There are just local lads with a racial problem.
Like any set of lads with a taste for the booze, they were also prone to lost months.
Fearing that we would be left behind, we set off earlier than the others and made it back to our Matchroom Stadium just after midnight, but still had to wait for the others as, typically, Errol and Tommo, our academy manager, had decided to stop en route and reward the lads with a McDonald's.
Blur had started life as an art-school quartet influenced by the abstruse cult band the Cardiacs, but by 1994, they were wearing tracksuits and talking about football and dog racing in interviews: "Lads with a capital 'L'," as one tabloid newspaper put it.
"He's got the nucleus of that squad that did really well for him still there at the club and I'm sure that the same group of lads, with a couple of additions will be good enough to go and win the league".
The lads with a reddish tinge to their hair, the bright-eyed young, polite young men with the chiselled or neurotically angled noses.
