Paul "One Punch" Doyle and the night Ajax's top boy picked the wrong man

The man on the pool table was five foot eight. The man walking towards him was six foot five, and he had something to say.

It was a night in Amsterdam in the autumn of 1998, a couple of hours into a long drink. Forty Manchester United fans had stopped over in the city on their way to a Champions League game in Munich. The man on the table was bored. The Dutchman thought he was about to make his name.

He was talking to Paul Doyle. In Salford they called him One Punch.

Is that right, mate? Well, tonight ain't your lucky night.

Paul Doyle, in Surviving the Madness

The name was simple. If Doyle caught you on the chin, nine times out of ten you were out cold. He was short and stocky and born to fight. Punch power can be taught, up to a point, through timing and technique. Some men are born with heavy hands, and Doyle was one of them. Add a mind that would not be beaten, and he was a real force on the streets of Manchester and well beyond them.

His start in life was hard. He spent his early years in institutions and then in prisons, and he came out as a young man straight into the Manchester of the 1980s. That meant the Quality Street Gang, the doors, and later a long, bitter war with his old friend Paul Massey over who ran security in Salford.

It also meant football. Doyle followed United, and United's firm of the 1970s and 1980s travelled in numbers nobody else could match. In his book he describes them going into cities like Leeds ten thousand strong, with the police stretched to breaking. For some of the men inside it, a match day was also a working day. Jewellers, clothes shops and club houses were on the way to the ground.

His hooligan life and his criminal life never really separated. In 1998 they were about to meet in a bar in Amsterdam.

Ajax have their own firm. It is called the F-Side, after the stand where its members gathered, and it formed in 1976. Of all the groups attached to the club, it is by far the most violent.

Its great enemy is Feyenoord of Rotterdam. On 23 March 1997, the two firms arranged to meet in a field beside the A9 motorway near Beverwijk, well away from any ground and any police. Feyenoord came with baseball bats, chains, bottles and tasers. The fight lasted around five minutes. When it was over, Carlo Picornie, one of the F-Side's leading figures, was dead in the grass. Many more were badly hurt.

His seat at the Ajax stadium has been left empty ever since.

So when a big Ajax man walked up to a group of English hooligans eighteen months later and announced who he was, it was not small talk. It was a challenge from a firm that had buried one of its own, and felt it had nothing left to prove to anybody.

He was about to find out otherwise.

In the 1998–99 Champions League, United were drawn in a group with Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Brondby. The first game, at Old Trafford on 16 September, finished three each against Barcelona. The first away trip was to Munich at the end of the month.

Doyle writes that nothing and no one was going to stop him going. He knew the risk better than anyone. For a long time he had been locked in a feud with a man the film describes as one of the most feared gangsters in Europe, a man allegedly behind the murder of Doyle's best friend. At home in Manchester, Doyle knew the ground. Leaving the city, and then leaving the country, put the odds against him.

His attitude, in his own words, was simple. He was not prepared to miss out.

Around forty of them set off, with an overnight stop in Amsterdam on the way. Among them were some hardcore villains. One was a hot-headed gangster who Doyle knew had worked with his enemy. He could not entirely trust the man. Before they left, the two of them agreed that whatever happened on the trip, they would stick together.

That agreement was about to be tested.

They checked into their hotels and hit the bars, and joined up with another group of United fans. It was a good night. A couple of hours in, Doyle had had enough of standing around. He was sitting on the edge of a pool table when a large Dutch man walked over to him.

Doyle stood up. The man still towered over him. In his best English he announced that he was Ajax's top boy.

Doyle looked up at him.

"Is that right, mate?" he said. "Well, tonight ain't your lucky night."

He had a pool cue in his hand. He brought it down over the Dutchman's head.

A cue across the skull would finish most men. It only made this one angry. He grabbed the cue and tried to wrench it out of Doyle's hands, and for a moment the two of them were locked together, pulling against each other, the small man and the giant.

Doyle held on. He pulled back with all his weight. Then, as the Dutchman leaned back to pull harder, Doyle let go of the cue.

The big man rocked backwards. Doyle sprang forward with everything he had and threw one punch.

It landed on the chin. Ajax's top boy went down, out cold, before he hit the floor.

Rather watch it?The film is on Gangland & True Crime Docs.Watch →

That should have been the end of it. It was the start.

As the Dutchman fell, two doormen came running across the bar. They were met by the rest of the United lads, with glass tankards and beer bottles. Doyle writes that it was like a hailstorm indoors, with chunks of glass instead of hailstones.

There were three Dutch men on the floor. The United fans did not wait to see who came next. They left fast, and split up into small parties of two and three, rather than stay in the city's bars in a mob that anyone could find.

The next day they went on to Munich, where United drew two each with Bayern. That season ended with the treble, and a night in Barcelona that every United fan alive can still describe. The night in Amsterdam is the one Doyle tells.

People who were never part of it always ask the same question. Why would grown men travel across Europe to fight strangers for nothing? The firms were a strange mix. Plasterers and builders who loved a row on match day stood next to full-time criminals who ran clubs and pubs. On the day they came together, and away from the ground they helped each other through life. It was a working-class version of a Masonic lodge, with fists instead of handshakes.

Doyle is still going strong. The night a six-foot-five Dutchman told him who he was shows why the name stuck. The full story is in our film on Gangland, and in Doyle's own words in his book.