Paul Doyle is a Manchester villain and football hooligan associated with Manchester United, known to everyone as One Punch. Locked up in prisons as a boy, he came out as a young man straight into battles with the established Quality Street Gang and a deadly war on the doors with his former friend Paul Massey. This film introduces him and the Ajax hooligan firm, then reads his own account, from his book Surviving the Madness, of a night in Amsterdam when a six-foot-five Dutch hooligan told him who he was.
One Punch
The name was simple. If Doyle caught you on the chin, the narrator says, nine times out of ten you were out cold. He stood five foot eight, stocky and born to fight. Punch power can be taught through technique, but some people are born with heavy hands, and Doyle was one of them. Add a mentality that would not be suppressed or defeated, and he was a real force on the streets of Manchester and beyond.
His hooligan life and his criminal life ran together. In his book he describes United's firm in the 1970s and 1980s going mob-handed into cities like Leeds, ten thousand strong, with the police stretched to control the numbers. That gave plenty of chances to go on the rob: jewellers, clothes shops, club houses.
The F-Side
Ajax have their own hooligan firm, the F-Side, and the narrator calls them by far the most violent associated with the club. In the battle of Beverwijk they clashed with their bitter rivals Feyenoord, whose fans came with baseball bats, chains, bottles and tasers. It lasted five minutes. Many were seriously injured, and one of the F-Side's leading figures was killed. His seat at the Ajax stadium is left empty as a mark of respect.
Amsterdam, 1998
In the 1998-99 Champions League, United were drawn with Brondby, Barcelona and Bayern Munich. After a 3-3 draw at home to Barcelona, the first away game was in Germany, and Doyle writes that nothing and no one was going to stop him going. He knew the risk. Leaving Manchester, and leaving the country, put the odds against him in a long-running feud with one of the most feared gangsters in Europe, a man the narrator says was allegedly behind the murder of Doyle's best friend. Doyle's attitude, in his words, was that he was not prepared to miss out.
Around 40 of them stopped overnight in Amsterdam on the way. Among them were some hardcore villains, including a hot-headed gangster Doyle knew had worked with his enemy. He could not entirely trust him, but they had agreed to stick together whatever happened.
They checked into their hotels and hit the bars, joining another group of United fans. A couple of hours in, Doyle was bored, sitting on a pool table, when a large Dutch man walked up to him. Doyle stood, and the man still towered over him. He announced, in his best English, that he was Ajax's top boy.
"Is that right, mate?" Doyle replied. "Well, tonight ain't your lucky night."
He smashed a pool cue over the man's head. It seemed only to anger him, and he tried to wrench the cue away. Doyle held on, pulling with all his weight, then let go as he leant back and sprang forward with a punch that knocked the man out cold. As he fell, two doormen came running. They were met with glass tankards and beer bottles. Doyle writes that it was like a hailstorm indoors, with chunks of glass instead of hailstones. With three Dutch men down, the group left fast and split into small parties rather than stay in the bars in numbers.
Why men do it
The narrator ends with the question outsiders always ask. Football firms, like biker clubs, are a mix: plasterers and builders who love a row on match day, and full-time criminals, some of them high-level, who run clubs and pubs. They come together on the day and help each other through life. The narrator compares it to a working-class version of a Masonic lodge.
Not everyone understands it. The narrator recalls Harry Roberts, in prison, asking him what the point was of going out for a fight and not making any money. To Roberts, violence belonged inside the business of crime.
Doyle, the film says, is still going strong. The night in Amsterdam shows why the name stuck.