All hail FSG-Anon!” said the others, as they stood and saluted, in awe.

“We think for ourselves!” said another, and the rest chimed back, “We think for ourselves!”

One guy was wearing a balaclava. “Do we need these to hide our identity?” I asked?

“No, he’s just really ugly.”

Within seconds, from the midriff of the man with the hidden face, the sound of a very damp diaper pushed beyond its structural integrity; the most alarming and unsettling no.2 since Paul Konchesky. Indeed, the most harrowing follow-through since Jordan Pickford on Virgil van Dijk.

I thought about shouting ‘evacuate!’, but feared it would lead to more of the same. I kept quiet, toed the line.

I was now one of the team.

#FSGOut, and even more than that, #FSGOutNow – there’s no time to waste.

Cheers!

I sat at the table adjacent to Henry and Gordon, my iPhone recording their conversation. There was another man present, who occasionally asked questions, although I’ve no idea who he was. At times they seemed to be explaining things to him, but he didn’t seem surprised or alarmed, even if he occasionally pushed back.

At one point my name came up.

“That Paul Tomkins guy – really creepy,” John Henry said. “He names things after himself. Who does that? Probably the kind of guy to speak about himself in the third person too. John W Henry doesn’t speak about himself in the third person. John W Henry didn’t get to where he is today by speaking about himself in the third person.”

“No, John,” Mike Gordon said with a nod. “Mike Gordon doesn’t speak about himself in the third person either.”

“Writes novels too, this Tomkins guy. No idea what they’re about. No one does.”

“No one has read them, John. Word is, they’re unreadable.”

“Worse than that, Mike.”

“Worse than unreadable?”

“Worse than unreadable. Probably far too long, too. He likes to waffle on, that Tomkins. You’d have to be a writer, with a face like that, wouldn’t you?”

“Sticks up for us though, John,” Gordon said, in between a drag that saw the cigar flaring with an orange glow.

“Yeah, seemed a good idea back in 2010. But the last thing we need, a guy who looks like Daniel Levy and sounds like a sex pest.”

“I thought it was Daniel Levy, to be honest, until he said something about signing a player before deadline day.”

“Won a few transfer windows though with those late, late deals, that Levy. Gotta love the Tottenham Whitespurs.”

“Getting back on topic, why did you buy the club in the first place?” asked the third man.

“We liked that the club had Roy Hodgson when we arrived, and we wanted to keep him. You can’t buy an absolute ass–“ Henry coughed, “excuse me, an absolute asset like that. Christian Purslow told us that he got Joe Cole – free transfer, absolutely massive wages. Perfect. Money down the drain.”

“We had to find as many ways to lose money as possible. It was all so perfect when we arrived. We just had to add to it.”

“They told us this Newcastle striker, Andy Carroll, couldn’t hit a barn door. Perfect replacement for Fernando Torres, in downgrading, and managed obsolesce. Comolli showed us these fancy radars. Like targets, only with nothing on them.”

“Blank, they were.”

“So we took Carroll to a farm, and sure enough, he couldn’t hit a barn door. Couldn’t even hit the barn. Did hit a grain silo, albeit in the next village. Perfect, we thought. We’ll waste the Torres money on him, and get that Luis Suarez. He bit someone, in Holland. Bound do do that again. Just look at those teeth. Plus, no one ever does well moving from Holland.”

“It’s the clogs. They can’t cope without the clogs.”

“So anyway, things got messy with Roy, and then Kenny, and Brendan almost messed things up bad in 2014 by winning the league, but we quickly put a stop to that. We had to sell that Suarez guy, pretty damn quick. Turns out he was pretty good. It couldn’t be allowed to happen again. Thankfully Rodgers signed Balotelli and Lambert and Benteke, and everything was right again. But it was a close call, 2013/14. Damn near won the league, darn it.”

“But you then went for Klopp?” the third man asked.

“At FSG, we looked at the data. Klopp was clearly a busted flush in Germany, according to the league table. People think we like obscure data, but we’re smarter than that. We’re the smartest people in the room.”

“Definitely in the top three. Depending on the room.”

Henry nodded. “Depending on the room. But most rooms. Small rooms, especially. Phone boxes, almost certainly. You won’t outsmart FSG in a phone box.”

“We worried that Klopp might still be good, but we were pretty confident that he wasn’t. We’d appointed this Ian Graham dude, but that was by accident. He was just there, lurking, with that Michael ‘Eddie’ Edwards guy. Came as a package deal, with the mad Frenchman Comolli.”

“‘Doctor’ Ian Graham! What the darn heck does he know about football and how to win the Premier League?”

“He’s a god-damned particle physicist or something! He said maybe Klopp’s final season at Dortmund wasn’t so bad, but we know the league table never lies. ‘You stick to particling physics’, we told him. ‘Go back to Wales, and the farms, and all the sheep. Stay in your lane’.”

“‘xG’, Graham had said. ‘What’s that?’, I said. ‘Expected gimps?’ Anyway, we found a lot of those – Andrew Beasley, Daniel Rhodes, Dan Kennett, the dweebs at Anfield Index, Josh Williams, even some of the guys on The Anfield Wrap and Redmen TV.”

“Jeez, John, that’s one hell of a lot of gimps.”

“Yea, we didn’t expect that many gimps.”

“Excess gimps, without doubt.”

“Lapped all that xG bullshit up, those guys. Bought it, hook, line and sinker. Everyone knows that the only stat that matters is at the top left of your screen. Everyone knows that Alan Shearer knows best.”

“Didn’t help us that that Neil Atkinson guy also liked Klopp so much. Has even written about him. ‘Transformer’. And that Paul Machin from Redmen.”

“More books to avoid. How did we get it so wrong?”

“A fair bit was down to that Eddie Edwards. Used to be a ski jumper, someone told me. Googled it – yup, it’s him. Almost blind. Perfect, we said. Let him run things. What can he know about soccer?”

“Nothing! He can’t even see. We knew right away that he was gonna screw it all up and help us get worse when he bought that Bobby Fimineeo. Never heard of this guy Fimineeo. No one had, not even Señor Fimineeo.”

“What a waste of money that was gonna be – it was textbook.”

“And it confirmed to us how out of his depth this Eddie was when he asked for air-conditioning in his office, and a laptop. What a jerkoff. Even drank coffee from the machine, the son of a bitch. So I put his stapler in a load of Jell-O. Try buying some Argentine wonderkid with that. I put the fax machine in custard, too.”

“You’d think someone who wants air-conditioning and has a laptop and drinks coffee would know absolutely Jack-shit about soccer.”

“That’s what they told us.”

“Where’s he now?”

“No one knows.”

“Probably off somewhere, drinking an espresso.”

“The jerkoff. We don’t need that kind of competence. Hard to fail when you’re that smart. Thank god we’ve seen the last of him.”

“Yeah, and Klopp has gone now too. No danger of him winning us any more trophies, no more title challenges. No more accidents. Jeez, so many fuck-ups. So many close calls. All those attempts to lose money, and then we ended up with Brewster’s millions, thanks to Sheffield United.”

“Not sure why it went so wrong – Klopp doing so well.”

“It started so promisingly, all the people leaving Anfield early. And we wanted Klopp to embrace the clear mediocrity of his final season in Germany. So we told him to go to the crowd if you draw with, say, West Brom. Salute them. Say that this is our level. West Brom at home, 2-2 on the final buzzer. A set of drawers, or something they call it over there. Linda was going on about clean sheets a lot at that time – we have all those maids to sort that, I told her.”

“Fine woman,” the third man chimed in. “I often say – I wonder what first attracted Linda to the billionaire John W Henry?”

Henry wasn’t listening. “Anyway, we’re doing the same over here with the Red Sox. Running them into the ground too. Betting against them.”

“But didn’t you end a 90-year wait to be champions? The pennant, or whatever it’s called?” the third man asked.

“Yea, but that was an accident.”

“And won it again?”

“Another accident.”

“Two more times?”

“Two more accidents.”

“I see.”

“You can’t win them all. Or you can’t lose them all, rather. We make a lot of mistakes, in our attempts to get things wrong, and things accidentally go right.”

“Take Mo Salah,” Gordon says. “Klopp wanted Julian Brandt, and we thought ‘ideal’. Then the data guys found Salah, and even better! – we could tell was a total bust from his time at Chelsea. He was junk.”

“Then, Klopp found us this goaltender, Hugo Loris, from the Whitespurs. No, he says. Loris is his first name. Great looking guy. Looks like a surfer. Hands like sieves, unfortunately.”

“So we sold Philippe Coutinho, as we knew the team would collapse without him.”

“Gini Wijnaldum – well, we knew he was a bust, as Newcastle had been relegated.”

“Same with Andy Robertson, eh Mike? They were the true signs of our lack of ambition. You’ll never win anything with relegated players. You’ll never win anything with kids, and you’ll never win anything with relegated players.”

“Or with the clinically blind.”

“You’re not wrong there, Mike. Those god-damned blind guys just don’t want it bad enough. They just can’t see it, though.”

“That Tomkins guy says he’s going blind. You know what that’s from?”

“Masturbating?”

“I was gonna say glaucoma. But probably that too.”

“I bet he thinks of us, y’know, when he’s...”

“Doesn’t everybody?”

“True, true. I know I do.”

“Me too.”

“Although we did inject those video ashes into his eyes.”

“That can’t have helped.”

“Well, now he says he’s the master of his domain. A bit late for that. And before he deleted his Twitter, he said he’s a never-nude these days, too.”

“Denim cutoffs?”

“Stonewashed. It’s the only way to live. Anyway. Where were we?”

“Negligence.”

“Yea, we were grossly negligent when we let Coutinho go, we knew it. Grossly negligent when we didn’t sign someone else when the van Dijk move fell through – clearly the smart thing would have been to go right out and buy someone else instead, like Harry Maguire. We were recklessly and grossly negligent a lot of times.”

“A lot of times.”

“And yet, despite us running interference, and still having Dejan Lovren, Klopp was starting to do a good job. Looked like we’d reach the Champions League final, 5-0 up against the Roman Centurions or something. Some dude – a dude! – called Alisson in their net-posts. That’s the moment we thought, he looks perfect for us. No one wants a goaltender called Alisson. Not even in women’s football.”

“Let in five! Had to be real junk. But it needed more than Alisson. So we managed to get Klopp’s Bosnian assistant to go for a job interview overseas, and leaked it to Klopp, who was furious, as you’d expect – and that got rid of him. The guy was the brains behind the operation, everyone said it, we all knew it. Even Klopp said. Jellco Bubach, or whatever his name was?”

“Dildo Bushbash?”

“Something like that. Pinko Doordash. Once he was gone, it would all fall apart. No way would that rookie Pep Lijnders fill the void. He’d already just gone back to Holland and flunked as a manager there, so the masterplan was working when Klopp promoted him. Came back with the air of mediocrity, tail between his legs. No ambition. He’d be useless without his clogs. We knew it.”

“But then we faced the Whitespurs in the next Champions League final. It’s really hard to lose against a team like that.”

“Spiralled from there. Early 2020, looked like we were gonna win the league, too. I panicked, I admit – jumped on a plane to Wuhan. Was just supposed to cause a bit of disruption, y’know? Void the league. Karen Brady was all over it.”

“Would have been great for us if they cancelled it all. Really hit the club’s value. All our the bets against the Reds would pay out.”

“But at least Giving Klopp the say on transfers after 2020 was perfect. Inevitable that everyone started disagreeing eventually.”

“But if we hadn’t, he might have walked away.”

“Maybe we should have done that. Hindsight is 20-20.”

“Even for the blind?”

“Even for the blind, Mike.”

“2020 is 20-20.”

“And it might have been cheaper than having to pay the PGMOL to give us Paul Tierney every week.”

“Tierney is legally blind, too, they say? Not allowed to drive, I heard. Has to use a white stick to get onto the pitch. Refs using only a sense of smell. Struggles even more when he has a cold.”

“Anyway, once Klopp went, we couldn’t risk anyone like him again. We need mediocrity. Go get us that bald Dutchman, I said.”

“And in fairness, they did.”

“Wrong god-damned bald Dutchman!” Henry shouted, thumping the table with uncharacteristic rage. “The guy The Manchester Red Devils were dumping. Erik Ten Points, or whatever his name is. How hard can it be to find the right bald Dutchman? Now we’re stuck with this guy who seems to know what he’s doing. Even without his clogs.”

“It’s a mess, John.”

“It’s worse than a mess, Mike. It’s like a Tomkins’ novel.”

“That bad?”

“Worse than that, Mike. Much worse.”

“Much worse than an unreadable novel?”

“That’s how it looks to me. They say no one can read it. Not even five pages. Not humanly possible. Not even AI wants to touch it. Melts the mainframes.”

“Talking of novels, Ten Hag says he’s not Harry Potter.”

“Harry Potter? He’s not even Harry Hill.”

“Remember when, instead of sacking Rodgers, we got him to change his backroom staff?”

“Ah, INEOS stealing from our self-sabotage playbook. Keep the manager, keep the stench of mediocrity after you’ve undermined him, but have some new guys in funny shorts next to him. Perfect.”

“So can we sack him? The new Dutchman?”

“We can’t even do that, Mike. Not now. Not after he masterminds such a total dismantling of The Manchester Red Devils on the road. They’ll call us grossly negligent.”

“They have before.”

“True.”

“Let’s hope they don’t find out that Mo Salah hasn’t been offered a new contract.”

“No, at least that won’t happen.”

“Cheers!”

“Cheers!”

* Disclaimer: Some of the names, facts, people, locations and events may have been changed, altered or completely invented.