There was no crime in supporting West Ham United – still isn't unfortunately, as Luiz himself had once done before wee Georgie shashayed into his life. Yes, Luiz was a hammer, all for Moore, Hurst, Peters, even Greaves at one time. He had the shirt because he liked the colours, which complimented his Celtic complexion. Often, in his formative days of languid evenings spent with claret and blue shirt tail trailing in his wake, you could find Luiz seriously involved in a game of fifty-a-side football on the local rec.
The kid had talent, but alas, like so many of his heroes, he had an attitude to go right along with it, and a bad one at that. Even though he had trained diligently with the school football squad, which was after all rightly renowned and feared across the home counties as a team to be reckoned with, Luiz's continual backchatting of the coaches invariably led to him not being selected. Luiz, as was his wont, took this rejection well and merely continued playing and training, often alone, in all weather conditions – which were, this being England, mainly sodden. Luiz's break came in a match he played one summer holidays for a local team called the Golden Shots during an all-day tournament. Luiz, not adverse to a spell wearing the colours of Wolverhampton Wanderers, scored two startling second half goals, the second a lob of some thirty-yards executed with the audacity of wee Georgie himself, which not only took the Shots into the culminating final, but also caught the eye of the new school coach Mr. Bremner, a wily Scotsman with no time for sideways passes and a stagnant back four. In that final, played in the twilight of a glorious summer's evening as the swallows swooped and the bugs flitted around gaily, Luiz went on a dribble which began just outside his own penalty area and ended on the opposing goalline, eluding seven of the opposing team's players in-between.
It was to be alas his finest football moment, though of course he would not have known this as he over celebrated by the public toilets. Mr. Bremner, pipe in mouth, was thus suitably enamoured with the silky foot skills of the red-headed claymore zipping down the right wing time and again, and invited Luiz to the next squad session.
Perhaps, in hindsight, only a Scotsman could handle a fireball like Luiz, a man in the ilk of Stein, Busby, or Docherty, men renowned for their cunning and guile in coaching the best out of the wayward geniuses in their mileu. So, as the training sessions progressed, Mr. Bremner spent time yanking his enigmatic charge from the practice pitch, his face crimson with anger, his neck veins like swollen leeches feasting on bloated corpses in the Clyde, lambarding Luiz for continually ignoring explicit game plans and technical instructions. Luiz took all of this in the spirit in which it was intended and time and again would return to the practice pitch – skin the last defender and decide not to cross the ball for his strikers but instead go for the ultimate glory himself. In the world of football, be it schoolboy practice on a boggy field or at the Estadio do Maracana, River Plate or Olympic Stadium Berlin, players who continually flout the team rules, get canned. So it was with Luiz, who, erring one too many times to the side of individuality, found himself not only fallen from grace with god, but more importantly, with Mr. Bremner too, a god in his own sphere of activity.
Banished to the reseves, Luiz spent a good half a season under the watchful eye of Mr. Jordan, another Scotsman with a crude mouth and an eye for burgeoning talent. Finally, beaten down by team rules, the ugly 4-4-2 system, and the national team's debacle in world cup failure after world cup failure, Luiz finally sucked-up the message and leaned how to cross a ball from the bi-line. Having spent hours in his own back yard wearing a football boot on his left foot and a slipper on his right to force himself to play left-footed as well as right, his natural inclination, by season's end with yet another flu epidemic sweeping England and the school first team squad all but decimated by illness, Luiz was finally called back up to the firsts to participate in the then ongoing, counties cup.
That of course, was where the scouts from professional clubs hung around looking for promising schoolboys, or indeed a scoolboy with promise . A school team wins its own county knock-out cup and thus goes on the following season to represent its county in a national competition against all of the schools across England who, the preceding year, had won the right to represent their county. No small deal indeed, a deal in point of fact which included many in-school training hours which negated the needs to learn such useless skills as woodwork or science and where the heated school gym became, for several months at least, the sole domain of Mr. Bremner and his collection of county-representing schoolboys. Yes, they were a happy crew. Feted, well-fed, well-trained, worked like thoroughbred racehorses day and afternoon and three evenings a week too to achieve and maintain peak physical fitness and mental awareness. Virtually isolated from the remainder of the sniffing and coughing school body, the football squad took on an aura of gladitorial status. One confirmed and enforced by their crushing, over two-legs, of the team from Hampshire, who were despatched in ruthless fashion on their own ground. Yes, travelling to away fixtures on a heated coach was also a bonus the glorious young heroes of Luiz's school football team were enjoying, while the wild ride continued.
For his part, Luiz had been confined to the occassional on-field stint as a late second half substitute, thrown on when the game was all but won and the result in no doubt or when Mr. Bremner thought it prudent to rest a better player for the hard yards that lay ahead. As the team cruised through the first and second rounds, all but crushing teams from nearby counties in the local pool, expectation grew to fever pitch in the school, the town, and wider county beyond. Parents were sent dietry notices, curfew sheets and instructions on how the boys ought to be cotton-woolled when outside of Mr. Bremner's absolute care. No point was overlooked, no pebble left unturned, no exclamation point omitted from the end of a sentence; the home pitch was mown so carefully and precicely by a professional groundskeeper brought in from Brighton and Hove Albion that it resembled the Aztec stadium itself. Then the school were given permission to play their home matches at the ground of their semi-professional town team, where there were floodlights, stands and removable corner flags. As they neared qualification for the national knock-out round, where by virtue of random luck they might have to play anywhere in England, the winter cold season struck with a particular vengeance and no amount of half-time oranges could remedy it. On top of this the weather turned spiteful, pitches were frozen solid and games were abandoned and re-scheduled across the country, and much to Mr. Bremner's chagrin, his charges had to travel to the foot of the country because it was mild and the frost hadn't bitten, to play the team representing Cornwall. It was a vindictive affair from woe to go, a game full of unnecessary stoppages, sideline abuse, players snapping at one and other's heels and jaws, and the occassional stray sheep wandering onto a pitch which looked as if it hadn't been mown since the Romans had quit England in disgust. It was to be however, a game remembered for a late goal from a young Cornishboy who stood about six-three and headed in from about thirty-eight yards. Luiz did not serve any pitch time and the team, vanquished at last, travelled home in a mournful state to consider how best to deal with a return leg a fortnight hence. Mr. Bremner, dour as he was, nonetheless devised a game plan which mitigated defending against a six-foot cyclops and instead was built around attack after attack. Wingers were needed, and Luiz, to his good fortune, found himself one of only two deemed fit enough to play.
The authorities, in the guise of Mr. Bremner, the selection committee, the PTA and the mayoral brigade, decided, behind closed doors, to make the return fixture a night time affair, something as then unprecedented in schoolboy football. Naturally the Cornish team was far from happy, many of their stars came from farming folks and most of the boys were expected to be up at five the following morning for milking, but despite appeals, the ruling body ruled that the match would be an interesting experiment and should thus proceed as planned. Luiz's school team trained at night on the floodlit pitch - playing games against local sides so that the canny Mr. Bremner could perfect his flying wing philosophy much like bomber command had done during WWII.
The night of the match drew around, it was a slick-frosted night, leading to more pre kick off dramas in respect of ball selection, studs, tackles, substitutes; the whole nine-yards. Finally, playing with a luminous orange ball which bounced higher than the regulation ball, the two teams squared off in front of a full grandstand and a plethora of sideline-stalking old men in raincoats and cloth caps yelling contrary advice while walking the numerous breeds of the isles.
That orange ball skidded and jumped about mercilessly, causing all manner of pre-game nerves to grow more nervous, culminating in a remarkable own goal by Luiz's team. A back pass which skidded straight through the legs of the goalkeeper as he stood arguing with a rogue granddad. A hush fell upon the ground, not a reverent hush, a hush of complete dismay. The Cornish had been gift-wrapped an away goal within five minutes. The mountain Luiz and his comrades-in-arms now had to climb, ice-slicked as it was, had begun to take on a Herculean aura. Undaunted, Luiz's team when back to the task at hand, and three-minutes before the half-time break netted an equaliser. At one apiece, and one down from the first game, and facing an away goals count double rule, the equation was straightforward and no one needed the math's teacher's advice. Luiz's school had to score twice more within normal time, any other score was null and void. Two goals on a pitch getting slipperier by the minute, without conceding on a counter attack, or the dream would be over.
Seventeen minutes into the second period Luiz found himself unmarked in the opposing penalty area as the orange ball came skidding into the box, and deftly he side-footed the ball into the gaping goal. There were cries of “offside” but to no avail. The miracle was beginning to look feasible. And so it was, as in all great heroic dramas, that Luiz the hero, should, moments after he had re-inforced that hero status with a spontaneous volley out of nothing to score his tean's third goal of the night, become almost instantly, the villain. On what ought to have been his most memorable night, Luiz found himself hacked crudely to the ice by a rugged Cornish boy with legs like fence posts. His game would have been over anyhow, had schoolboy football have had proper medical attention available instead of a half-cut school nurse, but instead Luiz finally got back up and then became embroiled in a series of tit-for-tat retaliations. Cautioned by the match referee, Luiz was seen, via the vapour clouds emanating from his mouth, to utter something to the referee who then, much to everyone's astonishment, dismissed him. Luiz, head bowed, still muttering and being goaded by ruddy-cheeked Cornish boys, left the pitch. He was thinking, he says now, of Georgie Best's then recently-announced decision to quit Manchester United to instead lay on a Spanish beach all day drinking sangria and de-frocking a procession of Miss Worlds. Luiz understood why, then.
His team triumphed, but the triumph was soured. Luiz, forced to make a report of his words and actions, finally stated that he had in fact said to the referee: “Who the fuck do you think you are, Clive Thomas?” He was subsequently summarily banned for five matches. A harsh punishment indeed at any level of association football.
Earlier that fateful week, we have to report for accuracy, George Best had been dismissed in a league fixture by the professional referee Clive Thomas, for calling him a wanker.
Luiz's school eventually capitulated in the counties cup to a team representing Cheshire, Luiz did not play again. A few weeks after that fateful appearance however Luiz received a letter, it was postmarked East London and carried the emblem of West Ham United on the envelope. Luiz studied the still-sealed missive a while and then opened it. Due to his exploits in the counties cup he had been selected for a schoolboy trial at Upton Park, once home to England's very own world cup winning captain Bobby Moore. There were directions with the letter, and Luiz followed them precisely, arriving at the ground two-weeks later some hour and a half beforehand to savour the atmosphere. Boys from all over South-East England loitered around nervously, for them, just like for Luiz, this was the window of opportunity ever so slightly ajar.
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