On Ocean Drive, Miami, I once met a chap called Chad from South Yorkshire. He was clenching a crushed Coke can, his ankle wrapped in clingfilm. I asked him if he was OK. “Had a tattoo,” he explained. “Bloody agony.” He peeled back the cellophane to show me a word in Russian: “Фрикли”. I asked him what it meant and he told me it was where he was from. I asked him where he was from. “Frickley,” he said. I inquired as to why he would want Frickley tattooed on his leg in Cyrillic. He didn’t have an answer for me.
Chad was a football fan, in Miami for England’s warm-up game ahead of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Incredibly, four years later, I bumped into him on Nikolskaya Street, Moscow, during the 2018 World Cup in Russia. I told him that if England won it, I’d pay for him to get “ENGLAND”, or rather “Англия”, tattooed on a bum cheek of his choosing. Sadly, neither event came to pass.
