MOB FOOTBALL
EXCERPT FROM TRUE BRITS ©JR DAESCHNER

"Savour the pain, boys! Savour the pain!"
That's easy for him to say. Blandie's lying near the top of the heap, and I'm down at the bottom, squashed by a dozen or more bodies.

Don't squeal like a pig. I can't move, and I'm vaguely aware of groans emanating from the bald heads and buzz cuts around me. My ribs are creaking and my heart, liver and assorted viscera are being squeezed to the point of bursting.

My torso feels like a giblet bag crammed up the rear of a butchered turkey. The coroner will open me up and find nothing but a creamy pâté inside, human foie gras in a skin-and-bones bag.

Still, at least I'm conscious-not like that kid they pulled out of the crush a couple of collapses ago. The Lord of the Hood-distinguished by his flowery top hat-jumped in to stop the ruckus, brandishing his wicker wand of office and bellowing: "MAN DOON! MAN DOON!" The teenager was ripped out of the tangle of bodies and laid flat on the field, unconscious, his eyes fluttering and head and hands twitching. Either he was knocked out or fainted from the lack of oxygen. "I hate it when that happens," an official frowned, without any irony.
But that kind of thing is bound to happen in the Haxey Hood, an organised riot that takes place every year on January 6th, supposedly since the 1200s.

Take as many as 300 men, get them liquored up, stick them on a claggy field in the freezing cold and throw a leather tube into the mob. This being England, the goal of the game is a no-brainer: to get back to the pub for more drinking.

But there are four local favourites in a one-mile radius-three in Haxey and one in the rival village of Westwoodside, on the other side of the field. And if the game finishes too soon, it would spoil the fun. So instead of heading straight for the nearest boozer, the competitors end up pushing in opposite directions, creating a slowly rotating human hurricane capable of trampling anyone or anything in its path-demolishing walls, tearing down hedges and bursting through people's front doors.

This asphyxiating crush of humanity, this juggernaut of flesh and bone, has an absurdly genteel name: the Sway. It may look like the world's biggest scrum-in fact, it is an ancestor of rugby and football-but there are crucial differences. "It's not a scroom because you're standin' up," Blandie had explained in the pub. "If you were bent over, you'd snap your neck."

In setting my goals for the Sway, I had started out with fairly macho aspirations-I'm gonna get my hands on that Hood, or crack a rib trying.
But then the Chief Boggin, Ian Dawes, told me how a broken collarbone ended his days in the Sway. The mob had just moved off the field and onto the road when the whole thing fell on top of him. He was pinned on his side against the blacktop, and the falling bodies broke his clavicle, right where it connects to the sternum.

"How painful was that?"
"Well, I passed out, and they dragged me out," he shrugged. His collarbone has never healed properly, and the few times that he's ventured back into the Sway, the pressure has been unbearable.

The more horror stories I heard, the more scaled-back my ambitions became ...