12 Nat Gomorrah: a life in football

As he reaches the landmark of fifty years with the club, let's celebrate the career of Nat Gomorrah, the best centre forward who ever pulled on a Milltown Rovers shirt. To the players of today, unaware of the club’s history, Nat’s just an old guy with a gammy knee and a nose like an over-ripe strawberry. Just the guy who washes their kit and re-marks the pitch with quicklime. But to those who have followed the peregrinations of Milltown Rovers, around the Vauxhall Cars Beezer Homes Sherpa Van Division (North), Nat Gomorrah is a living legend.

As one of nine kids, Nat had a difficult childhood. They were tough, those wartime years, especially in the Gomorrah household. Since there were never enough clothes to go round, the kids had to take turns playing out. The Gomorrahs got by the best they could. Nat’s mum traded sexual favours with homesick GIs for life’s little luxuries, like bubble-gum and nylon stockings: reckoned, at the time, to have been a fair swap. If money was tight, then so was his dad. He’d be down the pub, pissing away any spare cash he could find, and, in the process, providing an unfortunate role model for the impressionable Nat.

As a lad, Nat would spend hours dribbling a ball around the furniture of the cramped little house in Milltown. He learned how to nutmeg the wash-stand, and leave the sofa standing, before side-footing the ball between the legs of the kitchen table. “The boy’s a fool”, his dad would say, as Nat practised his post-goal celebrations, “I’m off out”.

Nat was playing a kickabout game in the park when he was talent-spotted by Brian Shoulder - then manager of Milltown Rovers - who selflessly devoted his Sunday mornings to watching young lads at play. Impressed by the lad’s precocious skills with the ball, Brian encouraged Nat to come to the ground for a trial.

Blessed with an educated left foot, Nat proved to be a natural goal-scorer. His right foot couldn't even manage a CSE in woodwork, but that's football for you. In next to no time he had risen through the youth team and the reserves; when he made his debut in the first team, in 1950, he was just a gangly youth of fifteen, wearing borrowed boots.

The fans took to Nat right away. They loved his flamboyance, his arrogance, his casual disregard for the rules of the game. Within weeks Nat had forged the striking partnership with Billy Budgen that would bring such a glut of goals throughout the fifties and sixties. With Nat’s goal-scoring abilities, and Brian’s steady hand on the tiller, the trophy cabinet soon filled up with silverware. Yes, they were good times for Milltown Rovers. At 3 o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, the compact ground on Armpit Road was the only place to be.

Those were the days when the maximum wage held sway, and Nat’s wages were never more than £20 a week. But with everyone in Milltown wanting to associate themselves with Nat’s achievements on the pitch, many a fat, manilla envelope was slipped into Nat’s jacket pocket as he propped up the bar of his local. In a rash moment of euphoria, following another Nat Gomorrah hat-trick, the butcher promised Nat that, as long as he lived, there would be a joint of beef on his dining table every Sunday. A local car dealer gave Nat an Austin Prefect, with his name emblazoned on the side. Instead of painting the car to reflect the team colours, it seemed easier to change the team colours to match the car. That was why Milltown Rovers adopted the two-tone strip in the now-familiar livery of tarnished chrome and rust.

Success came easily to Nat. Perhaps too easily. Never short of self-confidence, the boy from the back-streets started to believe the adulatory headlines in the Milltown Times. He thought there was one rule for him, and another for the rest of the team. While they were working up a sweat at the training ground, he’d be drinking in the local pubs. With only his dad to emulate, he succumbed to instant gratification. A life that was once so promising became one long lock-in of lager-topped licentiousness.

Whenever he wasn’t shouting “Drinks all round” for his freeloading friends, he’d be frittering his time and his money away at the betting shop. Nat loved a flutter; he’d bet on anything, happy to contribute each week to the bookmakers' benevolent fund. One day he bet a fiver that the 4.30 at Catterick would be run at 5 o'clock. He lost, of course, but the odds were just too good to pass up.

When it came to women, Nat liked to play the field - indulging in the sort of casual bed-hopping that even Goldilocks would blanch at. His status as a local hero ensured that he was never short of conquests. Many a local lass had her head turned by the impressive bulge in Nat’s trousers. Yes, a wad of notes can be a powerful aphrodisiac: "Fiscal foreplay", as Nat used to say. This kind of craziness couldn’t last for ever, of course. He would turn up at the ground ten minutes before a game, in someone else's clothes, fobbing Brian off with ever more imaginative excuses. One night he even went to bed sober, just to see what it was like.

When Nat started to make headlines on the front page of the Milltown Times, as well as the back, the warning signs were clear. As long as he was still putting those goals away, the fans were happy. But Brian could see that the drink, the drugs, the gambling and the girls were wreaking predictable havoc on Nat’s health. While the fans saw the swagger, Brian saw the sickness. Nat was a man on his knees. Should Brian extend the hand of friendship and help him back onto his feet, or follow his bank manager's sterling example and just kick Nat in the bollocks? Brian decided to give him one last chance. As he pointed out to a surly and unrepentant Nat: “You can only wear one suit at a time, eat one meal at a time, sleep with one woman at a time. OK, maybe not, but you get my drift. Pull yourself together, lad, or else..."

Taking advice, however well-meaning, was never Nat’s forté. When he turned up for the next game, he was so hungover that he could hardly run. He thought he was bigger than the club and, after a three-day bender, he nearly was. The fans booed the portly figure with one of the baffling chants that Milltown supporters seemed to favour: “E's fat, e's round, 'e writes like Ezra Pound”. Brian pulled him off at half-time: a pleasant change for Nat, who usually just got a slice of orange. When Nat took just one bottle into the shower, it was, unfortunately, a bottle of single malt whisky. Brian, exasperated beyond measure, sent him home and told him not to come back .

Flabby and unfit, with the fans’ taunts still ringing in his ears, Nat staggered to the pub. He wanted to drown his sorrows, but they seemed to have learned to swim. If an alcoholic can be defined as a man who drinks more than his doctor, then Nat’s prognosis was grim indeed. As he sat morosely at the bar, sinking pints and whisky chasers, he poured out his troubles to a new barmaid called Sally. A good-looking girl, she'd done some modelling. Mostly, it must be said, for a company that made fridge magnets. Nevertheless, by the time Nat had unburdened himself, and the lights at the back of the bar were looking pleasantly blurred, he had fallen madly, desperately in love with her.

Nat was used to getting what he wanted, when he wanted it. So, after a whirlwind romance, he proposed. Impressed by his collection of Chris de Burgh records, and ignoring the warnings of well-meaning friends, Sally accepted. It was the wedding of the year. Of course, Milltown was so full of unusual families and unconventional lifestyles during the sixties that the mere sight of a church wedding was enough to draw crowds.

There were many aspects of the wedding that should have made Sally think twice. Nat wanted to invite all his ex-girlfriends to the reception, but the building's fire license only covered a maximum of two hundred people. Then there was the matter of the drip-dry wedding dress, and the cards from his more cynical friends that read: ‘Congratulations on your first marriage’. Unforgivably, Nat made Sally promise to “love, honour, obey... and sleep on the damp patch”. But love is blind. And probably deaf too. Which explains why Sally came to plight her troth to a man who thought monogamy was what you made furniture from. A man who insisted, despite all Sally’s entreaties, on having a visitors' book in the bedroom.

With Sally’s help, Nat knuckled down to a strict regime of salads, early nights and sobriety. To the fans’ delight, he won his place back in the team and renewed his old partnership up front with Billy Budgen. For Milltown Rovers the good times were back again.

At first, Sally was able to handle Nat's mercurial mood-swings. But by the time they’d been together a year - and celebrating their Tupperware anniversary - cracks began to appear in their marriage. Having lost her virginity at a Milltown Rovers home game, Sally felt sexually inhibited unless the bedroom was full of cheering fans. And after years of gambling, drinking and having a series of meaningless affairs, Nat found marriage a bit dull. He remembered back to the good old days, when his sexual athleticism won plaudits. On one memorable occasion he even had a standing ovation. But it’s always a mistake to relive past glories, especially in the marital bed. Sally came home one evening to find Nat in flagrante delicto with a nubile young girl wearing nothing more than a light coating of olive oil and a whipped-cream bikini.

Nat tried to make amends. "I'm sorry”, he bleated, “I'm only flesh and blood", which Sally correctly translated as "I'm an unprincipled bastard, a serial adulterer and an incorrigible liar... and the only thing I'm really sorry about is being found out”. Sally could take no more. She threw Nat out, changed the locks and got on with her life. Unlike Nat, who went into alcoholic freefall and gambled away what little money he still had. Somebody should have warned him never to play poker with soft-handed strangers. His last words, before the heart attack that finally ended his football career, were "Jacks or better... Ante up... Cut those cards... Let's play"...

The fans took it well. In a moving show of sentiment, Nat won their votes as the club’s Player of the Year in 1969. And in a moving show of realism, they decided not to award him the traditional trophy, but gave him an orthopaedic bed instead. As a reward for all his goals, Brian decided to keep Nat on the payroll. Nat’s been at the club ever since, though, ironically, there have been no fewer than twelve other optimists following Brian through those revolving doors of football management. Despite all the changes at the club, Milltown Rovers have never escaped from the Vauxhall Cars Beezer Homes Sherpa Van Division (North). And now, in the year 2000, the team struggles on.

It’s Saturday afternoon in Milltown and, as the church clock strikes three, Nat hobbles onto the muddy pitch, and waves to all corners of the ground. His eyes are rheumy, like a pair of oysters floating in milk, as the memories come flooding back. It’s fifty years to the day since his first game for the Rovers. To look at Nat now, it's hard to imagine him leaping like a salmon at the far post, and heading one of Billy Budgen’s pinpoint crosses into the net. Most of the crowd don’t know who he is, but no matter. The players smirk at this shambling figure but, in truth, they’re not fit to lace Nat’s drinks. He’s Milltown’s finest: a man who’s been there, done that and got the scar tissue. Nat Gomorrah, goal-poacher and a footballing maverick, we salute you.

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