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Home Début

ARSENAL v STOKE CITY

14.9.68

I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would bring with it.

In May ’68 (a date with connotations, of course, but I am still more likely to think of Jeff Astle than of Paris), just after my eleventh birthday, my father asked me if I’d like to go with him to the FA Cup Final between West Brom and Everton; a colleague had offered him a couple of tickets. I told him that I wasn’t interested in football, not even in the Cup Final—true, as far as I was aware, but perversely I watched the whole match on television anyway. A few weeks later I watched the Man Utd-Benfica game, enthralled, with my mum, and at the end of August I got up early to hear how United had got on in the final of the World Club Championship. I loved Bobby Charlton and George Best (I knew nothing about Denis Law, the third of the Holy Trinity, who had missed the Benfica match through injury) with a passion that had taken me completely by surprise; it lasted three weeks, until my dad took me to Highbury for the first time.

My parents were separated by 1968. My father had met someone else and moved out, and I lived with my mother and my sister in a small detached house in the Home Counties. This state of affairs was unremarkable enough in itself (although I cannot recall anyone else in my class with an absent parent—the sixties took another seven or eight years to travel the twenty-odd miles down the M4 from London), but the break-up had wounded all four of us in various ways, as break-ups are wont to do.

There were, inevitably, a number of difficulties that arose from this new phase of family life, although the most crucial in this context was probably the most banal: the commonplace but nevertheless intractable one-parent Saturday-afternoon-at-the-zoo problem. Often Dad was only able to visit us midweek; no one really wanted to stay in and watch TV, for obvious reasons, but on the other hand there wasn’t really anywhere else a man could take two children under twelve. Usually the three of us drove to a neighbouring town, or up to one of the airport hotels, where we sat in a cold and early-evening deserted restaurant, and where Gill and I ate steak or chicken, one or the other, in more or less complete silence (children are not great dinner conversationalists, as a rule, and in any case we were used to eating with the TV on), while Dad watched. He must have been desperate to find something else to do with us, but the options in a commuter-belt town between 6.30 and 9.00 on a Monday night were limited.

That summer, Dad and I went to a hotel near Oxford for a week, where in the evenings we sat in a deserted hotel dining room, and where I ate steak or chicken, one or the other, in more or less complete silence. After dinner we went to watch TV with the other guests, and Dad drank too much. Things had to change.

My father tried again with the football that September, and he must have been amazed when I said yes. I had never before said yes to any suggestion of his, although I rarely said no either. I just smiled politely and made a noise intended to express interest but no commitment, a maddening trait I think I invented especially for that time in my life but which has somehow remained with me ever since. For two or three years he had been trying to take me to the theatre; every time he asked I simply shrugged and grinned idiotically, with the result that eventually Dad would get angry and tell me to forget it, which was what I wanted him to say. And it wasn’t just Shakespeare, either: I was equally suspicious of rugby matches and cricket matches and boat trips and days out to Silverstone and Longleat. I didn’t want to do anything at all. None of this was intended to punish my father for his absence: I really thought that I would be happy to go anywhere with him, apart from every single place he could think of.

1968 was, I suppose, the most traumatic year of my life. After my parents’ separation we moved into a smaller house, but for a time, because of some sort of chain, we were homeless and had to stay with our neighbours; I became seriously ill with jaundice; and I started at the local grammar school. I would have to be extraordinarily literal to believe that the Arsenal fever about to grip me had nothing to do with all this mess. (And I wonder how many other fans, if they were to examine the circumstances that led up to their obsession, could find some sort of equivalent Freudian drama? After all, football’s a great game and everything, but what is it that separates those who are happy to attend half a dozen games a season—watch the big matches, stay away from the rubbish, surely the sensible way—from those who feel compelled to attend them all? Why travel from London to Plymouth on a Wednesday, using up a precious day’s holiday, to see a game whose outcome was effectively decided in the first leg at Highbury? And, if this theory of fandom as therapy is anywhere near the mark, what the hell is buried in the subconscious of people who go to Leyland DAF Trophy games? Perhaps it is best not to know.)

There is a short story by the American writer Andre Dubus entitled “The Winter Father”, about a man whose divorce has separated him from his two children. In the winter his relationship with them is tetchy and strained: they move from afternoon jazz club to cinema to restaurant, and stare at each other. But in the summer, when they can go to the beach, they get on fine. “The long beach and the sea were their lawn; the blanket their home; the ice chest and thermos their kitchen. They lived as a family again.” Sitcoms and films have long recognised this terrible tyranny of place, and depict men traipsing round parks with fractious kids and a frisbee. But “The Winter Father” means a lot to me because it goes further than that: it manages to isolate what is valuable in the relationship between parents and children, and explains simply and precisely why the zoo trips are doomed.

In this country, as far as I know, Bridlington and Minehead are unable to provide the same kind of liberation as the New England beaches in Dubus’s story; but my father and I were about to come up with the perfect English equivalent. Saturday afternoons in north London gave us a context in which we could be together. We could talk when we wanted, the football gave us something to talk about (and anyway the silences weren’t oppressive), and the days had a structure, a routine. The Arsenal pitch was to be our lawn (and, being an English lawn, we would usually peer at it mournfully through driving rain); the Gunners’ Fish Bar on Blackstock Road our kitchen; and the West Stand our home. It was a wonderful set-up, and changed our lives just when they needed changing most, but it was also exclusive: Dad and my sister never really found anywhere to live at all. Maybe now that wouldn’t happen; maybe a nine-year-old girl in the nineties would feel that she had just as much right to go to a game as we did. But in 1969 in our town, this was not an idea that had much currency, and my sister had to stay at home with her mum and her dolls.

I don’t recall much about the football that first afternoon. One of those tricks of memory enables me to see the only goal clearly: the referee awards a penalty (he runs into the area, points a dramatic finger, there’s a roar); a hush as Terry Neill takes it, and a groan as Gordon Banks dives and pushes the ball out; it falls conveniently at Neill’s feet and this time he scores. But I am sure this picture has been built up from what I have long known about similar incidents, and actually I was aware of none of this. All I really saw on the day was a bewildering chain of incomprehensible incidents, at the end of which everyone around me stood and shouted. If I did the same, it must have been an embarrassing ten seconds after the rest of the crowd.

But I do have other, more reliable, and probably more meaningful memories. I remember the overwhelming maleness of it all—cigar and pipe smoke, foul language (words I had heard before, but not from adults, not at that volume), and only years later did it occur to me that this was bound to have an effect on a boy who lived with his mother and his sister; and I remember looking at the crowd more than at the players. From where I was sitting I could probably have counted twenty thousand heads; only the sports fan (or Mick Jagger or Nelson Mandela) can do that. My father told me that there were nearly as many people in the stadium as lived in my town, and I was suitably awed.

(We have forgotten that football crowds are still astonishingly large, mostly because since the war they have become progressively smaller. Managers frequently complain about local apathy, particularly when their mediocre First or Second Division team has managed to avoid a good hiding for a few weeks; but the fact that, say, Derby County managed to attract an average crowd of nearly seventeen thousand in 1990/91, the year they finished bottom of the First Division, is a miracle. Let’s say that three thousand of these are away supporters; that means that among the remaining fourteen thousand from Derby, there were a number of people who went at least eighteen times to see the worst football of last or indeed most other seasons. Why, really, should anyone have gone at all?)

It wasn’t the size of the crowd that impressed me most, however, or the way that adults were allowed to shout the word “WANKER!” as loudly as they wanted without attracting any attention. What impressed me most was just how much most of the men around me hated, really hated, being there. As far as I could tell, nobody seemed to enjoy, in the way that I understood the word, anything that happened during the entire afternoon. Within minutes of the kick-off there was real anger (“You’re a DISGRACE, Gould. He’s a DISGRACE!” “A hundred quid a week? A HUNDRED QUID A WEEK! They should give that to me for watching you.”); as the game went on, the anger turned into outrage, and then seemed to curdle into sullen, silent discontent. Yes, yes, I know all the jokes. What else could I have expected at Highbury? But I went to Chelsea and to Tottenham and to Rangers, and saw the same thing: that the natural state of the football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score.

I think we Arsenal fans know, deep down, that the football at Highbury has not often been pretty, and that therefore our reputation as the most boring team in the entire history of the universe is not as mystifying as we pretend: yet when we have a successful side much is forgiven. The Arsenal team I saw on that afternoon had been spectacularly unsuccessful for some time. Indeed they had won nothing since the Coronation and this abject and unambiguous failure was simply rubbing salt into the fans’ stigmata. Many of those around us had the look of men who had seen every game of every barren season. The fact that I was intruding on a marriage that had gone disastrously sour lent my afternoon a particularly thrilling prurience (if it had been a real marriage, children would have been barred from the ground): one partner was lumbering around in a pathetic attempt to please, while the other turned his face to the wall, too full of loathing even to watch. Those fans who could not remember the thirties (although at the end of the sixties a good many of them could), when the club won five Championships and two FA Cups, could remember the Comptons and Joe Mercer from just over a decade before; the stadium itself, with its beautiful art deco stands and its Jacob Epstein busts, seemed to disapprove of the current mob even as much as my neighbours did.

I’d been to public entertainments before, of course; I’d been to the cinema and the pantomime and to see my mother sing in the chorus of the White Horse Inn at the Town Hall. But that was different. The audiences I had hitherto been a part of had paid to have a good time and, though occasionally one might spot a fidgety child or a yawning adult, I hadn’t ever noticed faces contorted by rage or despair or frustration. Entertainment as pain was an idea entirely new to me, and it seemed to be something I’d been waiting for.

It might not be too fanciful to suggest that it was an idea which shaped my life. I have always been accused of taking the things I love—football, of course, but also books and records—much too seriously, and I do feel a kind of anger when I hear a bad record, or when someone is lukewarm about a book that means a lot to me. Perhaps it was these desperate, bitter men in the West Stand at Arsenal who taught me how to get angry in this way; and perhaps it is why I earn some of my living as a critic—maybe it’s those voices I can hear when I write. “You’re a WANKER, X.” “The Booker Prize? THE BOOKER PRIZE? They should give that to me for having to read you.”

Just this one afternoon started the whole thing off—there was no prolonged courtship—and I can see now that if I’d gone to White Hart Lane or Stamford Bridge the same thing would have happened, so overwhelming was the experience the first time. In a desperate and percipient attempt to stop the inevitable, Dad quickly took me to Spurs to see Jimmy Greaves score four against Sunderland in a 5-1 win, but the damage had been done, and the six goals and all the great players left me cold: I’d already fallen for the team that beat Stoke 1-0 from a penalty rebound.

A Spare Jimmy Husband

ARSENAL v WEST HAM

26.10.68

On this, my third visit to Highbury (a goalless draw—I’d now seen my team score three times in four and a half hours), all the kids were given a free Soccer Stars album. Each page of the album was devoted to one First Division team, and contained fourteen or fifteen spaces in which to glue stickers of the players; we were also given a little packet of the stickers to start our collection off.

Promotional offers aren’t often described thus, I know, but the album proved to be the last crucial step in a socialisation process that had begun with the Stoke game. The benefits of liking football at school were simply incalculable (even though the games master was a Welshman who once memorably tried to ban us from kicking a round ball even when we got home): at least half my class, and probably a quarter of the staff, loved the game.

Unsurprisingly, I was the only Arsenal supporter in the first year. QPR, the nearest First Division team, had Rodney Marsh; Chelsea had Peter Osgood, Tottenham had Greaves, West Ham had the three World Cup heroes, Hurst, Moore and Peters. Arsenal’s best-known player was probably Ian Ure, famous only for being hilariously useless and for his contributions to the television series Quiz Ball. But in that glorious first football-saturated term, it didn’t matter that I was on my own. In our dormitory town no club had a monopoly on support and, in any case, my new best friend, a Derby County fan like his father and uncle, was similarly isolated. The main thing was that you were a believer. Before school, at breaktime and at lunch time, we played football on the tennis courts with a tennis ball, and in between lessons we swapped Soccer Star stickers—Ian Ure for Geoff Hurst (extraordinarily, the stickers were of equal value), Terry Venables for Ian St John, Tony Hately for Andy Lochhead.

And so transferring to secondary school was rendered unimaginably easy. I was probably the smallest boy in the first year, but my size didn’t matter, although my friendship with the Derby fan, the tallest by several feet, was pretty handy; and though my performance as a student was undistinguished (I was bunged into the “B” stream at the end of the year and stayed there throughout my entire grammar school career), the lessons were a breeze. Even the fact that I was one of only three boys wearing shorts wasn’t as traumatic as it should have been. As long as you knew the name of the Burnley manager, nobody much cared that you were an eleven-year-old dressed as a six-year-old.

This pattern has repeated itself several times since then. The first and easiest friends I made at college were football fans; a studious examination of a newspaper back page during the lunch hour of the first day in a new job usually provokes some kind of response. And yes, I am aware of the downside of this wonderful facility that men have: they become repressed, they fail in their relationships with women, their conversation is trivial and boorish, they find themselves unable to express their emotional needs, they cannot relate to their children, and they die lonely and miserable. But, you know, what the hell? If you can walk into a school full of eight hundred boys, most of them older, all of them bigger, without feeling intimidated, simply because you have a spare Jimmy Husband in your blazer pocket, then it seems like a trade-off worth making.

Don Rogers

SWINDON TOWN v ARSENAL

(at Wembley) 15.3.69

Dad and I went to Highbury another half a dozen times that season, and by the middle of March 1969, I had gone way beyond fandom. On matchdays I awoke with a nervous churning in the stomach, a feeling that would continue to intensify until Arsenal had taken a two-goal lead, when I would begin to relax: I had only relaxed once, when we beat Everton 3-1 just before Christmas. Such was my Saturday sickness that I insisted on being inside the stadium shortly after one o’clock, some two hours before the kick-off; this quirk my father bore with patience and good humour, even though it was frequently cold and from 2.15 onwards my distraction was such that all communication was impossible.

My pre-match nerves were the same however meaningless the game. That season Arsenal had blown all chance of the Championship by about November, a little later than usual; but this meant that in the wider scheme of things it scarcely mattered whether they won the games I went to see. It mattered desperately to me, however. In these early stages, my relationship with Arsenal was of an entirely personal nature: the team only existed when I was in the stadium (I can’t remember feeling especially devastated by their poor results away from home). As far as I was concerned, if they won the games I saw 5-0, and lost the rest 10-0, that would have been a good season, probably to be commemorated by the team travelling down the M4 to see me on an open-topped bus.

I made an exception for the FA Cup-ties; these I wanted Arsenal to win despite my absence, but we got knocked out 1-0 at West Brom. (I had been forced to go to bed before the result came through—the tie was played on a Wednesday night—and my mother wrote the score down on a piece of paper and attached it to my bookcase ready for me to look at in the morning. I looked long and hard: I felt betrayed by what she had written. If she loved me, then surely she could have come up with a better result than this. Just as hurtful as the score was the exclamation mark she had placed after it, as if it were … well, an exclamation. It seemed as inappropriate as if it had been used to emphasise the death of a relative: “Gran died peacefully in her sleep!” These disappointments were still entirely new to me, of course, but like all fans, I’ve come to expect them now. At the time of writing, I have felt the pain of FA Cup defeat twenty-two times, but never as keenly as that first one.)

The League Cup I’d never really heard of, mainly because it was a midweek competition and I hadn’t yet been allowed to attend a midweek game. But when Arsenal reached the final, I was prepared to accept it as a consolation for what had seemed to me to be a heartbreakingly poor season, although it had in fact been pretty run-of-the-mill for the sixties.

So Dad paid a tout way over the odds for a pair of tickets (I never found out exactly how much, but later, with justified anger, he led me to understand that they’d been very expensive) and on Saturday, 15th March (“BEWARE THE IDES OF MARCH” was the headline in the Evening Standard’s special colour supplement), I went to Wembley for the first time.

Arsenal were playing Swindon Town, a Third Division team, and no one seemed to have any real doubts that Arsenal would win the game, and therefore their first cup for sixteen years. I wasn’t so sure. Silent in the car all the way there, I asked Dad on the steps up to the stadium whether he was as confident as everyone else. I tried to make the question conversational—sports chatter between two men on a day out—but it wasn’t like that at all: what I really wanted was reassurance from an adult, a parent, my father, that what I was about to witness wasn’t going to scar me for life. “Look,” I should have said to him, “when they’re playing at home, in an ordinary League game, I’m so frightened they’ll lose that I can’t think or speak or even breathe, sometimes. If you think Swindon have any kind of chance at all, even a chance in a million, it’s best if you take me home now, because I don’t think I’d be able to cope.”

If I had come out with that, then it would have been unreasonable of my father to make me go inside the stadium. But I simply asked him, in an assumed spirit of idle curiosity, who he thought would win the game, and he said he thought Arsenal would, three or four nothing, the same as everyone else did, and so I got the reassurance I was looking for; but I was scarred for life anyway. Like my mother’s exclamation mark, my father’s blithe confidence later seemed like a betrayal.

I was so scared that the Wembley experience—a crowd of a hundred thousand, the huge pitch, the noise, the sense of anticipation—passed me by completely. If I noticed anything about the place at all it was that it wasn’t Highbury, and my sense of alienation simply added to my unease. I sat shivering until Swindon scored shortly before half-time, and then the fear turned to misery. The goal was one of the most calamitously stupid ever given away by a team of professionals: an inept back-pass (by Ian Ure, naturally), followed by a missed tackle, followed by a goalkeeper (Bob Wilson) slipping over in the mud and allowing the ball to trickle over the line just inside the right-hand post. For the first time, suddenly, I became aware of all the Swindon fans sitting around us, with their awful West Country accents, their absurd innocent glee, their delirious disbelief. I hadn’t ever come across opposing fans before, and I loathed them in a way I had never before loathed strangers.

With one minute remaining in the game, Arsenal equalised, unexpectedly and bizarrely, a diving header from a rebound off the goalkeeper’s knee. I tried not to weep with relief, but the effort was beyond me; I stood on the seat and yelled at my father, over and over again, “We’ll be all right now, won’t we? We’ll be all right now!” He patted me on the back, pleased that something had been rescued from the dismal and expensive afternoon, and told me that yes, now, finally, everything would be OK.

It was his second betrayal of the day. Swindon scored twice more in extra time, one a scrappy goal from a corner, the other from Don Rogers after a magnificent sixty-yard run, and it was all too much to bear. When the final whistle went, my father betrayed me for the third time in less than three hours: he rose to his feet to applaud the extraordinary underdogs, and I ran for the exit.

When my father caught up with me he was furious. He delivered his ideas on sportsmanship with great force (what did I care about sportsmanship?), marched me to the car, and we drove home in silence. Football may have provided us with a new medium through which we could communicate, but that was not to say that we used it, or that what we chose to say was necessarily positive.

I don’t remember Saturday evening, but I know that on the Sunday, Mother’s Day, I elected to go to church rather than stay at home, where there was a danger that I would watch the highlights of the game on The Big Match and push myself over the edge into a permanent depressive insanity. And I know that when we got to church, the vicar expressed his pleasure in seeing such a large congregation given the competing temptations of a Cup Final on TV, and that friends and family nudged me and smirked. All this, however, was nothing compared to what I knew I would get at school on Monday morning.

For twelve-year-old boys permanently on the lookout for ways in which to humiliate their peers, opportunities like this were too good to miss. When I pushed open the door to the prefab, I heard somebody shout “Here he is!”, and I was submerged under a mob of screaming, jeering, giggling boys, some of whom, I noted darkly before I was knocked to the floor, didn’t even like football.

It may not have mattered much in my first term that I was an Arsenal fan, but in my second it had become more significant. Football was still, in essence, a unifying interest—nothing had changed in that way. But as the months passed, our allegiances had become much more defined, and we were much quicker to tease. This was easily anticipated, I suppose, but on that dreadful Monday morning painful nonetheless. As I lay in the grammar school dirt it occurred to me that I had made a grotesque mistake; it was my fervent wish that I could turn back the clock and insist that my father took me, not to Arsenal v Stoke, but to a deserted hotel dining room or the zoo. I didn’t want to go through this once a season. I wanted to be with the rest of the class, trampling the hell out of some other poor heartbroken kid—one of the swots or weeds or Indians or Jews who were habitually and horribly bullied. For the first time in my life I was different and on my own, and I hated it.

I have a photograph from the game played on the Saturday after the Swindon tragedy, away at QPR. George Armstrong is just picking himself up, having scored the winner in a 1-0 win; David Court is running towards him, his arms triumphantly aloft. In the background you can see Arsenal fans on the edge of the stand, silhouetted against a block of flats behind the ground, and they too are punching the sky. I couldn’t understand anything I saw in the picture at all. How could the players care, after the way they had humiliated themselves (and, of course, me) seven days—seven days—before? Why would any fan who had suffered at Wembley the way I had suffered stand up to cheer a nothing goal in a nothing match? I used to stare at this photo for minutes at a time, trying to detect somewhere within it any evidence of the trauma of the previous week, some hint of grief or of mourning, but there was none: apparently everyone had forgotten except me. In my first season as an Arsenal fan I had been betrayed by my mother, my father, the players and my fellow supporters.

England!

ENGLAND v SCOTLAND

May 1969

Although the temptation to plunge into a warm bath containing dissolved essence of Kenneth Wolstenholme is always with me, I know in my heart that in the late sixties and early seventies, some things were better and some things were worse. The England team, of course, was better then: still the world champions, packed with great players, and looking as though they might be able to retain the World Cup in Mexico the following year.

I was proud of England, delighted that my father was taking me to see them play in a big game under floodlights at Wembley (and going back there so soon after the League Cup Final was therapeutic, a successful exorcism of demons that would otherwise have plagued me for years). And though there is no doubt that Colin Bell, Francis Lee and Bobby Moore were better than Geoff Thomas, Dennis Wise and Terry Butcher, it wasn’t just the comparative quality that enabled me to feel unambiguous about that England side. The ambiguity came with age: by the time I was sixteen or seventeen, I knew better than the England manager.

A critical faculty is a terrible thing. When I was eleven there were no bad films, just films that I didn’t want to see, there was no bad food, just Brussels sprouts and cabbage, and there were no bad books—everything I read was great. Then suddenly, I woke up in the morning and all that had changed. How could my sister not hear that David Cassidy was not in the same class as Black Sabbath? Why on earth would my English teacher think that The History of Mr Polly was better than Ten Little Indians by Agatha Christie? And from that moment on, enjoyment has been a much more elusive quality.

But in 1969, as far as I was concerned, there was no such thing as a bad England player. Why would Sir Alf pick someone who wasn’t up to the job? What would be the point? I took it on trust that the eleven players who destroyed Scotland that night—two goals each for Hurst and Peters, Colin Stein replying for the Scots—were the best in the country. (Sir Alf had ignored everyone from Arsenal, which simply confirmed that he knew what he was doing.) And anyway the absence of any live football on television meant that we often didn’t know who was much good or not: the highlights merely showed good players scoring goals, rather than bad players missing them.

By the early seventies I had become an Englishman—that is to say, I hated England just as much as half my compatriots seemed to do. I was alienated by the manager’s ignorance, prejudice and fear, positive that my own choices would destroy any team in the world, and I had a deep antipathy towards players from Tottenham, Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester United. I began to squirm when watching England games on TV, and to feel, as many of us feel, that I had no connection whatsoever with what I saw; I might as well have been Welsh, or Scottish, or Dutch. Is it like this everywhere? I know that in the past the Italians have greeted their boys with rotten tomatoes at the airport when they return from overseas humiliations, but even that sort of commitment is beyond my comprehension. “I hope they get stuffed,” I have heard Englishmen say on numerous occasions in reference to the England team. Is there an Italian or Brazilian or Spanish version of that sentence? It is difficult to imagine.

Part of this contempt may be related to the fact that we have too many players, all of indistinguishable dingy competence; the Welsh and the Irish have very little choice when it comes to putting out a team, and the fans know that their managers simply have to make do. In those circumstances, occasional poor performances are inevitable and victories are little miracles. Then of course there is the procession of England managers that has treated players of real skill and flair—Waddle and Gascoigne, Hoddle and Marsh, Currie and Bowles, George and Hudson, footballers whose gifts are delicate and difficult to harness, but at the same time much more valuable than a pair of leather lungs—with the kind of disdain the rest of us reserve for child molesters. (Which international squad in the world would be unable to find a place for Chris Waddle, the man who in 1991 ambled through the AC Milan back four whenever he chose?) And finally there are the England fans (discussed at greater length elsewhere), whose activities during the eighties hardly encouraged identification with the team in any of the rest of us.

It wasn’t always thus with the fans at international matches. It is impossible not to feel a little ache when one sees replays of games in the 1966 World Cup that did not involve England, for example. In the now-famous game between North Korea and Portugal at Goodison Park (in which the unknown Asian team took a 3-0 lead over one of the best sides in the competition before going out 5-3), you can see a thirty-thousand-plus crowd, the vast majority of whom are Scousers, applauding wildly after goals from each team. It is difficult to imagine the same interest now; more likely, you’d get a couple of thousand scallies making slanty eyes at the Asians in one team, and monkey noises at Eusebio in the other. So, yes, of course I feel nostalgic, even if I am longing for a time which never really belonged to us: like I said, some things were better, some were worse, and the only way one can ever learn to understand one’s own youth is by accepting both halves of the proposition.

The crowd that night contained none of these Goodison saints, but they were no different from the crowds I had been a part of during the rest of the season, with the exception of an extravagantly emotional Scotsman in the row in front who swayed precariously on his seat for the first half and failed to reappear for the second. And most of us actively enjoyed the game, as if for one night only football had become another branch of the entertainment industry. Perhaps, like me, they were enjoying the freedom from the relentless responsibility and pain of club football: I wanted England to win, but they weren’t my team. What, after all, did my country mean to me, a twelve-year-old from the Home Counties, compared to a north London side thirty miles from where I lived, a side I’d never heard of and never thought about nine months previously?

Camping

ARSENAL v EVERTON

7.8.69

For the opening game of my first full season I was at a scout camp in Wales. I hadn’t wanted to go. I was never the most ging-gang-gooly gung-ho of scouts at the best of times and, shortly before our departure, I had discovered that my parents were finally getting divorced. Actually, this didn’t disturb me unduly, at least consciously: after all, they had been separated for some time now and the legal process seemed to be a simple confirmation of the separation.

From the moment we arrived at the camp, though, I was dreadfully, overwhelmingly homesick. I knew that I was going to find it impossible to get through the ten days away; each morning began with a reverse charge call to my mother, during which I would sob pathetically and embarrassingly down the line back home. I was aware that this sort of behaviour was quite unbelievably feeble, and when an older scout was assigned to talk to me in order to discover what was wrong, I told him about the divorce with a shameless eagerness: it was the only explanation I could come up with that would in any way excuse my cissy longing to see my mother and my sister. It did the trick. For the rest of the holiday I was treated with a reverential pity by the rest of the campers.

I blubbed and dripped through the first week, but it wasn’t getting any easier, and on the Saturday my father was dispatched from his Midlands base down to see me. Saturday, of course, was the hardest day of all. I was stuck in some stupid Welsh field for the first home game of the season, and my sense of displacement was all the more acute.

I had missed football in the preceding months. The summer of ’69 was the first in my life in which something seemed to be lacking. My dad and I were faced with pre-Arsenal problems; the sports pages no longer held any interest for me (in those days, before Gazza, before cynical and meaningless pre-season tournaments which somehow still offer a methadone alternative to the real competitions to come, before the ludicrous freneticism of the contemporary transfer market, the newspapers went weeks on end without even mentioning football); and we weren’t allowed on to the tennis courts at school to kick a ball around. I had longed for and welcomed the previous summers, but this one destroyed so many routines I had come to rely on that it seemed to stifle rather than liberate—as if July and November had swapped places.

Dad arrived at the camp-site in mid afternoon. We walked over to a rock on the edge of the field and sat down; he talked about how little difference the divorce itself would make to our lives, and how we would be able to go to Highbury much more frequently next season. I knew he was right about the divorce (although to admit as much would have rendered his two hundred mile round-trip unnecessary), but the football promise seemed hollow. What, in that case, were we doing sitting on a rock in Wales when Arsenal were playing Everton? Quite a way back down the line my self-pity had got the better of me. I really did blame it all—the terrible food, the nightmarish walks, the cramped, uncomfortable tents, the revolting, fly-plagued holes we were supposed to crap into, and, worst of all, the two empty seats in the West Stand—on the fact that I was the child of estranged parents, the product of a broken home; in fact, I was on a scout camp in the middle of Wales because I had joined the scouts. Not for the first time in my life, and certainly not for the last, a self-righteous gloom had edged out all semblance of logic.

Just before five, we went back to my tent to listen to the results. Both of us knew that to a large extent the success of my father’s mission depended not on his ability to reassure or persuade but on the news from north London, and I think my father was praying even harder than usual for a home win. I hadn’t really been listening to him for the previous twenty minutes anyway. He sat down on somebody else’s sleeping bag, an incongruous figure in his immaculate sixties young executive casual gear, and we tuned in to Radio 2. The Sports Report theme made my eyes water again (in a different, better world we would be sitting on the hot leather seats of Dad’s company car, trying to push through the traffic, and humming along); when it was over, James Alexander Gordon announced a 1-0 home defeat. Dad slumped back against the canvas, tired, knowing now that he’d been wasting his time, and I went back home the next afternoon.

Boring, Boring Arsenal

ARSENAL v NEWCASTLE

27.12.69

“All those terrible nil-nil draws against Newcastle,” my father would complain in years to come. “All those freezing, boring Saturday afternoons.” In fact, there were only two terrible nil-nil draws against Newcastle, but they occurred in my first two seasons at Highbury, so I knew what he meant, and I felt personally responsible for them.

By now I felt guilty about what I had got my father into. He had developed no real affection for the club, and would rather, I think, have taken me to any other First Division ground. I was acutely aware of this, and so a new source of discomfort emerged: as Arsenal huffed and puffed their way towards 1-0 wins and nil-nil draws I wriggled with embarrassment, waiting for Dad to articulate his dissatisfaction. I had discovered after the Swindon game that loyalty, at least in football terms, was not a moral choice like bravery or kindness; it was more like a wart or a hump, something you were stuck with. Marriages are nowhere near as rigid—you won’t catch any Arsenal fans slipping off to Tottenham for a bit of extra-marital slap and tickle, and though divorce is a possibility (you can just stop going if things get too bad), getting hitched again is out of the question. There have been many times over the last twenty-three years when I have pored over the small print of my contract looking for a way out, but there isn’t one. Each humiliating defeat (Swindon, Tranmere, York, Walsall, Rotherham, Wrexham) must be borne with patience, fortitude and forbearance; there is simply nothing that can be done, and that is a realisation that can make you simply squirm with frustration.

Of course I hated the fact that Arsenal were boring (I had by now conceded that their reputation, particularly at this stage in their history, was largely deserved). Of course I wanted them to score zillions of goals and play with the verve and thrill of eleven George Bests, but it wasn’t going to happen, certainly not in the foreseeable future. I was unable to defend my team’s inadequacies to my father—I could see them for myself, and I hated them—and after each feeble attempt at goal and every misplaced pass I would brace myself for the sighs and groans from the seat next to me. I was chained to Arsenal and my dad was chained to me, and there was no way out for any of us.

Pelé

BRAZIL v CZECHOSLOVAKIA

June 1970

Until 1970, people of my age and a good few years older knew more about Ian Ure than they did about the greatest player in the world. We knew that he was supposed to be pretty useful, but we had seen very little evidence of it: he had literally been kicked out of the 1966 tournament by the Portuguese, but he hadn’t really been fit anyway, and nobody I knew could remember anything about Chile in 1962. Six years after Marshall McLuhan published Understanding Media, a good three-quarters of the population of England had about as clear a picture of Pelé as we’d had of Napoleon one hundred and fifty years before.

Mexico ’70 introduced a whole new phase in the consumption of football. It had always been a global game in the sense that the whole world watched it and the whole world played it; but in ’62, when Brazil retained the World Cup, television was still a luxury rather than a necessity (and in any case the technology required to relay the games live from Chile didn’t exist), and in ’66 the South Americans had performed poorly. Brazil were eliminated before the knock-out stage; Argentina went unnoticed until their elimination by England in the quarter-finals, when their captain Rattin was sent off but refused to walk, and Sir Alf referred to them as animals. The only other South American team in the last eight, Uruguay, got thumped 4-0 by Germany. In effect, 1970 was the first major confrontation between Europe and South America that the world had had the opportunity to witness. When Czechoslovakia went one up in Brazil’s opening game, David Coleman observed that “all we ever knew about them has come true”; he was referring to Brazil’s sloppy defence, but the words are those of a man whose job it was to introduce one culture to another.

In the next eighty minutes, everything else we knew about them came true too. They equalised with a direct free kick from Rivelino that dipped and spun and swerved in the thin Mexican air (had I ever seen a goal scored direct from a free kick before? I don’t remember one), and they went 2-1 up when Pelé took a long pass on his chest and volleyed it into the corner. They won 4-1, and we in 2W, the small but significant centre of the global village, were duly awed.

It wasn’t just the quality of the football, though; it was the way they regarded ingenious and outrageous embellishment as though it were as functional and necessary as a corner kick or a throw-in. The only comparison I had at my disposal then was with toy cars: although I had no interest in Dinky or Corgi or Matchbox, I loved Lady Penelope’s pink Rolls-Royce and James Bond’s Aston Martin, both equipped with elaborate devices such as ejector seats and hidden guns which lifted them out of the boringly ordinary. Pelé’s attempt to score from inside his own half with a lob, the dummy he sold to the Peruvian goalkeeper when he went one way round and the ball went the other … these were football’s equivalent of the ejector seat, and made everything else look like so many Vauxhall Vivas. Even the Brazilian way of celebrating a goal—run four strides, jump, punch, run four strides, jump, punch—was alien and funny and enviable, all at the same time.

The strange thing was that it didn’t matter, because England could live with it. When we played Brazil in the second match, we were unlucky to lose 1-0; and in a tournament that provided dozens of superlatives—the best team of all time, the best player of all time, even the two best misses of all time (both Pelé’s)—we chipped in with a couple of our own, the best save of all time (Banks from Pelé, of course) and the best, most perfectly timed tackle of all time (Moore on Jairzinho). It is significant that our contribution to this superlative jamboree was due to defensive excellence, but never mind—for ninety minutes England were every bit as good as the best team in the world. I still cried after the game, though (mainly because I had misunderstood the way the tournament worked—I thought we were out, and Mum had to explain the vagaries of the group system).

In a way Brazil ruined it for all of us. They had revealed a kind of Platonic ideal that nobody, not even the Brazilians, would ever be able to find again; Pelé retired, and in the five subsequent tournaments they only showed little flashes of their ejector-seat football, as if 1970 was a half-remembered dream they had once had of themselves. At school we were left with our Esso World Cup coin collections and a couple of fancy moves to try out; but we couldn’t even get close, and we gave up.

Thumped

ARSENAL v DERBY

31.10.70

By 1970 my father had moved abroad and a new Arsenal routine emerged, one which no longer relied on his more infrequent visits. I was introduced to another, older Arsenal fan at school, known as Rat, by the brother of my classmate Frog, and the two of us travelled up to Highbury together. The first three matches we saw were spectacular successes: 6-2 v West Brom, 4-0 v Forest and 4-0 v Everton. These were consecutive home games and it was a golden autumn.

It is stupid and unforgivably fogeyish to contemplate the prices in 1970, but I’m going to anyway: a return to Paddington cost 30p for a child; the return fare from Paddington to Arsenal on the tube was 10p; and admission to the ground was 15p (25p for adults). Even if you bought a programme it was possible to travel thirty miles and watch a First Division football match for less than 60p.

(Maybe there is a point to this banality after all. If I travel to see my mother on the train now the fare is £2.70 for a day return, a tenfold increase on 1970 adult prices; but in the 91/92 season it now cost £8 to stand on the terraces at Arsenal, a thirty-two-fold increase. For the first time ever, it was cheaper to go to the West End and see the new Woody Allen or Arnold Schwarzenegger—in your own seat—than to stand and watch Barnsley play for a nil-nil draw in the Rumbelows Cup at Highbury. If I were twenty years younger, I wouldn’t be an Arsenal supporter in twenty years’ time: it is not possible for most kids to find ten or fifteen quid every other Saturday, and if I had been unable to go regularly in my early teens then it is unlikely that my interest would have sustained.)

The art deco splendour of the West Stand was not possible without Dad’s deeper pockets, so Rat and I stood in the Schoolboys’ Enclosure, peering at the game through the legs of the linesmen. At the time the club disapproved of perimeter advertising and pre-match DJs, and so we had neither; Chelsea fans may have been listening to the Beatles and the Stones, but at Highbury half-time entertainment was provided by the Metropolitan Police Band and their vocalist, Constable Alex Morgan. Constable Morgan (whose rank never changed throughout his long Highbury career) sang highlights from light operettas and Hollywood musicals: my programme for the Derby game says that he performed Lehar’s “Girls Were Made To Love and Kiss” that afternoon.

It was a bizarre ritual. Just before the kick-off he would hit an extraordinary high note and sustain it as the climax to his performance: in the Lower East Stand, just behind him, the crowd would rise to their feet, while the North Bank would attempt to drown him out by whistling and chanting. The Schoolboys’ Enclosure is the kind of quaint title that only Arsenal, with its mock opera, its Old Etonian chairman and its cripplingly heavy history, could have dreamed up, suggesting as it did a safe haven for Jennings and Darbishire, or William Brown, provided he behaved himself: skewiff caps and grubby blazers, frogs in pockets and Sherbet Fountains—an ideal spot, in fact, for two suburban grammar school boys up in town to watch the Big Game.

The reality of the Schoolboys’ was somewhat different in 1970, just after number one crops and Doctor Martens had begun to appear on the terraces for the first time. The small, narrow section of terrace was in effect a breeding ground for future hooligans, tough kids from Finsbury Park and Holloway either too small or too poor to watch from the North Bank, where their big brothers stood. Rat and I didn’t take any notice of them for the first few weeks; after all, we were all Arsenal fans together, so why should we be worried? Yet something separated us. It wasn’t our accents—neither of us was particularly well-spoken. But it may have been our clothes, or our haircuts, or our clean, lovingly folded scarves, or our fervent pre-match scrutiny of the programme, which we kept spotless in an inside pocket or a duffle bag.

We left a couple of minutes before the end of the Derby game, when Arsenal were winning 2-0 (Kelly and Radford, one in each half). A couple of black boys (black boys! Flipping heck!), maybe our age, but yards taller and from a different planet—the planet Real Life, the planet Secondary Modern, the planet Inner City—jostled us as we walked past; my heart skipped a couple of beats and I made for the exit. They followed. We moved a little faster, anxious to get through the maze of alleyways and turnstiles that led out of the ground. Out in the street, I knew the kids wouldn’t bother us in the middle of the crowd of grown-ups flooding away from the stadium.

The crowd didn’t seem to perturb them in the slightest, however. We broke into a run towards the tube station; so did they. Rat made it, but they caught up with me, pushed me against the wall of the stadium, smacked me in the face a couple of times, stole my red-and-white scarf and left me in a crumpled, traumatised heap on the pavement. People—adults with a reassuring paternal demeanour—stepped over me or around me, just as I have walked around innumerable beatings outside grounds. I had been hit much harder at school (I was not only small but cheeky, a particularly unfortunate combination), but usually by people I knew, which made it somehow acceptable. This was different. This was much scarier: I didn’t understand what the limits were—had I been lucky or unlucky?—and though I knew I was obsessed enough with the team to go back and stand in the same place again, the prospect of getting thumped once a fortnight at twenty to five was bleak.

I really don’t think that I was aware of class then. A few years later, when I discovered politics, I would have felt that I deserved a smack in the mouth for being a privileged middle-class white male—indeed, in my late teens, when the chief source of my ideological input was the first Clash album, I probably would have delivered it myself—but then I just felt a deep sense of disappointment and shame. Disappointment because I had finally begun to suspect that some people didn’t go to football for the Right Reasons (devotion to the Gunners, or at the least a yen for some sparkling wing play); shame because, despite my size and youth, I was still a male and there is something in males, something stupid and unreconstructed but powerful nonetheless, that simply refuses to tolerate anything that might be construed as weakness. (The above version of the afternoon’s events is archetypally masculine: there were two of them against one of me; I was tiny, they were huge, and so on. It could well have been that I was assaulted by a blind seven-year-old with one arm, but my memory has properly protected me from any suspicion that I might have been a wimp from the sticks.)

Perhaps the worst of it was that I couldn’t unburden the experience on to my mum. If I told her, I’d be banned from going to football unaccompanied by my father for years to come; so I kept it to myself, confessed that I’d left the scarf—a present from my gran—on the tube, endured endless complaints about my carelessness and irresponsibility, and was denied my customary Saturday night trip to the chip shop. Any theories about the brutalising experience of urban deprivation would have been wasted on me that night; I was only interested in suburban deprivation, which seemed to me the cruellest deprivation of them all.

Can You See Me on the Box?

SOUTHAMPTON v ARSENAL

10.4.71

On holiday in Bournemouth, where both my grandmothers lived, and conveniently there is an away match at Southampton. So I book a coach ticket, travel along the coast and squirm through a packed Dell to the far edge of the terrace; and the next day, when Southern show the highlights of the game on TV, there I am on the bottom left of the screen every time a corner is taken (McLintock scored from one of them, the decider in a 2-1 win): a sober lad, seven days short of my fourteenth birthday, unmistakably pre-pubescent … but I’m not waving or leering or shoving the boy standing next to me, just standing there, a still point in the middle of all the juvenile hyperactivity around me.

Why was I so serious? I was a child everywhere else: at home; at school, where chronic fits of the giggles seized me well into the sixth form; and out with my friends, one or two of whom now had girlfriends, the most side-splittingly, gut-bustingly, snot-dribblingly hilarious development the rest of us had ever seen. (Symbolically, a nickname was altered. Larry, so-called because of his physical and stylistic resemblances to Larry Lloyd, the Liverpool centre-half, became Caz, because of the interest he now shared with Casanova, the Italian striker. We were delighted with the witticism.) But when I was watching Arsenal, I don’t think I felt relaxed enough to laugh until I was well into my twenties; if I had been filmed by the corner flag at any time between 1968 and 1981 my expression would have been the same.

The simple truth is that obsessions just aren’t funny, and that obsessives don’t laugh. But there’s a complicated truth here as well: I don’t think I was very happy, and the problem with being a thirteen-year-old depressive is that when the rest of life is so uproarious, which it invariably is, there is no suitable context for the gloom. How can you express misery when people keep making you snigger all the time? There was no sniggering at Arsenal games, however—not from me, anyway. And even though I had friends who would have been happy to accompany me to matches, significantly my support soon became a solitary activity: the following season I watched around twenty-five games, seventeen or eighteen of them on my own. I just didn’t want to have fun at football. I had fun everywhere else, and I was sick of it. What I needed more than anything was a place where unfocused unhappiness could thrive, where I could be still and worry and mope; I had the blues, and when I watched my team I could unwrap them and let them breathe a little.

How I Won the Double

ARSENAL v NEWCASTLE

17.4.71

In a little over a year, things had changed. The team was still short of stars and pretty low on verve, but they suddenly became very hard to beat. In 1970 the dismal seventeen-year hunt for a trophy finally ended when Arsenal won the European Fairs Cup—amazingly, in some style. After thrashing Ajax, Johann Cruyff and all, in the semi, they came from behind to beat Anderlecht of Belgium 4-3 in the final. They won 3-0 at Highbury in the second leg, and grown men danced on the pitch and wept with the relief of it all. I wasn’t there. I wasn’t allowed to go to a midweek match on a school night on my own.

1971 was Arsenal’s annus mirabilis. They won the League Championship and the FA Cup in the same season, the famous Double that only three teams this century have managed. In fact, they won the trophies in the same week: on Monday night they won the Championship at Tottenham, and on the Saturday the Cup against Liverpool at Wembley. I wasn’t there. I wasn’t at Tottenham because I still wasn’t allowed to go to a midweek match on a school night on my own; I wasn’t at Wembley because Dad didn’t come through with a ticket, despite promises to the contrary and, yes, I’m still bitter twenty years on.

So I wasn’t there for anything. (I wasn’t even there for the parade through Islington on the Sunday after the Cup Final. I had to go to see my Auntie Vi in Dulwich.) I missed it all. And as this book is about the consumption of football, rather than football itself, the Double year—Arsenal’s finest season of the century—doesn’t really have much place in my story, and how about that for impressionism? Sure, I threw a radio jubilantly against my bedroom wall when the final whistle blew at Tottenham; I literally went dizzy with joy when Charlie George scored the winner in the Cup Final and lay on his back with his arms outstretched; I strutted around school, trying to work out how I could humiliate my classmates in the same way they had humiliated me two years before, settling instead for a beatific smile which was understood by both teachers and boys. As far as they were concerned, I was Arsenal, and I was entitled to my triumphant bliss.

But I didn’t think so, not really. I’d earned the pain against Swindon, but I hadn’t contributed to the Double triumph in the same way, unless you counted a dozen or so League games, a school blazer groaning with lapel badges and a bedroom covered in magazine pictures as a contribution. The others, those who’d got hold of Final tickets and queued for five hours at Tottenham, they’ve got more to say about the Double than I.

I try now to hang on to the fact that a couple of weeks earlier, before all this glory, I had managed to place myself at the centre of the Double narrative. On my birthday Dad and I went to Arsenal v Newcastle (a terrible game, again); I sat clutching a radio that he had given me (the very radio, in fact, that I smashed on 3rd May), pocket-sized for Saturday afternoons. Leeds were top of the First Division, and that afternoon they had a home game against West Brom, fifth from bottom and without an away win all season. There used to be a comic strip called “Billy’s Boots”, about a boy whose magic boots transformed their mediocre owner into a superstar; I suddenly seemed to be in possession of a radio which transformed the results of the most useless team into dramatic away victories. When I turned it on shortly after half-time, West Brom scored; when I did it again, they scored a second time. The tannoy at Highbury announced the news and the crowd went berserk; Charlie George scored the only goal and Arsenal went top of the League for the first time that season.

The gift I got that afternoon was priceless, like world peace or an end to Third World poverty, something that couldn’t be bought for a million pounds—unless my dad had bought the referee at Leeds for a million pounds, the only possible explanation for some of his decisions that afternoon. One of West Brom’s goals was by general consensus hundreds of yards offside, provoking the crowd into invading the pitch, which in turn resulted in Leeds being banned from their ground for the first few games of the following season. “The crowd has gone mad and they have every right to do so,” Barry Davies pronounced memorably on Match of the Day that night; those were the days, when TV commentators actively encouraged riots rather than argued pompously for the return of National Service. If you did slip the ref something, then thanks, Dad. Brilliant idea. Would Leeds have lost at home to West Brom if it hadn’t been my birthday? Would the game at Arsenal have finished nil-nil, as Arsenal v Newcastle games had always done before? Would we then have gone on to win the League? I doubt it.

Another City

CHELSEA v TOTTENHAM

January 1972

It is true to say that while I made a natural Arsenal supporter—I too was often dour, defensive, argumentative, repressed—my father belonged at Stamford Bridge. Chelsea were flamboyant, unpredictable and, it has to be said, not the most reliable of teams; my father had a taste for pink shirts and theatrical ties, and, stern moralist that I was, I think I felt that he could have done with a little more consistency. (Parenthood, George Graham would say, is a marathon, not a sprint.) Whatever the reason, Dad patently enjoyed going to Chelsea more than our trips to Highbury, and it was easy to see why. We once spotted Tommy Steele (or maybe it was John Alderton) coming out of the Gents in Chelsea’s North Stand, and before the games we ate in one of the Italian restaurants on the King’s Road. Once we went to look around the Chelsea Drugstore, where I bought the second Led Zeppelin album and sniffed the cigarette smoke in the air suspiciously. (I was as literal-minded as any Arsenal centre-half.)

Chelsea had Osgood and Cooke and Hudson, all flash and flair, and their version of football was bewilderingly different from Arsenal’s (this League Cup semi-final, one of the best games I had ever seen, finished 2-2). But more importantly, the Bridge and its environs presented me with a different but still familiar version of London: familiar because the middle-class suburban boy has always been aware of it. It was not dissimilar to the London we already knew from trips to see pantomimes and films and museums, a busy, bright-lights-big-city London supremely aware that it was the centre of the world; and the people that I saw at Chelsea in those days were centre-of-the-world people. Football was a fashionable game, and Chelsea were a fashionable team; the models and actors and young executives who were cheering the Blues on were beautiful to look at and made the Bridge (the seats, anyway) an exquisitely exotic place.

But this wasn’t what I came to football for. Arsenal and its neighbourhood was for me much more exotic than anything I would ever see around the King’s Road, which was full of an old-hat ho-hum glitz; football had gripped me because of its otherness. All those quiet terraced streets around Highbury and Finsbury Park, all those embittered but still peculiarly loyal used-car salesmen … now that was real exoticism; the London that a grammar school boy from the Thames Valley could never have seen for himself no matter how many times he went to the Casino cinema to see films in Cinerama. We wanted different things, my dad and I. Just as he was starting to want a part of what Chelsea was all about (and just as he was, for the first time in his life, able to afford it), I wanted to go tearing off in the other direction.

Islington Boy

READING v ARSENAL

5.2.72

The white south of England middle-class Englishman and woman is the most rootless creature on earth; we would rather belong to any other community in the world. Yorkshiremen, Lancastrians, Scots, the Irish, blacks, the rich, the poor, even Americans and Australians have something they can sit in pubs and bars and weep about, songs to sing, things they can grab for and squeeze hard when they feel like it, but we have nothing, or at least nothing we want. Hence the phenomenon of mock-belonging, whereby pasts and backgrounds are manufactured and massaged in order to provide some kind of acceptable cultural identity. Who was it that sang “I Wanna Be Black”? The title says it all, and everybody has met people who really do: in the mid-seventies, young, intelligent and otherwise self-aware white men and women in London began to adopt a Jamaican patois that frankly didn’t suit them at all. How we all wished we came from the Chicago Projects, or the Kingston ghettos, or the mean streets of north London or Glasgow! All those aitch-dropping, vowel-mangling punk rockers with a public school education! All those Hampshire girls with grandparents in Liverpool or Brum! All those Pogues fans from Hertfordshire singing Irish rebel songs! All those Europhiles who will tell you that though their mothers live in Reigate, their sensibilities reside in Rome!

Ever since I have been old enough to understand what it means to be suburban I have wanted to come from somewhere else, preferably north London. I have already dropped as many aitches as I can—the only ones left in my diction have dug themselves too far into definite articles to be winkled out—and I use plural verb forms with singular subjects whenever possible. This was a process that began shortly after my first visits to Highbury, continued throughout my suburban grammar school career, and escalated alarmingly when I arrived at university. My sister, on the other hand, who also has problems with her suburban roots, went the other way when she went to college, and suddenly started to speak like the Duchess of Devonshire; when we introduced each other to our respective sets of friends they found the experience perplexing in the extreme. Which of us, they seemed to be wondering, had been adopted? Had she fallen on hard times or had I struck lucky? Our mother, born and bred in south-east London but a Home Counties resident for nearly forty years, cuts the accents neatly down the middle.

In a way nobody can blame any of us, the Mockneys or the cod Irish, the black wannabees or the pseudo Sloanes. The 1944 Education Act, the first Labour Government, Elvis, beatniks, the Beatles and the Stones, the sixties … we never stood a chance. I blame the eleven-plus. Before the war, maybe, our parents could have scraped the money together to send us to minor public schools, and we would have received our pisspoor cheapskate third-hand classical educations and gone to work in a bank; the eleven-plus, designed to create a meritocracy, made state schools safe for nice families again. Post-war grammar school boys and girls stepped into a void; none of the available cultures seemed to belong to us, and we had to pinch one quick. And what is suburban post-war middle-class English culture anyway? Jeffrey Archer and Evita, Flanders and Swann and the Goons, Adrian Mole and Merchant-Ivory, Francis Durbridge Presents … and John Cleese’s silly walk? It’s no wonder we all wanted to be Muddy Waters or Charlie George.

The Reading-Arsenal fourth-round Cup-tie in 1972 was the first and most painful of the many exposures to come. Reading was my nearest League team, an unhappy geographical accident that I would have done anything to change; Highbury was thirty-odd miles away, Elm Park a mere eight. Reading fans had Berkshire accents, and incredibly they didn’t seem to mind; they didn’t even try to speak like Londoners. I stood with the home supporters—the match was all-ticket, and it was much easier to go to Reading than to north London to get one—and while I waited my still customary ninety minutes for the game to begin, a whole family (a family!), mother, father and son, all kitted up in blue-and-white scarves and rosettes (rosettes!), started talking to me.

They asked me questions about my team and the stadium, made jokes—peasants!—about Charlie George’s hair, offered me biscuits, lent me their programmes and newspapers. I was beginning to enjoy the conversation. My assumed Cockney sounded to my ears flawless against their loathsome burr, and our relationship was beginning to take on a gratifying city-slicker-meets-hicks-from-the-sticks hue.

It was when they asked me about schools that it all went terribly wrong: they had heard about London comprehensives, and wanted to know whether it was all true, and for what seemed like hours I weaved an elaborate fantasy based on the exploits of the half-dozen small-time thugs at the grammar. I can only presume that I had managed to convince myself, and that by this stage my town had, in my head, transmuted into a north London village somewhere between Holloway and Islington; because when the father asked where I lived, I told him the truth.

“Maidenhead?” the father repeated, incredulous. “Maidenhead? But that’s four miles down the road!”

“Nearer ten,” I replied, but he seemed unconvinced that the extra six miles made much difference, and I could see his point. I was blushing.

Then he finished me off. “You shouldn’t be supporting Arsenal this afternoon,” he said. “You should be supporting your local team.”

It was the most humiliating moment of my teenage years. A complete, elaborate and perfectly imagined world came crashing down around me and fell in chunks at my feet. I wanted Arsenal to avenge me, to beat the Third Division team and their pedantic, dull-witted fans into a pulp; but we won 2-1 with a second-half Pat Rice deflection, and at the end of the game the Reading father ruffled my hair and told me that at least it wouldn’t take me long to get home.

It didn’t stop me, though, and it only took a couple of weeks to rebuild the London Borough of Maidenhead. But I made sure that the next time I went to an away game it was precisely that—far away, where people might believe that my Thames Valley hometown had its own tube station and West Indian community and terrible, insoluble social problems.

Happy

ARSENAL v DERBY

12.2.72

For a match to be really, truly memorable back then, the kind of game that sent me home buzzing inside with the fulfilment of it all, these conditions had to be met: I had to go with my dad; we had to eat lunch in the chip shop (sitting down, no sharing of tables); we had to have seats in the Upper West Stand (the West Stand because you can see down the players’ tunnel from there and so can greet the arrival of the team on the pitch before anyone in the ground), between the half-way line and the North Bank; Arsenal had to play well and win by two clear goals; the stadium had to be full, or nearly full, which usually implied an opposing team of some significance; the game had to be filmed, by ITV for The Big Match on Sunday afternoon rather than by the BBC for Match of the Day (I liked the anticipation, I guess); and Dad had to be wearing warm clothes. He often travelled over from France without an overcoat, forgetting that his Saturday afternoon was likely to be spent in sub-zero temperatures, and his discomfort was so violent that I felt guilty insisting that we stayed right until the final whistle. (I always did insist, however, and when we reached the car he was often so cold that he could hardly speak; I felt bad about it, but not bad enough to risk missing a goal.)

These were enormous demands, and it is hardly surprising that everything came together just the once, as far as I am aware, for this game against Derby in 1972, when an Alan Ball-inspired Arsenal beat the eventual League Champions 2-0 with two Charlie George goals, one a penalty and the other a superb diving header. And because there was a table for us in the chip shop, and because the referee pointed to the spot when Ball was brought down instead of waving play on, and because my dad remembered his coat, I have allowed this game to become something it wasn’t: it now represents for me the whole works, the entire fixation, but that’s wrong. Arsenal were too good, Charlie’s goal was too spectacular, the crowd was too big and too appreciative of the team’s performance … The 12th of February did happen, in just the way I have described it, but only its atypicality is important now. Life isn’t, and has never been, a 2-0 home victory against the League leaders after a fish-and-chip lunch.

My Mum and Charlie George

DERBY COUNTY v ARSENAL

26.2.72

I begged and pleaded and nagged, and eventually my mother gave in and allowed me to travel to away games. Back then I was jubilant; now I’m indignant. What did she think she was doing? Didn’t she ever read the papers or watch TV? Hadn’t she heard of hooligans? Was she really unaware of what Football Specials, the infamous trains that carried fans all over the country, were like? I could have been killed.

Now that I think about it, my mother’s part in all this was actually quite mysterious. She didn’t like me spending my money on Led Zeppelin records, understandably, or on cinema tickets, and she didn’t even seem that keen on me buying books. And yet somehow it was OK for me to travel to London or Derby or Southampton on an almost weekly basis and take my chances with any group of nutters that I happened upon. She has never discouraged my mania for football; in fact it was she who bought my ticket for the Reading Cup-tie, driving down a frozen, snow-covered A4 and queuing up while I was at school. And some eight years later I came home to find on our dining table an impossibly elusive ticket for the West Ham-Arsenal Cup Final that she had bought (for twenty quid, money she didn’t really have) from a man at work.

Well, yes, of course it was something to do with masculinity, but I don’t think that her usually tacit, occasionally active football support was supposed to be for my benefit; it was for hers. On Saturdays, it seems to me now, we enacted a weird little parody of a sitcom married couple: she would take me down to the station, I’d go on the train up to London, do my man’s stuff and ring her from the forecourt call-box when I got back for a lift home. She would then put my tea on the table and I ate while I talked about my day and, sweetly, she would ask questions about a subject that she didn’t know much about, but tried to take an interest in anyway, for my sake. If things had not gone well she would tiptoe around them; on a good day my satisfaction would fill the living room. In Maidenhead, this was exactly what happened from Monday to Friday, every single weekday evening. The only difference was that in our house we didn’t get around to it until the weekend.

There is, I know, an argument which says that acting out the role of one’s father with one’s mother isn’t necessarily the best way of ensuring psychic health in later years. But then, we all do it at some time or another, chaps, don’t we?

Away games were my equivalent of staying late at the office, and the fifth-round Cup-tie at Derby was the first time I had got to do it properly. In those days there were no restrictions on travelling in the way there are now (British Rail eventually abandoned the Football Specials, and the clubs make their own travel arrangements): we could roll up at St Pancras, buy a dirt-cheap train ticket, and pile on to a dilapidated train, the corridors of which were patrolled by police with guard dogs. Much of the journey took place in darkness—light bulbs were shattered at wearyingly brief intervals—which made reading difficult, although I always, always took a book with me and spent ages finding the carriages which contained middle-aged men who would have no interest in attracting the attention of the alsatians.

At our destination we were met by hundreds and hundreds of police, who then escorted us to the ground by a circuitous route away from the city centre; it was during these walks that my urban hooligan fantasies were given free rein. I was completely safe, protected not only by the law but by my fellow supporters, and I had therefore been liberated to bellow along in my still-unbroken voice with the chanted threats of the others. I didn’t look terribly hard, in truth: I was as yet nowhere near as big as I should have been, and wore black-framed Brains-style National Health reading glasses, although these I hid away for the duration of the route marches, presumably to make myself just that little bit more terrifying. But those who mumble about the loss of identity football fans must endure miss the point: this loss of identity can be a paradoxically enriching process. Who wants to be stuck with who they are the whole time? I for one wanted time out from being a jug-eared, bespectacled, suburban twerp once in a while; I loved being able to frighten the shoppers in Derby or Norwich or Southampton (and they were frightened—you could see it). My opportunities for intimidating people had been limited hitherto, though I knew it wasn’t me that made people hurry to the other side of the road, hauling their children after them; it was us, and I was a part of us, an organ in the hooligan body. The fact that I was the appendix—small, useless, hidden out of the way somewhere in the middle—didn’t matter in the slightest.

If going to the ground was all glory and raw power, standing inside it, and getting back to the station afterwards, was less invigorating. Violence inside the grounds has all but disappeared now, for a variety of reasons: fans are separated properly (back then, if you fancied your chances in the opposition end, you could just walk through the turnstiles), away fans are usually kept back after games until the stadium has cleared, the policing is a lot more sophisticated, and so on. For the first half of the seventies, however, there was a fight at every single Arsenal game I attended. At Highbury they mostly took place on the Clock End, where the opposition’s fans stood; usually they were brief flurries, Arsenal fans charging into the enemy, the enemy scattering, the police taking control. These were ritualistic charges, the violence usually contained in the movement itself rather than in fists and boots (it was this “running” that caused the Heysel tragedy, rather than any real physical attack). But occasionally, particularly against West Ham, Tottenham, Chelsea or Manchester United, the trouble was just as likely to be at the North Bank end of the ground where the noise comes from: when away fans could amass sufficient numbers they would attempt to seize the home fans’ territory as if it were an island of strategic military importance.

Consequently it was very difficult to watch football safely at away grounds. Standing in the section “reserved” for visitors didn’t ensure any protection; in fact, it merely informed the opposition of your identity. Standing at the other end was either dangerous (if the Arsenal fans were intending to invade the home end) or pointless—why bother to travel half the length of the country if you then had to pretend to support the opponents? I settled for a place along the side, if possible, where it was quiet; if not, then in the “away” end, but towards a corner, as far from the more gung-ho, members of the Arsenal touring party as possible. But I never enjoyed away games. I felt constantly nervous, often with good reason: at random points throughout the afternoon, fighting would break out, prefaced by the same kind of roar that greeted a goal; but the fact that the roar might occur when the play was nowhere near either end of the pitch was disorienting in the extreme. I have seen players look around, perplexed that their efforts at a throw-in should meet with such vocal enthusiasm.

The afternoon at Derby was worse than most. There had been trouble before the game and at sporadic intervals during it, and though I was way down the terraces, hidden among younger kids and their fathers, I was scared—so scared that in fact I was ambivalent about an Arsenal victory. A draw would have suited me fine, but I could live with defeat and an exit from the Cup if it meant I could get back to Derby station without anything untoward happening to my head. It is at times like this that the players have more responsibilities than they could ever perceive or understand; in any case, this sort of perception was not one of Charlie George’s most obvious qualities.

Charlie George is one of the few seventies icons who has so far managed to avoid being deconstructed, possibly because he appears at first glance to be one of the identikit George Best/Rodney Marsh/Stan Bowles long-haired, wayward wasters who were two a new pee twenty years ago. It is true that he was as outrageously gifted as the best of the breed, and that these gifts were appallingly underexploited throughout his career (he only played for England once, and towards the end of his time at Arsenal could not even gain a place in the first team); all this and more—his temper, his problems with managers, the fierce devotion he attracted from younger fans and women—was par for the course, commonplace at a time when football was beginning to resemble pop music in both its presentation and its consumption.

Charlie George differed slightly from the rebel norm on two counts. Firstly, he had actually spent his early teenage years on the terraces of the club for which he later played; and though this is not unusual in itself—plenty of Liverpool and Newcastle players supported these clubs when they were young—George is one of the few genius misfits to have jumped straight over the perimeter fence into a club shirt and shorts. Best was Irish, Bowles and Marsh were itinerant … not only was George Arsenal’s own, nurtured on the North Bank and in the youth team, but he looked and behaved as if running around on the pitch dressed as a player were the simplest way to avoid ejection from the stadium. Physically, he did not fit the mould: he was powerfully built and over six feet tall, too big to be George Best. On my birthday in 1971, shortly before his goal against Newcastle, one of the frequent red mists that plagued him had descended, and he had grabbed a rugged Newcastle defender by the throat and lifted him from the ground. This was not misfit petulance, this was hard-man menace, and the likely lads on the terraces have never had a more convincing representative.

And secondly, he was not a media rebel. He could not give interviews (his inarticulacy was legendary and genuine); his long, lank hair remained unfeathered and unlayered right up until the time he unwisely decided upon a bubble perm from hell some time in the mid-seventies, and when he first played in the team, at the beginning of the 69/70 season, it looked suspiciously as if he were trying to grow out a number one crop; and he seemed uninterested in womanising—Susan Farge, the fiancée whose name I still remember, is intimidatingly prominent in most of the off-the-pitch photographs. He was a big star, and the media were interested, but they didn’t know what to do with him. The Egg Marketing Board tried, but their slogan, “E for B and Charlie George”, was significantly incomprehensible. Somehow, he had made himself unpackageable, media-proof—possibly the very last star of any iconic stature to do so. (For some reason, however, he managed to remain in the otherwise colander-like consciousness of my grandmother for some years after his retirement. “Charlie George!” she spat disapprovingly and opaquely circa 1983, when I told her that I was off to Highbury to watch a game. What he means to her will, I fear, never properly be understood.)

At Derby he was astonishing on a dreadful, muscle-jellifying winter pitch (Those pitches! The Baseball Ground at Derby, White Hart Lane, Wembley even … was winter grass really an eighties innovation, like the video machine or frozen yoghurt?). He scored twice, two screamers, and to the tune of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s then-recent hit, we sang “Charlie George! Superstar! How many goals have you scored so far?” (to which the Derby fans, like others all over the country had done before them, replied “Charlie George! Superstar! Walks like a woman and he wears a bra!” It is hard not to laugh when people remember the sixties and seventies as the golden age of terrace wit). Despite Charlie’s double, the game finished 2-2 after a late Derby equaliser, and I therefore got the draw I’d been cravenly hoping for, but not the aggro-free walk back to the station that was supposed to be mine as a consequence.

It was Charlie’s fault. A goal, for reasons that would require a book in itself to explain, is a provocative gesture, especially when the terraces are already bathed in a sort of half-light of violence, as they were on that afternoon. I understood that Charlie was a professional footballer, and that if an opportunity to score came his way then our tenuous safety should not in itself be a consideration. This much was clear. But whether it was absolutely essential to celebrate by running over to the Derby fans—in whose snarling, southern-poof hating, Cockney baiting, skinheaded, steel-toecapped company we were obliged to spend the remainder of the afternoon, and through whose hostile, alleywayed territory we were obliged to scuttle after the final whistle—and making an unambiguous take-that-you-provincial-fuckers V-sign … this was much more opaque. The way I saw it, Charlie’s sense of responsibility and duty had momentarily let him down.

He got booed off the pitch and fined by the FA; we got chased all the way on to our train, bottles and cans cascading around our ears. Cheers, Charlie.

Social History

ARSENAL v DERBY

29.2.72

The replay finished nil-nil, a game with no merit whatsoever. But it remains the only first-team game that has taken place at Highbury on a midweek afternoon during my Arsenal time: February 1972 was the time of the power workers’ strike. For all of us it meant sporadic electricity, candlelight, occasional cold suppers, but for third-year football fans it meant visits to the Electricity Board showroom, where the cut-off rota was posted, in order to discover which of us were able to offer The Big Match on Sunday afternoons. For Arsenal, the power crisis meant no floodlights, hence the Tuesday afternoon replay.

I went to the game, despite school, and though I had imagined that the crowd might consist of me, a few other teenage truants, and a scattering of pensioners, in fact there were more than sixty-three thousand people there, the biggest crowd of the season. I was disgusted. No wonder the country was going to the dogs! My truancy prevented me from sharing my disquiet with my mother (an irony that escaped me at the time), but what was going on?

For this thirtysomething, the midweek afternoon Cup-tie (West Ham played giant-killers Hereford on a Tuesday afternoon as well, and got a forty-two-thousand-plus crowd) now has that wonderful early seventies sheen, like an episode of The Fenn Street Gang or a packet of Number Six cigarettes; maybe it was just that everyone at Upton Park and Highbury, all one hundred and six thousand of us, wanted to walk down one of the millions of tiny alleys of social history.

Me and Bob McNab

STOKE CITY v ARSENAL

(Villa Park) 15.4.72

The 71/72 FA Cup was a cracker, an apparently endless source of wonder and tricky trivia questions. Which two teams took eleven hours to settle their fourth qualifying round tie? Which player scored nine goals in his team’s first round 11-0 win over Margate? Who did he play for then? Where was he transferred to later? Who were the two Hereford players who scored in their Southern League side’s astonishing 2-1 victory against First Division Newcastle? (A clue: the surnames have special resonance for Arsenal fans.) Oxford City and Alvechurch; Ted Macdougall; Bournemouth; Manchester United; Ronnie Radford and Ricky George: one point for each, seven points and you’ve won a pair of Malcolm Macdonald sideboards.

And then there were the afternoon Cup replays and Charlie’s V-sign, and at Villa Park, in our semi-final against Stoke, our goalkeeper Bob Wilson was carried off in the middle of our 1-1 draw (John Radford had to take over) and I spoke to Bob McNab, the Arsenal left-back, a couple of hours before the kick-off.

I went up to Villa Park with Hislam, a wannabee hooligan from Maidenhead whom I ran into on trains every now and again. I was in awe of him. He wore a white butcher’s coat covered in crudely drawn red Arsenal slogans, de rigueur for anyone with any terrace pretensions; and on the way home from games he would sit down next to me on the 5.35 from Paddington and ask me the score, explaining that he had been detained in the police cells under the pitch and therefore had no idea of what had been going on above his head. Jenkins, the apparently legendary leader of the North Bank (I’d never heard of him, needless to say), was a personal friend of his.

I was soon to find out, predictably, that this was all rubbish, and that Hislam’s relationship with reality was tenuous even on a good day. If there was such a person as Jenkins (the Leader, a scheming hooligan-general responsible for military tactics, probably has its roots in urban, or even suburban, myth) Hislam didn’t know him; and even I, desperate to number among my acquaintances a real-life criminal, began to wonder how an ostensibly harmless-looking fourteen-year-old managed to get himself arrested every single Saturday for offences which remained frustratingly vague.

Football culture is so amorphous, so unwieldy, so big (when I listened to Hislam talk about incidents in King’s Cross and Euston and the back streets of Paddington, the whole of London seemed within the grasp of its tentacles) that it inevitably attracts more than its fair share of fantasists. If you wish to have taken part in a fearsome battle with Tottenham fans, it doesn’t have to have happened within the stadium where it could easily be verified. It could have taken place at a station, or on a route to the ground, or in an enemy pub: football rumours of this kind have always been as thick and as impenetrable as smog. Hislam knew this, and was as happy as Larry inventing his gruesome and improbable lies; football was perfectly equipped to feed his ravenous appetite for self-deception, just as it was able to feed mine. For a while, we had a satisfying symbiosis going. He wanted to believe he was a hooligan, and so did I, and for a while he could have told me anything.

Dad had obtained two terrace tickets for the game for me (I hadn’t explained to him the full extent of my football solitude) and Hislam had generously agreed to take the spare. When we arrived at Villa Park we had to find the box office to pick them up. It was one-thirty, and a few of the players were there, distributing tickets to wives and family and friends. Bob McNab, the left-back, was one of them; he hadn’t played in the first team since January, and I was surprised to see him. I couldn’t believe that Bertie Mee was going to give him his first run-out for three months in an FA Cup semi-final. In the end my curiosity overcame my shyness.

“Are you playing, Bob?”

“Yeah.”

Dialogue in works of autobiography is quite naturally viewed with some suspicion. How on earth can the writer remember verbatim conversations that happened fifteen, twenty, fifty years ago? But “Are you playing, Bob?” is one of only four sentences I have ever uttered to any Arsenal player (for the record the others are “How’s the leg, Bob?” to Bob Wilson, recovering from injury the following season; “Can I have your autograph, please?” to Charlie George, Pat Rice, Alan Ball and Bertie Mee; and, well, “How’s the leg, Brian?” to Brian Marwood outside the Arsenal club shop when I was old enough to know better) and I can therefore vouch for its absolute authenticity.

I have imagined conversations, of course. Even now I frequently take Alan Smith or David O’Leary to the pub, buy them a low-alcohol lager, sit them down and talk until last-orders and beyond about George Graham’s alleged parsimony, Charlie Nicholas’s fitness or John Lukic’s transfer. But the plain truth is that the club means more to us than it does to them. Where were they twenty years ago? Where will they be in twenty years’ time? Where will they be in two years’ time, a couple of them? (At Villa Park or Old Trafford, bearing down on the Arsenal goal with the ball at their feet, that’s where.)

No, I’m happy with things the way they are, thank you very much. They’re players and I’m a fan, and I don’t want to blur the boundaries. Men laugh at what they see as the grotesque inadequacy of groupies, but a one-night stand with a star is perfectly understandable, and has its own balance and logic. (If I were a nubile twenty-year-old, I’d probably be down at the training ground throwing my panties at David Rocastle, although this kind of confession from a man, however New he is, is regrettably still not acceptable.) Yet many of us have had opportunities to talk to the players, at boot launches or sports shop openings, in nightclubs or restaurants, and most of us have taken them. (“How’s the leg, Bob?” “Thought you were brilliant Saturday, Tony.” “Hey, make sure you do Tottenham next week, yeah?”) And what are these clumsy, embarrassing, fumbling encounters if they are not passes, beery gropes in the dark? We’re not young and desirable nymphettes, we’re grown-ups with pot-bellies, and we have nothing to offer at all. Professional footballers are as beautiful and unattainable as models, and I don’t want to be a middle-aged bottom-pincher.

I hadn’t worked all this out then, when I saw Bob McNab in his pre-match suit. And when I got into the ground, and two blokes in front of me started talking about team changes, I told them that McNab was playing, because he’d told me himself, and they looked at me and then looked at each other and shook their heads (although when the changes were read out over the tannoy they looked at me again). Meanwhile Hislam had taken himself off up to the top of Villa’s massive Holte End, to be with The Lads, and was busy telling anyone who would listen how he’d bunked into the ground under the turnstiles (he made this claim to someone he may or may not have known as soon as we walked into the ground). Which of us was the fantasist here? I was, obviously. No one talks to the players before the game, but bunking in without paying … what would be the point of lying about that if you had a ticket stub in your pocket?

Wembley II—the Nightmare Continues

LEEDS v ARSENAL

5.5.72

A classic anxiety dream, banal in its obviousness. I am attempting to get to Wembley, and I have a ticket for the Final in my pocket. I leave home in plenty of time for the game, but every attempt to travel towards the stadium takes me in the opposite direction. At first this is just an amusing irritation, but eventually it induces panic; at two minutes to three I am in central London, trying to hail a cab and beginning to realise that I’m not going to get to see the match. I like the dream though, in a funny sort of way. I have had it six times now, before every Cup Final that Arsenal have played in since 1972, and so it is a nightmare inextricably linked with success. I wake up sweating, but the sweat serves as the first anticipatory moment of the day.

My Cup Final ticket had come directly from the club, rather than via touts and my dad, and I was ludicrously proud of it. (Even more eccentric was the joy I took in the compliment slip that came with it, which I stored away for years afterwards.) Cup tickets were allocated on the basis of the numbered vouchers that appeared on the back of the programme. If you had all the programmes, as I did, you were more or less assured of a ticket; thus the system was supposed to reward loyal fans, although in effect it rewarded those with enough energy to track down the programmes they needed among the ad hoc programme stands outside the ground (a laborious process which constituted a kind of loyalty in itself). I had been to the vast majority of the home games and a few of the aways; I had as much right as any, and probably more right than most, to a spot on the terraces at Wembley, and so my pride came from the feeling of belonging I had lacked in the previous year.

(This sense of belonging is crucial to an understanding of why people travel to the meaningless game in Plymouth on a Wednesday night, and without it football would fail as a business. But where does it end? Those fans who travel the length and breadth of the country every week; does the club “belong” to them more than it does to me? And the old geezer who only gets along ten times a season, but has been going to Highbury since 1938 … doesn’t the club belong to him too, and he to the club? Of course. But it took me another few years to discover that; in the meantime, it was no pain, no gain. Unless I had suffered and shivered, wept into my scarf and paid through the nose, it was simply not possible to take pleasure in or credit for the good times.)

The game itself was as dismal as all the other Arsenal-Leeds games had been: the two teams had developed something of a History, and their meetings were usually violent and low-scoring. My friend Bob McNab was booked in the first two minutes, and from that moment there was a procession of free kicks and squabbles, ankle taps and pointing fingers, and snarls. What made it worse was that this was the Centenary Cup Final; I am sure that if the top brass at the FA had had a free hand in choosing who the two finalists would be, Arsenal and Leeds would have come pretty low down on their list. The pre-match anniversary celebrations (I had found my spot on the terraces a good ninety minutes before the kick-off, as was my custom), which consisted of representatives of all the other Cup finalists marching round the pitch behind banners, suddenly appeared almost satirical in its intent. You remember the Matthews Final in ’53? Bert Trautmann playing in goal with a broken neck in ’56? Tottenham’s Double team in ’61? Everton’s comeback in ’66? Osgood’s diving header in ’70? Now watch Storey and Bremner attempting to gouge lumps out of each other’s thighs. The sourness of the game simply exacerbated the tension in my stomach, every bit as debilitating as it had been during the Swindon game three years earlier. If no one was going to bother with any of the niceties of the game (and there were stretches when it appeared that no one was even going to bother with the ball) then winning the Cup became even more important: there wasn’t anything else to think about.

At the beginning of the second half, Mick Jones wriggled to the byline and crossed for Allan Clarke to score for Leeds with a ridiculously effortless nod of the head. Inevitably it was the only goal of the game. We hit the post or the bar or something, and had a shot kicked off the line, but these were token Cup Final moments, not to be taken seriously; you could see that the Arsenal players understood the pointlessness of their effort.

As the end of the game approached I braced myself for the grief that I knew would swallow me whole, as it had done after the Swindon match. I was fifteen, and the option of tears was not available as it had been in 1969; when the final whistle went I can recall my knees buckling slightly. I didn’t feel sorry for the team or for the rest of the fans, but for myself, although now I realise that all football sorrow takes this form. When our teams lose at Wembley we think of the colleagues and classmates we have to face on Monday morning, and of the delirium that has been denied us; it seems inconceivable that we will allow ourselves to be this vulnerable ever again. I felt that I didn’t have the courage to be a football fan. How could I contemplate going through this again? Was I going to come to Wembley every three or four years for the rest of my life and end up feeling like this?

I felt an arm around my shoulders and realised for the first time that I was standing next to three Leeds fans, an old man, his son, and his grandson. “Never mind, lad,” said the old man. “They’ll be back.” For a moment it felt as though he was holding me upright, until the first and most intense spasm of misery passed and I regained the strength in my legs. Almost immediately a couple of Arsenal suedeheads with an unmistakable and ominous fury in their eyes pushed their way through the crowd towards the four of us. I stepped back, and they removed the Leeds scarf that was around the little boy’s neck. “Give that back,” his dad said, but only because he knew it would be a weak father who said nothing, not in any expectation of success. There was a brief windmilling of fists and the two older men staggered backwards; I didn’t stay around to find out what kind of beating they took. I ran for the gangway and went straight home, frightened and sick. It was the only manner, really, in which the Centenary Cup Final could have ended.

A New Family

ARSENAL v WOLVES

15.8.72

Over the summer of 1972, things changed. Arsenal, the most British (that is to say, the dourest and most aggressive) team you could imagine, went all continental on us, and for half a dozen games at the start of the 72/73 season decided to play Total Football. (This, for the benefit of those with only a sketchy grasp of football tactics, was a Dutch invention which necessitated flexibility from all the players on the pitch. Defenders were required to attack, attackers to play in mid-field; it was football’s version of post-modernism, and the intellectuals loved it.) That August at Highbury, gentle and appreciative applause was as familiar a sound as sixty thousand shuffling feet had been a couple of years earlier. Imagine Mrs Thatcher coming back from Brussels and lecturing us on the perils of jingoism, and you will have some idea of the improbability of the conversion.

A win at Leicester on the opening Saturday was followed by this destruction of Wolves (5-2, with goals from defenders McNab and Simpson). “I have never been so excited by an Arsenal performance,” said the man in the Daily Mail the next morning. “They played more good football than in a dozen matches in their Double year.” “Arsenal have genuinely changed their nature,” said the Telegraph. “The old hardness and obsessive search for the heads of the strikers have disappeared. Instead, as hapless Wolves discovered, there is a new inventiveness and improvisation.”

For the first, but certainly not the last, time, I began to believe that Arsenal’s moods and fortunes somehow reflected my own. It wasn’t so much that we were both playing brilliantly and winning (although my two recent O-level passes were all the proof I needed that I was a genuine Championship of Life contender); more that during the summer of 1972 my life seemed to me to have become suddenly and bewilderingly exotic, and my team’s mysterious adoption of a flamboyant continental style was perfectly and inexplicably analogous. Everything about the Wolves game was disorienting—the five goals, the quality of the passing (Alan Ball was outstanding), the purr of the crowd, the genuine enthusiasm of a normally hostile press. And I watched all this from the Lower East Stand with my father and my stepmother, a woman I had met just a few weeks earlier and whom I had previously always thought of, when I had thought of her at all, simply as The Enemy.

In the four or five years since my parents’ separation, I had asked my father almost nothing about his personal life. Part of this was understandable: like most kids I possessed neither the vocabulary nor the nerve to talk about things like this. Another part of it was not quite as easy to explain, and had more to do with the fact that none of us ever referred to what had happened if we could possibly avoid doing so. Even though I was aware that there had been Another Woman when my father left, I never asked him about her; my picture of my father was therefore curiously incomplete. I knew that he worked, and that he lived abroad, but I never attempted to envision any sort of life for him: he took me to football, asked me about school and then disappeared for another couple of months into some sort of unimaginable limbo.

It was inevitable that sooner or later I would be made to confront the fact that Dad, like all of us, had another, fuller context. That confrontation eventually occurred in the early summer of 1972, when I discovered that my father and his second wife were the parents of two small children. In July, the amazing news still undigested, I went to visit the undreamed-of family at their home in France. The fact that this set-up had hitherto been concealed from me meant that there had been none of the gradual accumulation of detail that usually occurs in such cases: like Mia Farrow in The Purple Rose of Cairo, dragged from the audience through the screen into a film by one of its characters, I was propelled into a world that had been imagined and completed without my participation, entirely alien but still somehow recognisable. My half-brother was small and dark and looked up to and after his little sister, eighteen months younger, blonde and bright and self-confident … where had I seen these two before? In our home movies, that’s where. But if they were us, Gill and I, why were they speaking half in French and half in English? And what was I supposed to be to them, a brother, or some kind of third parent, or something in between, a trainee intermediary from the adult world? And how come there was a swimming pool and a permanent supply of Coke in the fridge? I loved it and I hated it and I wanted to go home on the next plane and I wanted to stay for the rest of the summer.

When I did get back, I had to invent a modus vivendi that would do me for the next few years, a task I thought best accomplished by ensuring that the new world was never ever mentioned in the old, although it wouldn’t have achieved much to complain about the absence of a swimming pool in our tiny back garden in any case; thus one huge and important part of my life was kept entirely and pacifically separate from another, an arrangement perfectly designed to produce mendacity, self-delusion and schizophrenia in an already confused teenager.

When my stepmother sat down next to me at Highbury for the Wolves game, it was as if Elsie Tanner had walked into the Crossroads Motel; the appearance of an inhabitant from one world at the centre of the other somehow drained the reality out of both. And then Arsenal started to bang inch-perfect passes along the ground all over the pitch, and our defenders popped up in the opposing penalty area to lob the opposing goalkeeper with Cruyff-like precision and delicacy, and my suspicion that this was a world gone mad was confirmed. I was sitting with the Enemy, Arsenal thought they were Holland, and if I had looked carefully, I would surely have seen pigs floating serenely over the Clock End.

A couple of months later we got thumped 5-0 at Derby and immediately reverted to our old, dogged and reassuring ways; the fact that the experiment had been so brief seemed to reinforce the impression that it had all been a particularly ingenious metaphor, invented for my benefit and abandoned the moment I had understood it.

A Matter of Life and Death

CRYSTAL PALACE v LIVERPOOL

October 1972

I have learned things from the game. Much of my knowledge of locations in Britain and Europe comes not from school, but from away games or the sports pages, and hooliganism has given me both a taste for sociology and a degree of fieldwork experience. I have learned the value of investing time and emotion in things I cannot control, and of belonging to a community whose aspirations I share completely and uncritically. And on my first visit to Selhurst Park with my friend Frog, I saw a dead body, still my first, and learned a little bit about, well, life itself.

As we walked towards the railway station after the game, we saw the man lying in the road, partially covered by a raincoat, a purple-and-blue Palace scarf around his neck. Another younger man was crouched over him, and the two of us crossed the road and went to have a look.

“Is he all right?” Frog asked.

The man shook his head. “No. Dead. I was just walking behind him and he keeled over.”

He looked dead. He was grey and, as far as we were concerned, unimaginably motionless. We were impressed.

Frog sensed a story that would interest not only the fourth year but much of the fifth as well. “Who done him? Scousers?”

At this point the man lost patience. “No. He’s had a heart attack, you little prats. Now fuck off.”

And we did, and that was the end of the incident. But it has never been very far away from me since then, my one and only image of death; it is an image which instructs. The Palace scarf, a banal and homely detail; the timing (after the game, but mid-season), the stranger paying distressed but ultimately detached attention. And, of course, the two idiotic teenagers gawping at a tiny tragedy with unembarrassed fascination, even glee.

It worries me, the prospect of dying in mid-season like that, but of course, in all probability I will die sometime between August and May. We have the naive expectation that when we go, we won’t be leaving any loose ends lying around: we will have made our peace with our children, left them happy and stable, and we will have achieved more or less everything that we wanted to with our lives. It’s all nonsense, of course, and football fans contemplating their own mortality know that it is all nonsense. There will be hundreds of loose ends. Maybe we will die the night before our team appears at Wembley, or the day after a European Cup first-leg match, or in the middle of a promotion campaign or a relegation battle, and there is every prospect, according to many theories about the afterlife, that we will not be able to discover the eventual outcome. The whole point about death, metaphorically speaking, is that it is almost bound to occur before the major trophies have been awarded. The man lying on the pavement would not, as Frog observed on the way home, discover whether Palace stayed up or not that season; nor that they would continue to bob up and down between the divisions over the next twenty years, that they would change their colours half a dozen times, that they would eventually reach their first FA Cup Final, or that they would end up running around with the legend “VIRGIN” plastered all over their shirts. That’s life, though.

I do not wish to die in mid-season but, on the other hand, I am one of those who would, I think, be happy to have my ashes scattered over the Highbury pitch (although I understand that there are restrictions: too many widows contact the club, and there are fears that the turf would not respond kindly to the contents of urn after urn). It would be nice to think that I could hang around inside the stadium in some form, and watch the first team one Saturday, the reserves the next; I would like to feel that my children and grandchildren will be Arsenal fans and that I could watch with them. It doesn’t seem a bad way to spend eternity, and certainly I’d rather be sprinkled over the East Stand than dumped into the Atlantic or left up some mountain.

I don’t want to die immediately after a game, though (like Jock Stein, who died seconds after Scotland beat Wales to qualify for the World Cup, or like a friend’s father, who died at a Celtic-Rangers game a few years ago). It seems excessive, somehow, as if football were the only fitting context for the death of a football fan. (And I’m not talking about the deaths of Heysel or Hillsborough or Ibrox or Bradford here, of course; those were tragedies of a different order altogether.) I don’t want to be remembered with a shake of the head and a fond smile intended to imply that this is the way I would have chosen to go out if I could; give me gravitas over cheap congruence any time.

So let’s get this straight. I don’t want to peg out in Gillespie Road after a game because I might be remembered as a crank; and yet, crankily, I want to float around Highbury as a ghost watching reserve games for the rest of time. And in a sense these two desires—at first glance incomprehensibly inconsistent, I would imagine, to those without equivalent fixations—characterise obsessives and encapsulate their dilemma. We hate being patronised (there are some people who know me only as a monomaniac, and who ask me slowly and patiently, in words of one syllable, about Arsenal results before turning to someone else to talk about life—as if being a football fan precludes the possibility of possessing a family or a job or an opinion on alternative medicine), but our lunacy makes condescension almost inevitable. I know all this, and I still want to lumber my son with the names Liam Charles George Michael Thomas. I get what I deserve, I guess.

Graduation Day

ARSENAL v IPSWICH

14.10.72

By the time I was fifteen I was no longer quite so small—indeed, there were now a number of boys in my year smaller than me. This was a relief in most ways, but brought with it a problem that gnawed at me constantly for some weeks: I could no longer, if I was to maintain any self-respect, postpone my transfer from the Schoolboys’ Enclosure to the North Bank, the covered terrace behind one of the goals where Arsenal’s most vocal supporters stood.

I had plotted my début with great care. For much of that season I’d spent more time staring at the alarming lump of noisy humanity to my right than straight ahead at the pitch; I was trying to work out exactly where I would make for and what parts I should avoid. The Ipswich game looked like my ideal opportunity: Ipswich fans were hardly likely to attempt to “take” the North Bank, and the crowd wouldn’t be much more than thirty thousand, about half the capacity. I was ready to leave the Schoolboys behind.

It is difficult to recall now exactly what concerned me. After all, when I travelled up to Derby or Villa I usually stood in the away end, which was simply a displaced North Bank, so it couldn’t have been the prospect of trouble (always more likely at away games or at the other end of Arsenal’s ground), or fear of the type of people I would be standing with. I rather suspect that I was frightened of being revealed, as I had been at Reading earlier on that year. Supposing the people around me found out I wasn’t from Islington? Supposing I was exposed as a suburban interloper who went to a grammar school and was studying for Latin O-level? In the end I had to take the risk. If, as seemed probable, I provoked the entire terrace into a deafening chant of “HORNBY IS A WANKER” or “WE ALL HATE SWOTS, HATE SWOTS, HATE SWOTS” to the tune of the “Dambusters’ March”, then so be it; at least I would have tried.

I arrived on the terrace shortly after two o’clock. It seemed enormous, bigger even than it had looked from my usual position: a vast expanse of steep grey steps over which had been sprinkled a complex even pattern of metal crush barriers. The position I had decided on—dead centre, half-way down—indicated both a certain amount of gung-ho (the noise at most football grounds begins in the centre of the home terrace and radiates outwards; the sides and the seats only join in at moments of high excitement) and a degree of caution (centre back was not a place for the faint-hearted débutant).

Rites of passage are more commonly found in literary novels, or mainstream Hollywood films with pretensions, than they are in real life, particularly in real suburban life. All the things that were supposed to change me—first kiss, loss of virginity, first fight, first drink, first drugs—just seemed to happen; there was no will involved, and certainly no painful decision-making process (peer-group pressure, bad temper and the comparative sexual precocity of the female teenager made all the decisions for me), and perhaps as a consequence I emerged from all these formative experiences completely unformed. Walking through the North Bank turnstile was the only time I can remember consciously grasping a nettle until I was in my mid-twenties (really—this is not the place to go through all the nettles I should have grasped by then, but I know I didn’t bother): I wanted to do it, but at the same time I was, pathetically, a little afraid. My only rite of passage, then, involved standing on one piece of concrete as opposed to another; but the fact that I had made myself do something that I only half-wanted to do, and that it all turned out OK … this was important to me.

An hour before the kick-off the view from my spot was spectacular. No corner of the pitch was obscured, and even the far goal, which I had imagined would look tiny, was quite clear. By three o’clock, however, I could see a little strip of the pitch, a narrow grass tunnel running from the near penalty area to the touchline at the far end. The corner flags had disappeared entirely, and the goal beneath me was visible only if I jumped at the crucial moment. Whenever there was a near-miss at our end, the crowd tumbled forward; I was forced seven or eight steps down the terracing and, when I looked round, the carrier bag containing my programme and my Daily Express that I had placed at my feet seemed miles away, like a towel on the beach when you’re in a rough sea. I did see the one goal of the game, a George Graham volley from about twenty-five yards, but only because it was scored at the Clock End.

I loved it there, of course. I loved the different categories of noise: the formal, ritual noise when the players emerged (each player’s name called in turn, starting with the favourite, until he responded with a wave); the spontaneous shapeless roar when something exciting was happening on the pitch; the renewed vigour of the chanting after a goal or a sustained period of attacking. (And even here, among younger, less alienated men, that football grumble when things were going badly.) After my initial alarm I grew to love the movement, the way I was thrown towards the pitch and sucked back again. And I loved the anonymity: I was not, after all, going to be found out. I stayed for the next seventeen years.

There is no North Bank now. The Taylor Report recommended that, post-Hillsborough, football stadia should become all-seater, and the football clubs have all decided to act on that recommendation. In March 1973, I was among a crowd of sixty-three thousand at Highbury for an FA Cup replay against Chelsea; crowds of that size are no longer possible, at Highbury or in any other English stadium apart from Wembley. Even in 1988, the year before Hillsborough, Arsenal had two crowds of fifty-five thousand in the same week, and the second of them, the Littlewoods Cup semi-final against Everton, now looks like the last of the sort of game that comes to represent the football experience in the memory: floodlights, driving rain and an enormous, rolling roar throughout the match. So, yes, of course it is sad; football crowds may yet be able to create a new environment that electrifies, but they will never be able to recreate the old one which required vast numbers and a context in which those numbers could form themselves into one huge reactive body.

Even sadder, though, is the way that Arsenal have chosen to redevelop the stadium. It cost me 25p to watch the Ipswich match; the Arsenal Bond scheme means that from September 1993 entry to the North Bank will cost a minimum £1100 plus the price of a ticket, and, even allowing for inflation, that sounds a bit steep to me. A debenture plan makes sound financial sense for the club, but it is inconceivable that football at Highbury will ever be the same again.

The big clubs seem to have tired of their fan-base, and in a way who can blame them? Young working-class and lower-middle-class males bring with them a complicated and occasionally distressing set of problems; directors and chairmen might argue that they had their chance and blew it, and that middle-class families—the new target audience—will not only behave themselves, but pay much more to do so.

This argument ignores central questions about responsibility, fairness, and whether football clubs have a role to play in the local community. But even without these problems, it seems to me that there is a fatal flaw in the reasoning. Part of the pleasure to be had in large football stadia is a mixture of the vicarious and the parasitical, because unless one stands on the North Bank, or the Kop, or the Stretford End, then one is relying on others to provide the atmosphere; and atmosphere is one of the crucial ingredients of the football experience. These huge ends are as vital to the clubs as their players, not only because their inhabitants are vocal in their support, not just because they provide clubs with large sums of money (although these are not unimportant factors) but because without them nobody else would bother coming.

Arsenal and Manchester United and the rest are under the impression that people pay to watch Paul Merson and Ryan Giggs, and of course they do. But many of them—the people in the twenty pound seats, and the guys in the executive boxes—also pay to watch people watching Paul Merson (or to listen to people shouting at him). Who would buy an executive box if the stadium were filled with executives? The club sold the boxes on the understanding that the atmosphere came free, and so the North Bank generated as much income as any of the players ever did. Who’ll make the noise now? Will the suburban middle-class kids and their mums and dads still come if they have to generate it themselves? Or will they feel that they have been conned? Because in effect the clubs have sold them tickets to a show in which the principal attraction has been moved to make room for them.

One more thing about the kind of audience that football has decided it wants: the clubs have got to make sure that they’re good, that there aren’t any lean years, because the new crowd won’t tolerate failure. These are not the sort of people who will come to watch you play Wimbledon in March when you’re eleventh in the First Division and out of all the Cup competitions. Why should they? They’ve got plenty of other things to do. So, Arsenal … no more seventeen-year losing streaks, like the one between 1953 and 1970, right? No flirting with relegation, like in 1975 and 1976, or the odd half-decade where you don’t even get to a final, like we had between 1981 and 1987. We mug punters put up with that, and at least twenty thousand of us would turn up no matter how bad you were (and sometimes you were very, very bad indeed); but this new lot … I’m not so sure.

The Whole Package

ARSENAL v COVENTRY

4.11.72

The only trouble with the North Bank was that I bought the whole package. In the second half of my third game there (the middle one against Manchester City was memorable only because our new signing Jeff Blockley, an incompetent to rival Ian Ure, pushed a City corner against the underside of the bar with his hands, the ball bounced down behind the line and the referee wouldn’t give them the penalty or the goal—how we laughed!), Coventry City’s Tommy Hutchison scored a stunning solo goal. He picked the ball up about forty yards out on the left wing, left a trail of Arsenal defenders in his wake, and curled the ball round Geoff Barnett as he came out right into the far corner. On the North Bank there was a split second of silence as we watched the Coventry fans cavorting around on the Clock End like dolphins, and then came the fierce, unanimous and heartfelt chant, “You’re going to get your fucking heads kicked in.”

I had heard it before, obviously. For a good fifteen years it was the formal response to any goal scored by any away team at any football ground in the country (variations at Highbury were “You’re going home in a London ambulance.” “We’ll see you all outside.” and “Clock End, do your job.” (the Arsenal supporters at the Clock End being nearer to the opposing fans, and thus charged with the responsibility of vengeance). The only difference on this occasion was that I roared along with the imprecation for the first time. I was as outraged by the goal, as offended and as stricken, as anyone on the terrace; it was fortunate that there was an entire football pitch between me and the Coventry fans, or, or … or I would have done such things, I knew not what they were, but they would have been the terror of N5.

In many ways, of course, this was funny, in the way that the vast majority of teenage hooligan pretensions are funny, and yet even now I find it difficult to laugh at myself: half my life ago, and I’m still embarrassed. I like to think that there was none of me, the adult man, in that furious fifteen-year-old, but I suspect that this is over-optimistic. A lot of the fifteen-year-old remains, inevitably (as it does in millions of men), which accounts for some of the embarrassment; the rest of it stems from the recognition of the adult in the boy. Either way, it’s bad news.

I did learn, in the end. I learned that my threatening anybody was preposterous—I might just as well have promised the Coventry fans to bear their children—and that in any case violence and its attendant culture is uncool (none of the women I have ever wanted to sleep with would have been particularly impressed with me that afternoon). The big lesson, though, the one that tells you football is only a game and that if your team loses there’s no need to go berserk … I like to think I’ve learned that one. But I can still feel it in me, sometimes, at away games when we’re surrounded by opposing fans and the referee’s giving us nothing and we’re hanging on and hanging on and then Adams slips and their centre-forward’s in and then there’s this terrible needling bellow from all around you … Then I’m back to remembering just two of the three lessons, which is enough in some ways but not enough in others.

Masculinity has somehow acquired a more specific, less abstract meaning than femininity. Many people seem to regard femininity as a quality; but according to a large number of both men and women, masculinity is a shared set of assumptions and values that men can either accept or reject. You like football? Then you also like soul music, beer, thumping people, grabbing ladies’ breasts, and money. You’re a rugby or a cricket man? You like Dire Straits or Mozart, wine, pinching ladies’ bottoms and money. You don’t fit into either camp? Macho, nein danke? In which case it must follow that you’re a pacifist vegetarian, studiously oblivious to the charms of Michelle Pfeiffer, who thinks that only leering wideboys listen to Luther Vandross.

It’s easy to forget that we can pick and choose. Theoretically it is possible to like football, soul music and beer, for example, but to abhor breast-grabbing and bottom-pinching (or, one has to concede, vice versa); one can admire Muriel Spark and Bryan Robson. Interestingly it is men who seem to be more aware than women of the opportunities for mix ’n’ match: a feminist colleague of mine literally refused to believe that I watched Arsenal, a disbelief that apparently had its roots in the fact that we had once had a conversation about a feminist novel. How could I possibly have read the book and have been to Highbury? Tell a thinking woman that you like football and you’re in for a pretty sobering glimpse of the female conception of the male.

And yet I have to accept that my spiteful fury during the Coventry game was the logical conclusion to what had begun four years before. At fifteen I was not capable of picking and choosing, nor of recognising that this culture was not necessarily discrete. If I wanted to spend Saturdays at Highbury watching football, then I also had to wave a spear with as much venom as I could muster. If, as seems probable given my sporadically fatherless state, part of my obsession with Arsenal was that it gave me a quick way to fill a previously empty trolley in the Masculinity Supermarket, then it is perhaps understandable if I didn’t sort out until later on what was rubbish and what was worth keeping. I just threw in everything I saw, and stupid, blind, violent rage was certainly in my field of vision.

I was lucky (and it was luck, I can take no credit for it) that I nauseated myself pretty quickly; lucky most of all that the women I fancied, and the men I wanted to befriend (at this stage those verbs belonged exactly where I have placed them), would have had nothing to do with me if I hadn’t. If I’d met the kind of girl who accepted or even encouraged masculine belligerence then I might not have had to bother. (What was that anti-Vietnam slogan? “Women say yes to men who say no”?) But there are football fans, thousands of them, who have neither the need nor the desire to get a perspective on their own aggression. I worry for them and I despise them and I’m frightened of them; and some of them, grown men in their mid-thirties with kids, are too old now to go around threatening to kick heads, but they do anyway.

Carol Blackburn

ARSENAL v DERBY

31.3.73

At this point I feel that I have to defend the accuracy of my memory, and perhaps that of all football fans. I have never kept a football diary, and I have forgotten hundreds and hundreds of games entirely; but I have measured out my life in Arsenal fixtures, and any event of any significance has a footballing shadow. The first time I was best man at a wedding? We lost 1-0 to Spurs in the FA Cup third round, and I listened to the account of Pat Jennings’ tragic mistake in a windy Cornish car park. When did my first real love affair end? The day after a disappointing 2-2 draw with Coventry in 1981. That these events are commemorated is perhaps understandable, but what I cannot explain is why I remember some of the other stuff. My sister, for example, recalls coming to Highbury twice, but knows no more than that; I know that she saw a 1-0 win against Birmingham in 1973 (a Ray Kennedy goal, on the afternoon that Liam Brady made his début) and a 2-0 win against Stoke in 1980 (Hollins and Sansom). My half-brother first came in January 1973 to see a 2-2 cup-tie against Leicester, but how come it is I rather than he who knows this? Why, when somebody tells me that he or she came to Highbury in 1976 to see a 5-2 game against Newcastle, do I feel compelled to tell them that the score was actually 5-3? Why can’t I smile politely and agree that, yes, that was a great game?

I know how annoying we are, how cranky we must seem, but there is nothing much we can do about it now. (My father is much the same about Bournemouth football and Hampshire cricket in the 1940s.) These scores and scorers and occasions are of a piece: Pat’s slip against Tottenham was not, of course, as important as Steve’s wedding, but to me the two events have now become intrinsic and complementary parts of some new and different whole. An obsessive’s memory is therefore, perhaps, more creative than that of an ordinary person; not in the sense that we make things up, but in the sense that we have baroque cinematic recall, full of jump-cuts and split-screen innovation. Who else but a football fan would use a fumble on a muddy field three hundred miles away to recall a wedding? Obsession requires a commendable mental agility.

It is this agility that allows me to date the arrival of my adolescence quite precisely: it arrived on Thursday, 30th November 1972, when Dad took me to London to buy some new clothes. I chose a pair of Oxford bags, a black polo-neck jumper, a black raincoat and a pair of black stack-heeled shoes; I remember the date because on the Saturday, when Arsenal played Leeds United at Highbury and beat them 2-1, I was wearing the entire outfit and feeling better inside myself than I had ever felt. I developed a new hairstyle (supposed to resemble Rod Stewart’s, but I never found the courage for the spikes) to go with the clobber; and I developed an interest in girls to go with the haircut. One of these three innovations changed everything.

The Derby game was a really big one. After the indifferent spell that had brought about the end of the Total Football experiment, Arsenal had clawed their way back into the Championship race simply by being what they had always been—mean, fierce, competitive, hard to beat. If they won this game (against the reigning champions), then they stood a chance of going top of the First Division for the first time since the Double year; they were level on points with Liverpool, who were at home to Tottenham that afternoon. And looking at the programme for the Derby game, one is reminded of how extraordinarily balanced football fortunes are. If we had beaten Derby, there would have been every prospect of winning the Championship again; in fact, we lost it by three points, the very gap we allowed to open up that afternoon. The following Saturday we were playing Second Division Sunderland in the FA Cup semi-final, and we lost that too. The two defeats prompted Bertie Mee to break the whole team up, but he never got a new one together again, and three years later he was gone. If we’d won either of the games—and we should and could have won both—then the modern history of the club might have been entirely different.

So the course of the next decade was to be mapped out for Arsenal that afternoon, but I didn’t care. The previous evening Carol Blackburn, my girlfriend of some three or four weeks (I can remember watching the TV highlights of the Chelsea-Arsenal FA Cup quarter-final at Stamford Bridge with her—she was a Chelsea fan—at a friend’s house a fortnight before) had packed me in. She was, I thought, beautiful, with the long, straight, centre-parted hair and the melting doe eyes of Olivia Newton-John; her beauty had reduced me to nervous and miserable silence for much of the duration of our relationship, and it was no real surprise when she moved on to a boy called Daz, a year older than me and already, incredibly, at work.

I was unhappy during the game (I watched it from the Clock End, although I don’t know why; perhaps I felt that the focused energy of the North Bank would be inappropriate), but not because of what was going on in front of me: for the first time in nearly five years of watching Arsenal events on the pitch seemed meaningless, and it hardly registered that we lost 1-0 and blew the chance to go top. I knew instinctively, as Arsenal searched for an equaliser in the later stages of the game, that we would not score, that even if the Derby centre-half caught the ball and threw it at the referee we would miss the resultant penalty. How could we possibly win or draw, with me feeling like this? Football as metaphor, again.

I regretted our defeat against Derby, of course, although not as much as I regretted being dumped by Carol Blackburn. But what I regretted most of all—and this regret came to me much, much later on—was the wedge that had been driven between me and the club. Between 1968 and 1973, Saturdays were the whole point of my entire week, and whatever happened at school or at home was just so much fluff, the adverts in between the two halves of the Big Match. In that time football was life, and I am not speaking metaphorically: I experienced the big things—the pain of loss (Wembley ’68 and ’72), joy (the Double year), thwarted ambition (the European Cup quarter-final against Ajax), love (Charlie George) and ennui (most Saturdays, really)—only at Highbury. I even made new friends, through the youth team or the transfer market. What Carol Blackburn did was to give me another sort of life, the real, untransposed kind in which things happened to me rather than to the club, and as we all know, that is a rum sort of a gift.

Goodbye to all that

ARSENAL v MANCHESTER CITY

4.10.75

I have a few programmes for the 73/74 season, so I must have been to some of the games that year, but I can’t remember any of them. I know that the following season I didn’t go at all, and that the season after that, 75/76, I only went the once, with my Uncle Brian and my young cousin Michael.

I stopped partly because Arsenal were dire: George, McLintock and Kennedy had gone, and were never properly replaced, Radford and Armstrong were way past their best, Ball couldn’t be bothered, a couple of the young players (Brady, Stapleton and O’Leary were all playing) were having understandable difficulties settling in to a struggling side, and some of the new purchases simply weren’t up to the mark. (Terry Mancini, for example, a bald, cheerful and uncomplicated centre-half, seemed to have been bought for the Second Division promotion campaign that was beginning to look inevitable.) In seven years Highbury had once again become the unhappy home of a moribund football team, just as it had been when I first fell in love with it.

This time around, though, I didn’t want to know (and neither did a good ten thousand others). I’d seen it all before. What I hadn’t seen before were the high school and convent girls who worked in the Maidenhead High Street branch of Boots at weekends; and thus it was that some time in 1974, my after-school clearing-up and restocking job (which I had taken on only because I needed to find some football money) became an after-school and Saturday job.

I was still at school in 1975, but only just. I took my A-levels that summer, and scraped by in two of the three subjects; then, with breathtaking cheek, I decided to stay on for an extra term to study for the Cambridge entrance examinations—not, I think, because I wanted to go to Cambridge, but because I didn’t want to go to university immediately, and yet neither did I want to travel around the world, or teach handicapped children, or work on a kibbutz, or do anything at all that might make me a more interesting person. So I worked a couple of days a week at Boots, went into school now and again, and hung out with the few people I knew who hadn’t yet gone on to college.

I didn’t miss football too much. I had swapped one group of friends for another during the sixth form: the football crowd who had got me through the first five years of secondary school, Frog, Larry aka Caz and the rest, had started to seem less interesting than the depressive and exquisitely laconic young men in my English set, and suddenly life was all drink and soft drugs and European literature and Van Morrison. My new group revolved around Henry, a newcomer to the school, who stood as a Raving Maoist in the school election (and won), took all his clothes off in pubs, and eventually ended up in some kind of asylum after stealing mailbags from the local railway station and throwing them up a tree. Kevin Keegan and his astonishing workrate seemed dull, perhaps understandably, by comparison. I watched football on TV, and two or three times went to see QPR in the season they nearly won the Championship with Stan Bowles, Gerry Francis, and the kind of swaggering football that had never really interested Arsenal. I was an intellectual now, and Brian Glanville’s pieces in the Sunday Times had taught me that intellectuals were obliged to watch football for its art rather than its soul.

My mother has no brothers and sisters—all my relatives come from my father’s side—and my parents’ divorce isolated my mother and sister and me from the leafier branch of the family, partly through our own choice, partly through our geographical distance. It has been suggested to me that Arsenal substituted for an extended family during my teens, and though this is the kind of excuse I would like to make for myself, it is difficult even for me to explain how football could have performed the same function in my life as boisterous cousins, kindly aunts and avuncular uncles. There was a certain sort of symmetry, then, when my Uncle Brian rang to say that he was taking his Arsenal-loving thirteen-year-old to Highbury and to ask whether I would accompany them: maybe as football was ceasing to be a potent force in my life, the joys of extended family life were about to be revealed to me.

It was strange watching Michael, a younger version of myself, agonising for his team as they went 3-0 down and huffed their way back into the game (Arsenal lost 3-2 without ever really suggesting that they would get so much as a point). I could see the distraction in his face, and began to understand how football could mean so much to boys of that age: what else can we lose ourselves in, when books have started to become hard work and before girls have revealed themselves to be the focus that I had now discovered they were? As I sat there, I knew it was all over for me, the Highbury scene. I didn’t need it any more. And of course it was sad, because these six or seven years had been very important to me, had saved my life in several ways; but it was time to move on, to fulfil my academic and romantic potential, to leave football to those with less sophisticated or less developed tastes. Maybe Michael would take over for a few years, before passing it all on to someone else. It was nice to think that it wouldn’t disappear from the family altogether, and maybe one day I would come back, with my own boy.

I didn’t mention it to my uncle or to Michael—I didn’t want to patronise him by suggesting in any way that football fever was an illness that only afflicted children—but when we were making our way out of the ground I bade it a private and sentimental farewell. I’d read enough poetry to recognise a heightened moment when I saw one. My childhood was dying, cleanly and decently, and if you can’t mourn a loss of that resonance properly, then what can you mourn? At eighteen, I had at last grown up. Adulthood could not accommodate the kind of obsession I had been living with, and if I had to sacrifice Terry Mancini and Peter Simpson so that I could understand Camus properly and sleep with lots of nervy, neurotic and rapacious art students, then so be it. Life was about to begin, so Arsenal had to go.