Life for The Raider will only be good again when he's got no fans

Fag in mouth, jail cell tan, Nick O'Teen teeth, stuck in an 80s time-warp like Heysel never happened.

I strolled along to watch my local non-league team Stafford Rangers the other week and among the flat caps and flasks of Bovril stood a group of half a dozen usual suspects.

Fat, stupid and ugly in every sense of the word.

Middle aged and straight out of Middle Earth.

Oh, how we quaked at the effing and jeffing from the bad-ass Marston Road 'crew'.

Oh, how we laughed at the 'banter'.

Ignoring the handful of kids and solitary woman I spotted in the 426-strong 'crowd', they blurted out all manner of Neanderthal toss for the full 90 minutes.

"Oooo are ya?"

"F*** off linesman you w*****!"

"Oi! Number 6! You're gonna get your f****** head kicked in!"

That last one made me smile, as the 'Number 6' was a typical non-league battler, hard as a rock and built like a brick outhouse.

Naturally, the blokes in question were REALLY big men, but only when their 'mates' were with them.

I say 'mates', I mean snivelling little runts.

But you get the picture.

At this juncture, someone normally chirps up 'why didn't you say something to them then Harrison?'.

Well, I would have had a go, but I don't think I'm hard enough.

And secondly because, sigh, I couldn't be bothered. The kids weren't listening. The woman looked over, smiled and rolled her eyes, acknowledging their stupidity.

And, well . . . it's a football ground 'innit'?

That's what happens at a football ground 'mate' and 'if you don't like it you can do one!'.

Which brings me to the cult that is The Wealdstone Raider.

Bear with me on this, because it takes some explaining.

The WR is a guy who is apparently famous for shouting abuse at a non-league football match while being filmed by a passer-by.

It's typical Oscar Wilde stuff, with him shouting 'You've got no fans' at the mighty Whitehawk FC.

You might think that's stating the obvious, but this is now his catchphrase.

Anyway, when he spots the guy filming him, he threatens him with violence in the time-honoured fashion: "You want some?"

Pint in hand, he says, apparently in all seriousness: "If you want some, I'll give it ya."

I'm not making this up . . . the guy is now a 'celebrity'.

Last week he made a public appearance at a Wolverhampton estate agents – and people were queuing around the block to meet him.

Later on, he went to Molineux for the Wolves game and had fans, staff and even ex-players lining up to grab the inevitable selfies.

He's had a record at number five in the charts (not that that counts for much these days) and his YouTube videos have been viewed, wait for it, more than 10 million times.

To be fair to the Raider, a builder whose real name is Gordon Hill, he is donating money he raises to charity and has so far given more than £10,000 to Great Ormond Street Hospital, among others.

He's got an agent and manager, been lauded at the darts and is becoming a regular on TV programmes.

There's a range of merchandise; the mugs, the scarves, the flags, the T-shirts.

A banner with his catchphrases on has even appeared at Dutch football matches.

His manager says he's had 3,000 email enquiries in the past couple of months.

Predictably, there's talk of him going into the Celebrity Big Brother house, although there's concern about how Katie Price might react if he asks her: "Do you want some?"

Instinctively, I wanted to dislike him, having seen his ilk too many times.

But this week, 'Wealdstone Raider: The Official Documentary' was released, showing him being courted by McFly, talkSPORT, crowds of fans and being chased down the road by cheering schoolchildren.

Away from his Saturday afternoon beer, he seems like a nice fella, who touchingly describes Wealdstone FC as 'his family' and says: "I'm not a celebrity. I'm just a normal bloke, a builder."

And in a last-minute twist, at the height of his sudden fame, he says he wishes none of this had ever have happened to him and talks about running away to live in a cave in Scotland.

"People who think I'm doing it for the fame should spend a day in my shoes," he says, looking tired and drawn by the constant attention.

In the end you feel quite sorry for him; 'a normal bloke', happily throwing insults around at a non-league football match, suddenly has the light of the nation's TV cameras thrown on him.

I doubt any of us could cope with it for long and I hope Gordon The Raider survives his brush with celebrity and gets back to some sort of normality unscathed.

You get the impression that he'll be much happier when he's got no fans.