Mac the Cat
Nov. 19th, 2025 10:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
baroque_mongooseBefore I became disabled, I was in the St John Ambulance; and since I lived in Sheffield at the time, that meant I was usually covering a home match at the weekend, either at Bramall Lane or Hillsborough, and quite often also midweek. I enjoyed that a good deal. It was nice to be able to help people (we were primarily there for the crowd, not the players, though we might occasionally get drafted in to help stretcher someone off); there was a lot of camaraderie; and there was football, of course, though the standard of that did rather vary. I used to joke that the football was very much like the sandwiches. At Bramall Lane you'd get big no-nonsense Yorkshire cobs, with a choice of maybe four plain fillings; they were definitely not posh, but they were good, hearty, fresh sandwiches. At Hillsborough, on the other hand, you'd be handed a silver platter (or at any rate a decent imitation) with a whole selection of effete little sandwiches cut into triangles and with, for some reason, the crusts cut off. They'd be presented on a bed of cress, or something of the kind, and they always tasted as if they'd been made at least two days before the match.
Very similarly, you tended to get plain but pretty solid football from United, whereas Wednesday always gave the impression that they were trying a bit too hard for their actual ability. And then they bought Paolo Di Canio.
That bloke was undeniably good. So was his little friend Benito Carbone, who arrived at around the same time; but Di Canio had real star quality. He'd run the length of the pitch with the ball apparently glued to his foot, then execute a beautiful pass to a team-mate... who, as often as not, would fluff it. And, after a while, you could see Di Canio getting frustrated. After all, since he was Italian, his body language tended to be in unusually large print. Not only was he a first-rate player in a mostly rather third-rate team, but also if the team did badly he'd pick up more than his share of the blame, because the fans tended to think he should have done better, given how good he was. Well, no; he was doing his level best. But if you're used to passing to team-mates who are around your own level of ability, and then all of a sudden you're dealing with team-mates who just aren't that great at reading the game, then you're up a bit of a gum tree.
I felt sorry for him. So I decided to give him a comic fictional sidekick; and this sidekick was Mac the Cat. Mac, as he put it himself in the first story, "was born in a wheelie bin jist off o' Sauchiehall Street", latched on to Di Canio while he was at Celtic, and decided to follow him to Wednesday because he was enjoying the high life. He was a lovable but entirely disreputable alley cat, who got into all kinds of entertaining scrapes which he narrated in the first person. These stories were all very short, no more than about 1000 words a pop, and they were published in one of the Wednesday fanzines. I have no idea if Di Canio ever saw them, but if he did I hope they made him smile. He needed it.
The whole business ended rather sadly. After a while, I found myself sitting on the touchline at Hillsborough thinking "that man has depression"; since I'd had it so often myself, I knew very well what it looked like. I shared my opinion with the fanzine editor, who had not had depression and therefore didn't take it seriously (also, I think, he wasn't that great at reading people). Di Canio struggled for a few more matches and finally bowed out, unable to handle it, at which point all the fans got very annoyed with him. I kept telling anyone who would listen that he had depression, but nobody listened until, perhaps six weeks after I'd originally noticed, the news emerged from the club that he'd been diagnosed with depression. He didn't last too long there after that. And that, I'm afraid, is what you get when you stick a brilliant player into a so-so team.
I can't remember exactly where he went after that - somewhere in Italy, I believe. But I like to think Mac the Cat stowed away in his luggage.
Very similarly, you tended to get plain but pretty solid football from United, whereas Wednesday always gave the impression that they were trying a bit too hard for their actual ability. And then they bought Paolo Di Canio.
That bloke was undeniably good. So was his little friend Benito Carbone, who arrived at around the same time; but Di Canio had real star quality. He'd run the length of the pitch with the ball apparently glued to his foot, then execute a beautiful pass to a team-mate... who, as often as not, would fluff it. And, after a while, you could see Di Canio getting frustrated. After all, since he was Italian, his body language tended to be in unusually large print. Not only was he a first-rate player in a mostly rather third-rate team, but also if the team did badly he'd pick up more than his share of the blame, because the fans tended to think he should have done better, given how good he was. Well, no; he was doing his level best. But if you're used to passing to team-mates who are around your own level of ability, and then all of a sudden you're dealing with team-mates who just aren't that great at reading the game, then you're up a bit of a gum tree.
I felt sorry for him. So I decided to give him a comic fictional sidekick; and this sidekick was Mac the Cat. Mac, as he put it himself in the first story, "was born in a wheelie bin jist off o' Sauchiehall Street", latched on to Di Canio while he was at Celtic, and decided to follow him to Wednesday because he was enjoying the high life. He was a lovable but entirely disreputable alley cat, who got into all kinds of entertaining scrapes which he narrated in the first person. These stories were all very short, no more than about 1000 words a pop, and they were published in one of the Wednesday fanzines. I have no idea if Di Canio ever saw them, but if he did I hope they made him smile. He needed it.
The whole business ended rather sadly. After a while, I found myself sitting on the touchline at Hillsborough thinking "that man has depression"; since I'd had it so often myself, I knew very well what it looked like. I shared my opinion with the fanzine editor, who had not had depression and therefore didn't take it seriously (also, I think, he wasn't that great at reading people). Di Canio struggled for a few more matches and finally bowed out, unable to handle it, at which point all the fans got very annoyed with him. I kept telling anyone who would listen that he had depression, but nobody listened until, perhaps six weeks after I'd originally noticed, the news emerged from the club that he'd been diagnosed with depression. He didn't last too long there after that. And that, I'm afraid, is what you get when you stick a brilliant player into a so-so team.
I can't remember exactly where he went after that - somewhere in Italy, I believe. But I like to think Mac the Cat stowed away in his luggage.
