Fever Pitch

My Second Childhood

ARSENAL v BRISTOL CITY

21.8.76

As it turned out, my coolness towards all things Arsenal had had nothing to do with rites of passage, or girls, or Jean-Paul Sartre, or Van Morrison, and quite a lot to do with the ineptitude of the Kidd/Stapleton strikeforce. When Bertie Mee resigned in 1976, and his replacement Terry Neill bought Malcolm Macdonald for £333,333 from Newcastle, my devotion mysteriously resurrected itself, and I was back at Highbury for the start of the new season, as stupidly optimistic for the club and as hungry to see a game as I had ever been in the early seventies, when my obsession had been at fever pitch. If I had been correct in assuming previously that my indifference marked the onset of maturity, then that maturity had lasted just ten months, and by the age of nineteen I was already into my second childhood.

Terry Neill was nobody’s idea of a saviour, really. He had come directly from Tottenham, which didn’t endear him to some of the Arsenal crowd, and it wasn’t even as if he had done a great job there: he had only just avoided taking them into the Second Division (although they were destined for the drop anyway). But he was a new broom, at least, and there were some pretty cobwebbed corners in our team; judging from the size of the crowd for his first game in charge, I was not the only one who had been lured back by the promise of a new dawn.

In fact, Macdonald and Neill and a new era were only partly responsible for my return to the fold. Over the previous few months I had managed to turn myself into a schoolboy again, and I had done it, paradoxically, by leaving school and getting a job. After my university entrance exams I went to work for a huge insurance company in the City; the idea, I think, was to take my fascination with London to some kind of conclusion by becoming a part of the place, but this proved harder to do than I had imagined. I couldn’t afford to live there, so I commuted from home (my salary went on the train fares and drinks after work), and I didn’t even get to meet that many Londoners (although as I was fixed on the notion that real Londoners were people who lived in Gillespie Road, Avenell Road or Highbury Hill, N5, they were always going to be elusive). My workmates were for the most part like me, young commuters from the Home Counties.

So instead of turning myself into a metropolitan adult, I ended up recreating my suburban adolescence. I was bored witless most of the time, just as I had been at school (the company was about to relocate to Bristol, and we were all woefully underemployed); we sat, scores of us, in rows of desks trying to look busy, while embittered supervisors, denied even the minor dignity of the tiny cubicles in which their bosses worked, watched us like hawks and reprimanded us when our timewasting became too conspicuous or noisy. It is in climates like this that football flourishes: I spent most of the long and lethally hot summer of 1976 talking about Charlie and the Double and Bobby Gould to a colleague, a dedicated and therefore somewhat wry fellow fan who was about to become a policeman just as I was about to become an undergraduate. Before very long I could feel some of my old enthusiasm beginning to re-exert its fierce grip.

Serious fans of the same club always see each other again somewhere—in a queue, or a chip shop, or a motorway service station toilet—and so it was inevitable that I would meet up with Kieran again. I saw him two years later, after the ’78 Cup Final: he was sitting on a wall outside Wembley waiting for some friends, his banner drooping miserably in the post-match gloom, and it wasn’t the right time to tell him that if it hadn’t been for our office conversations that summer, I probably wouldn’t even have been there that afternoon, feeling as miserable as he looked.

But that’s another story. After my first game back, against Bristol City, I went home feeling as though I’d been tricked. Despite the introduction of Malcolm Macdonald, whose imperious wave to the crowd before the game led one to suspect the worst, Arsenal seemed no better than they had been for the last couple of years; in fact, given that they lost 1-0 at home to a Bristol City side which had crept up from the Second Division to struggle for four years in the First, it could well be argued that they were a good deal worse. I sweated in the August sunshine, and I cursed, and I felt the old screaming frustration that I had been happily living without. Like alcoholics who feel strong enough to pour themselves just one small one, I had made a fatal mistake.

Supermac

ARSENAL v EVERTON

18.9.76

On one of my videos (George Graham’s Greatest Ever Arsenal Team, if anyone is interested), there is a perfect Malcolm Macdonald moment. Trevor Ross gets hold of the ball on the right, crosses before the Manchester United left-back can put a challenge in, Frank Stapleton leaps, nods and the ball trundles over the line and into the net. Why is this so quintessentially Supermac, given his lack of involvement in any part of the goal? Because there he is, making a desperate lunge for the ball before it crosses the line, apparently failing to make contact, and charging away to the right of the picture with his arms aloft, not to congratulate the goalscorer but because he is staking a claim to the goal. (There is an anxious little glance back over his shoulder when he realises that his team-mates seem uninterested in mobbing him.)

That Manchester United match is not the only example of his embarrassing penchant for claiming anything that came anywhere near him. In the FA Cup semi-final against Orient the following season, the record books show that he scored twice. In fact, both shots would have gone off for throw-ins—that is to say, they were not travelling even roughly in the direction of the goal—had they not hit an Orient defender (the same one each time) and looped in a ridiculous arc over the goalkeeper and into the net. Such considerations were beneath Malcolm, however, who celebrated both goals as if he had run the length of the field and beaten every defender before thumping the ball into the bottom left-hand corner. He wasn’t much of a one for self-irony.

During this game against Everton, which we won 3-1 (a result which led us all to believe, once more, that a corner had been turned and that Terry Neill was building a team capable of winning the League again), there was another gem. Macdonald is in a chase with the centre-half, who gets a foot in, and lifts the ball agonisingly over his own advancing goalkeeper; but immediately Macdonald’s arms are in the air, he is pounding towards us on the North Bank, he turns to acknowledge the joy of the rest of the team. Defenders are famously quick to disclaim an own goal if it is possible, but the Everton centre-half, staggered by his opponent’s cheek, told the newspapers that our number nine hadn’t got anywhere near the ball. Even so, Macdonald got the credit for it.

In truth, he didn’t have much of a career at Arsenal. He retired with a serious knee injury after just three seasons with us, but in that last season he only played four times. He still managed to turn himself into a legend, though. He was a magnificent player, on his day, but there weren’t too many of those at Highbury; his best spell was at Newcastle, a habitually poor team, but such was his ambition that he seems to have succeeded in muscling his way into the Arsenal Hall of Fame. (Arsenal 1886-1986, by Phil Soar and Martin Tyler, the definitive history of the club, features him prominently on the cover, whereas Wilson and Brady, Drake and Compton are nowhere to be seen.)

So why have we let him take over in this way? Why is a player who played less than a hundred games for Arsenal associated with the club more readily than others who played six or seven times that number? Macdonald was, if nothing else, a glamorous player, and we have never been a glamorous team; so at Highbury we pretend that he was more important than he really was, and we hope that when we put him on the cover of our glossy books, nobody will remember that he only played for us for two years, and that therefore we will be mistaken for Manchester United, or Tottenham, or Liverpool. Despite Arsenal’s wealth and fame, we’ve never been in that mould—we have always been too grey, too suspicious of anyone with an ego—but we don’t like to admit it. The Supermac myth is a confidence trick that the club plays on itself, and we are happy to indulge it.

A Fourth Division Town

CAMBRIDGE UNITED v DARLINGTON

29.1.77

I applied to Cambridge from the right place, at the right time. The university was actively looking for students who had been educated through the state system, and even my poor A-level results, my half-baked answers to the entrance examination and my hopelessly tongue-tied interview did not prevent me from being granted admission. At last my studiously dropped aitches were paying dividends, although not in the way that I had at one stage anticipated. They had not resulted in my acceptance on the North Bank, but they had resulted in my acceptance at Jesus College, Cambridge. It is surely only in our older universities that a Home Counties grammar school education carries with it some kind of street-cred.

It is true that most football fans do not have an Oxbridge degree (football fans are people, whatever the media would have us believe, and most people do not have an Oxbridge degree, either); but then, most football fans do not have a criminal record, or carry knives, or urinate in pockets, or get up to any of the things that they are all supposed to. In a book about football, the temptation to apologise (for Cambridge, and for not having left school at sixteen and gone on the dole, or down the pits, or into a detention centre) is overwhelming, but it would be entirely wrong to do so.

Whose game is it anyway? Some random phrases from Martin Amis’s review of Among the Thugs, by Bill Buford: “a love of ugliness”; “pitbull eyes”; “the complexion and body scent of a cheese-and-onion crisp”. These phrases are intended to build up a composite picture of the typical fan, and typical fans know this picture is wrong. I am aware that as far as my education and interests and occupation are concerned, I am hardly representative of a good many people on the terraces; but when it comes to my love for and knowledge of the game, the way I can and do talk about it whenever the opportunity presents itself, and my commitment to my team, I’m nothing out of the ordinary.

Football, famously, is the people’s game, and as such is prey to all sorts of people who aren’t, as it were, the people. Some like it because they are sentimental socialists; some because they went to public school, and regret doing so; some because their occupation—writer or broadcaster or advertising executive—has removed them far away from where they feel they belong, or where they have come from, and football seems to them a quick and painless way of getting back there. It is these people who seem to have the most need to portray football grounds as a bolt-hole for a festering, vicious underclass: after all, it is not in their best interests to tell the truth—that “pitbull eyes” are few and far between, and often hidden behind specs, and that the stands are full of actors and publicity girls and teachers and accountants and doctors and nurses, as well as salt-of-the-earth working-class men in caps and loud-mouthed thugs. Without football’s myriad demonologies, how are those who have been distanced from the modern world supposed to prove that they understand it?

“I would suggest that casting football supporters as ‘belching sub-humanity’ makes it easier for us to be treated as such, and therefore easier for tragedies like Hillsborough to occur,” a wise man called Ed Horton wrote in the fanzine When Saturday Comes after reading Amis’s review. “Writers are welcome at football—the game does not have the literature it deserves. But snobs slumming it with ‘the lads’—there is nothing we need less.” Precisely. So the worst thing I can do for the game is offer atonement for, or deny, or excuse my education; Arsenal came long before Cambridge, and has stayed with me long after, and those three years make no difference to anything, as far as I can see.

In any case, when I arrived at college, it became clear that I was not alone: there were scores of us, boys from Nottingham and Newcastle and Essex, many of whom had been educated through the state system and welcomed by a college anxious to modulate its elitist image; and we all played football, and supported football teams, and within days we had all found each other, and it was like starting at grammar school all over again, except without the Soccer Star stickers.

I went up to Highbury from Maidenhead in the holidays, and travelled down from Cambridge for the big games, but I couldn’t afford to do it very often—which is how I fell in love all over again, with Cambridge United. I hadn’t intended to—the Us were only supposed to scratch the Saturday-afternoon itch, but they ended up competing for attention in a way that nobody else had managed before.

I was not being unfaithful to Arsenal, because the two teams did not inhabit the same universe. If the two objects of my adoration had ever run up against each other at a party, or a wedding, or another of those awkward social situations one tries to avoid whenever possible, they would have been confused: if he loves us, whatever does he see in them? Arsenal had Highbury and big stars and huge crowds and the whole weight of history on their back; Cambridge had a tiny, ramshackle little ground, the Abbey Stadium (their equivalent of the Clock End was the Allotments End, and occasionally, naughty visiting fans would nip round the back of it and hurl pensioners’ cabbages over the wall), less than four thousand watching at most games, and no history at all—they had only been in the Football League for six years. And when they won a game, the tannoy would blast out “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts”, an eccentric touch that nobody seemed to be able to explain. It was impossible not to feel a warm, protective fondness for them.

It only took a couple of games before their results started to matter to me a great deal. It helped that they were a first-class Fourth Division team—manager Ron Atkinson had them playing stylish, fast, ball-to-feet football which usually brought them three or four goals at home (they beat Darlington 4-0 on my first visit), and it helped that in goalkeeper Webster and fullback Batson there was an Arsenal connection. I’d seen Webster throw in two goals during one of his few games for Arsenal back in 1969; and Batson, one of the first black players in the Football League in the early seventies, had been converted from a poor midfield player to a classy full-back since his move from Highbury.

What I enjoyed most of all, however, was the way the players revealed themselves, their characters and their flaws, almost immediately. The modern First Division player is for the most part an anonymous young man: he and his colleagues have interchangeable physiques, similar skills, similar pace, similar temperaments. Life in the Fourth Division was different. Cambridge had fat players and thin players, young players and old players, fast players and slow players, players who were on their way out and players who were on their way up. Jim Hall, the centre-forward, looked and moved like a 45-year-old; his striking partner Alan Biley, who later played for Everton and Derby, had an absurd Rod Stewart haircut and a greyhound’s pace; Steve Spriggs, the midfield dynamo, was small and squat, with little stubby legs. (To my horror I was repeatedly mistaken for him during my time in the city. Once a man pointed me out to his young son as I was leaning against a wall, smoking a Rothmans and eating a meat pie, some ten minutes before a game in which Spriggs was appearing—a misapprehension which says much for the expectations the people of Cambridge had for their team; and once, in a men’s toilet in a local pub, I got into an absurd argument with someone who simply refused to accept that I was not who I said I wasn’t.) Most memorable of all was Tom Finney, a sly, bellicose winger who, incredibly, was to go on to the 1982 World Cup finals with Northern Ireland, although he only ever sat on the bench, and whose dives and fouls were often followed by outrageous winks to the crowd.

I used to believe, although I don’t now, that growing and growing up are analogous, that both are inevitable and uncontrollable processes. Now it seems to me that growing up is governed by the will, that one can choose to become an adult, but only at given moments. These moments come along fairly infrequently—during crises in relationships, for example, or when one has been given the chance to start afresh somewhere—and one can ignore them or seize them. At Cambridge I could have reinvented myself if I had been smart enough; I could have shed the little boy whose Arsenal fixation had helped him through a tricky patch in his childhood and early teens, and become somebody else completely, a swaggeringly confident and ambitious young man sure of his route through the world. But I didn’t. For some reason, I hung on to my boyhood self for dear life, and I let him guide me through my undergraduate years; and thus football, not for the first or last time, and through no fault of its own, served both as a backbone and as a retardant.

And that was university, really. No Footlights, no writing for Broadsheet or Stop Press, no Blue, no Presidency of the Union, no student politics, no dining clubs, no scholarships or exhibitions, no nothing. I watched a couple of films a week, I stayed up late and drank beer, I met a lot of nice people whom I still see regularly, I bought and borrowed records by Graham Parker and Television and Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen and the Clash, I attended one lecture in my entire first year, I played twice a week for the college second or third teams … and I waited for home games at the Abbey or cup-ties at Highbury. I managed, in fact, to ensure that any of the privileges a Cambridge education can confer on its beneficiaries would bypass me completely. In truth I was scared of the place, and football, my childhood comforter, my security blanket, was a way of coping with it all.

Boys and Girls

ARSENAL v LEICESTER CITY

2.4.77

I did something else in that year, apart from watch football, talk and listen to music: I fell stomach-clenchingly for a smart, pretty and vivacious girl from the teacher-training college. We cleared our desks (she had already attracted the attention of several other suitors in the first few weeks, and I had a girlfriend at home) and spent much of the next three or four years in each other’s company.

She is a part of this story, I think, in several ways. For a start, she was the first girlfriend who ever came to Highbury (in the Easter holidays at the end of our second term). The early-season new-broom promise had long since disappeared; in fact, Arsenal had just beaten the club record for the longest losing streak in their history—they had managed to lose, in consecutive games, to Manchester City, Middlesbrough, West Ham, Everton, Ipswich, West Brom and QPR. She charmed the team, however, much as she had charmed me, and we scored three times in the first quarter of the game. Graham Rix got the first on his début and David O’Leary, who went on to score maybe another half a dozen times in the next decade, got two in the space of ten minutes. Once again Arsenal were thoughtful enough to behave so oddly that the match, and not just the occasion, would be memorable for me.

It was strange having her there. In a misguided notion of gallantry—I’m sure she would rather have stood—I insisted that we bought seats in the Lower West Stand; all I remember now is how she responded each time Arsenal scored. Everyone in the row stood up apart from her (in the seats, standing up to acclaim a goal is an involuntary action, like sneezing); three times I looked down to see her shaking with laughter. “It’s so funny,” she said by way of explanation, and I could see her point. It had really never occurred to me before that football was, indeed, a funny game, and that like most things which only work if one believes, the back view (and because she remained seated she had a back view, right down a line of mostly misshapen male bottoms) is preposterous, like the rear of a Hollywood film set.

Our relationship—the first serious, long-term, stay-the-night, meet-the-family, what-about-kids-one-day sort of thing for either of us—was in part all about discovering for the first time the mysteries of our counterparts in the opposite sex. I had had girlfriends before, of course; but she and I had similar backgrounds and similar pretensions, similar interests and attitudes. Our differences, which were enormous, arose mostly because of our genders; if I had been born a girl, she was the sort of girl, I realised and hoped, that I would have been. It was probably for this reason that I was so intrigued by her tastes and whims and fancies, and her belongings induced in me a fascination for girls’ rooms that continued for as long as girls had rooms. (Now I am in my thirties they don’t have rooms any more—they have flats or houses, and they are often shared with a man anyway. It is a sad loss.)

Her room helped me to understand that girls were much quirkier than boys, a realisation that stung me. She had a collection of Yevtushenko’s poems (who the hell was Yevtushenko?) and unfathomable obsessions with Anne Boleyn and the Brontës; she liked all the sensitive singer/songwriters, and was familiar with the ideas of Germaine Greer; she knew a little about paintings and classical music, knowledge gleaned from somewhere outside the A-level syllabus. How had that happened? How come I had to rely on a couple of Chandler paperbacks and the first Ramones album to provide me with some kind of identity? Girls’ rooms provided countless clues to their character and background and tastes; boys, by contrast, were as interchangeable and unformed as foetuses, and their rooms, apart from the odd Athena poster here and there (I had a Rod Stewart poster on my wall, which I liked to think was aggressively, authentically and self-consciously down-market) were as blank as the womb.

It is true to say that most of us were defined only by the number and extent of our interests. Some boys had more records than others, and some knew more about football; some were interested in cars, or rugby. We had passions instead of personalities, predictable and uninteresting passions at that, passions which could not reflect and illuminate us in the way that my girlfriend’s did … and this is one of the most inexplicable differences between men and women.

I have met women who have loved football, and go to watch a number of games a season, but I have not yet met one who would make that Wednesday night trip to Plymouth. And I have met women who love music, and can tell their Mavis Staples from their Shirley Browns, but I have never met a woman with a huge and ever-expanding and neurotically alphabeticised record collection. They always seem to have lost their records, or to have relied on somebody else in the house—a boyfriend, a brother, a flatmate, usually a male—to have provided the physical details of their interests. Men cannot allow that to happen. (I am aware, sometimes, in my group of Arsenal-supporting friends, of an understated but noticeable jockeying: none of us likes to be told something about the club that we didn’t know—an injury to one of the reserves, say, or an impending alteration to the shirt design, something crucial like that—by any of the others.) I am not saying that the anally retentive woman does not exist, but she is vastly outnumbered by her masculine equivalent; and while there are women with obsessions, they are usually, I think, obsessive about people, or the focus for their obsession changes frequently.

Remembering my late teens at college, when many of the boys were as colourless as tap water, it is tempting to believe that it all starts around that time, that men have had to develop their facility to store facts and records and football programmes to compensate for their lack of distinguishing wrinkles; but that doesn’t explain how it is that one ordinary, bright teenager has already become more interesting than another ordinary, bright teenager, simply by virtue of her sex.

It is perhaps no wonder that my girlfriend wanted to come to Highbury: there wasn’t really very much else of me (she’d listened to my Ramones album), or at least nothing that I had yet discovered and extracted. I did have things that were mine—my friends, my relationships with my mum and my dad and my sister, my music, my love for cinema, my sense of humour—but I couldn’t see that they amounted to very much that was individual, not in the way that her things were individual; but my solitary and intense devotion to Arsenal, and its attendant necessities (my vowel-mangling was by now at a point of almost inoperable crisis) … well, at least it had an edge to it, and gave me a couple of features other than a nose, two eyes and a mouth.

Just Like a Woman

CAMBRIDGE UNITED v EXETER CITY

29.4.78

My arrival in Cambridge provoked the two best seasons in United’s short history. In my first year they won the Fourth Division by a mile; in my second, they found life a bit tougher in the Third, and had to wait until the final week of the season before clinching promotion. They had two games in a week at the Abbey: one on the Tuesday night against Wrexham, the best team in the division, which they won 1-0, and one on the Saturday against Exeter, which they needed to win to be sure of going up.

With twenty minutes to go, Exeter went into the lead, and my girlfriend (who together with her girlfriend and her girlfriend’s boyfriend had wanted to experience at first hand the dizzy glory of promotion) promptly did what I had always presumed women were apt to do at moments of crisis: she fainted. Her girlfriend took her off to see the St John’s Ambulancemen; I, meanwhile, did nothing, apart from pray for an equaliser, which came, followed minutes later by a winner. It was only after the players had popped the last champagne cork at the jubilant crowd that I started to feel bad about my earlier indifference.

I had recently read The Female Eunuch, a book which made a deep and lasting impression on me. And yet how was I supposed to get excited about the oppression of females if they couldn’t be trusted to stay upright during the final minutes of a desperately close promotion campaign? And what was to be done about a male who was more concerned about being a goal down to Exeter City of the Third Division than he was about somebody he loved very much? It all looked hopeless.

Thirteen years later I am still ashamed of my unwillingness, my inability, to help, and the reason I feel ashamed is partly to do with the awareness that I haven’t changed a bit. I don’t want to look after anybody when I’m at a match; I am not capable of looking after anybody at a match. I am writing some nine hours before Arsenal play Benfica in the European Cup, the most important match at Highbury for years, and my partner will be with me: what happens if she keels over? Would I have the decency, the maturity, the common sense, to make sure that she was properly looked after? Or would I shove her limp body to one side, carry on screaming at the linesman, and hope that she is still breathing at the end of ninety minutes, always presuming, of course, that extra time and penalties are not required?

I know that these worries are prompted by the little boy in me, who is allowed to run riot when it comes to football: this little boy feels that women are always going to faint at football matches, that they are weak, that their presence at games will inevitably result in distraction and disaster, even though my present partner has been to Highbury probably forty or fifty times and has shown no signs of fainting whatsoever. (In fact it is I who have come closest to fainting on occasions, when the tension of the last five minutes of a cup-tie constricts my chest and forces all the blood out of my head, if that is biologically possible; and sometimes, when Arsenal score, I see stars, literally—well, little splodges of light, literally—which cannot be a sign of great physical robustness.) But then, that is what football has done to me. It has turned me into someone who would not help if my girlfriend went into labour at an impossible moment (I have often wondered about what would happen if I was due to become a father on an Arsenal Cup Final day); and for the duration of the games I am an eleven-year-old. When I described football as a retardant, I meant it.

Wembley III—the Horror Returns

ARSENAL v IPSWICH

(at Wembley) 6.5.78

It is a truth universally acknowledged that ticket distribution for Cup Finals is a farce: the two clubs involved, as all supporters know, get less than half the tickets, which means that thirty or forty thousand people with no direct interest in the game get the other half. The Football Association’s rationale is that the Cup Final is for everybody involved with football, not just the fans, and it’s not a bad one: it is, I think, quite reasonable to invite referees and linesmen and amateur players and local league secretaries to the biggest day in football’s year. There is more than one way to watch a game, after all, and on this sort of occasion enthusiastic neutrals have their place.

The only flaw in the system is that these enthusiastic neutrals, these unimpeachable servants of the game, invariably decide that their endeavours are best recompensed not by a trip to London to see the big game, but by a phone call to their local tout: a good 90 per cent of them just flog the tickets they are given, and these tickets eventually end up in the hands of the fans who were denied them in the first place. It is a ludicrous process, a typically scandalous slice of Football Association idiocy: everybody knows what is going to happen, and nobody does anything about it.

Dad got me a ticket for the Ipswich final via work contacts, but there were others available, even at university, because the Blues are customarily sent half a dozen. (The following year, when Arsenal were again in the Final, I ended up with two tickets. One was from my next-door-neighbour, who had associations with a very big club in the north-west of England, a club that has been in trouble before with the FA for its cavalier distribution of Cup Final tickets: he simply wrote to them and asked for one, and they sent it to him.) There were, no doubt, many more deserving recipients of a seat than I, people who had spent the season travelling the length of the country watching Arsenal rather than messing around at college, but I was a genuine fan of one of the Cup Final teams, at least, and as such more entitled than many who were there.

My companions for the afternoon were affable, welcoming middle-aged men in their late thirties and early forties who simply had no conception of the import of the afternoon for the rest of us. To them it was an afternoon out, a fun thing to do on a Saturday afternoon; if I were to meet them again, they would, I think, be unable to recall the score that afternoon, or the scorer (at half-time they talked office politics), and in a way I envied them their indifference. Perhaps there is an argument which says that Cup Final tickets are wasted on the fans, in the way that youth is wasted on the young; these men, who knew just enough about football to get them through the afternoon, actively enjoyed the occasion, its drama and its noise and its momentum, whereas I hated every minute of it, as I had hated every Cup Final involving Arsenal.

I had now been an Arsenal supporter for ten seasons—just under half my life. In only two of those ten seasons had Arsenal won trophies; they had reached finals, and failed horribly, in another two. But these triumphs and failures had all occurred in my first four years, and I had gone from the age of fifteen, when I was living one life, to the age of twenty-one, when I was living a completely different one. Like gas lamps and horse-drawn carriages—or perhaps like Spirographs and Sekidens—Wembley and championships were beginning to seem as though they belonged to a previous world.

When we reached, and then won, the FA Cup semi-final in 1978, it felt as though the sun had come out after several years of November afternoons. Arsenal-haters will have forgotten, or will simply refuse to believe, that this Arsenal team was capable of playing delightful, even enthralling football: Rix and Brady, Stapleton and Macdonald, Sunderland and, best of all, for one season only, Alan Hudson … for three or four months it looked as if this was a team that could make us happy in all the ways in which it is possible to be made happy at football.

If I were writing a novel, Arsenal would win the ’78 Cup Final. A win makes more sense rhythmically and thematically; another Wembley defeat at this point would stretch the reader’s patience and sense of justice. The only excuses I can offer for my poor plotting are that Brady was patently unfit and should never have played, and Supermac, who had made some typical and unwise remarks in the press about what he was going to do to the Ipswich back four, was worse than useless. (He had made the same compound error, of boasting loudly and then failing to deliver, four years earlier, when he was playing for Newcastle; some time after the Ipswich fiasco the Guardian printed a Cup trivia question: “What is taken to the Cup Final every year but never used?” The answer they wanted was the ribbons for the losing team, which are never tied on to the handle of the Cup, but some smartass wrote in and suggested Malcolm Macdonald.) It was an overwhelmingly one-sided final, even though Ipswich didn’t score until the second half; we never looked like getting the goal back, and lost 1-0.

So I had now lost three out of three at Wembley, and was convinced that I would never, ever see Arsenal running around Wembley with anything at all. Yet ’78 is perhaps the least painful of the defeats, because I was with people who were not pained by it at all, not even the man with the red-and-white scarf (suspiciously clean, as if he had bought it outside the stadium). It is a strange paradox that while the grief of football fans (and it is real grief) is private—we each have an individual relationship with our clubs, and I think that we are secretly convinced that none of the other fans understands quite why we have been harder hit than anyone else—we are forced to mourn in public, surrounded by people whose hurt is expressed in forms different from our own.

Many fans express anger, against their own team or the supporters of the opponents—real, foul-mouthed fury that upsets and saddens me. I have never felt the desire to do that; I just want to be on my own to think, to wallow for a little while, and to recover the strength necessary to go back and start all over again. These men, the business types, were sympathetic but unconcerned. They offered me a drink and I declined, so they shook my hand and offered commiserations and I disappeared; to them, it really was only a game, and it probably did me good to spend time with people who behaved for all the world as if football were a diverting entertainment, like rugby or golf or cricket. It’s not like that at all, of course, but just for an afternoon it was interesting and instructive to meet people who believed that it was.

Sugar Mice and Buzzcocks Albums

CAMBRIDGE UNITED v ORIENT

4.11.78

What happened was, Chris Roberts bought a sugar mouse from Jack Reynolds (“The Rock King”), bit its head off, dropped it in the Newmarket Road before he could get started on the body, and it got run over by a car. And that afternoon Cambridge United, who had hitherto been finding life difficult in the Second Division (two wins all season, one home, one away), beat Orient 3-1, and a ritual was born. Before each home game we all of us trooped into the sweet shop, purchased our mice, walked outside, bit the head off as though we were removing the pin from a grenade, and tossed the torsos under the wheels of oncoming cars; Jack Reynolds would stand in the doorway watching us, shaking his head sorrowfully. United, thus protected, remained unbeaten at the Abbey for months.

I know that I am particularly stupid about rituals, and have been ever since I started going to football matches, and I know also that I am not alone. I can remember when I was young having to take with me to Highbury a piece of putty, or blu-tack, or some stupid thing, which I pulled on nervously all afternoon (I was a smoker even before I was old enough to smoke); I can also remember having to buy a programme from the same programme seller, and having to enter the stadium through the same turnstile.

There have been hundreds of similar bits of nonsense, all designed to guarantee victories for one or other of my two teams. During Arsenal’s protracted and nerve-racking semi-final campaign against Liverpool in 1980, I turned the radio off half-way through the second half of the last game; Arsenal were winning 1-0, and as Liverpool had equalised in the last seconds of the previous game, I couldn’t bear to hear it through to the end. I played a Buzzcocks album instead (the Singles—Going Steady compilation album), knowing that side one would take me through to the final whistle. We won the match, and I insisted that my flatmate, who worked in a record store, should play the album at twenty past four on Cup Final afternoon, although it did no good. (I have my suspicions that he might have forgotten.)

I have tried “smoking” goals in (Arsenal once scored as three of us were lighting cigarettes), and eating cheese-and-onion crisps at a certain point in the first half; I have tried not setting the video for live games (the team seems to have suffered badly in the past when I have taped the matches in order to study the performance when I get home); I have tried lucky socks, and lucky shirts, and lucky hats, and lucky friends, and have attempted to exclude others who I feel bring with them nothing but trouble for the team.

Nothing (apart from the sugar mice) has ever been any good. But what else can we do when we’re so weak! We invest hours each day, months each year, years each lifetime in something over which we have no control; is it any wonder then, that we are reduced to creating ingenious but bizarre liturgies designed to give us the illusion that we are powerful after all, just as every other primitive community has done when faced with a deep and apparently impenetrable mystery?

Wembley IV—the Catharsis

ARSENAL v MANCHESTER UNITED

(at Wembley) 12.5.79

I had no ambitions for myself whatsoever before I was twenty-six or twenty-seven, when I decided that I could and would write for a living, packed my job in and waited around for publishers and/or Hollywood producers to call me up and ask me to do something for them sight unseen. Friends at college must have asked me what I intended to do with my life, particularly because by now I was in my final term; but the future still seemed to me as unimaginable and as uninteresting as it had when I was four or five, so I have no idea what I might have answered. I probably mumbled something about journalism or publishing (the aimless arts undergraduate’s exact equivalent of train driving or astronautics), but privately I was beginning to suspect that as I had spent my three years unwisely, these careers would not be possible. I knew people who had spent their entire undergraduate lives writing for university newspapers who were not being offered jobs, so what chance did I stand? I decided that it would be better not to know, and therefore applied for nothing at all.

I may have had no ideas for myself, but I had big ideas for my football teams. Two of these dreams—Cambridge United’s promotion from the Fourth to the Third, and then from the Third to the Second—had been realised already. But the third and most burning ambition, to see Arsenal win the FA Cup at Wembley (and maybe this was, after all, a personal ambition, in that my presence was an essential part of it), still remained unfulfilled.

The team had done remarkably well to return to the Cup Final for a second consecutive season. It took them five games to get past Third Division Sheffield Wednesday (the police have recently decided, in their community-serving way, that the beautiful and strange FA Cup tradition of the multi-game marathon should not be allowed to continue); they then had a tough away draw at Nottingham Forest, the European champions, and another tricky game at Southampton, won after a replay by two brilliant Alan Sunderland goals. The semi-final against Wolves was comparatively straightforward, despite Brady’s absence through injury: two second-half goals, from Sunderland and Stapleton, and they were back at Wembley.

Exactly a decade after the Manchester United Cup Final, in May 1989, I was waiting to hear news about a script I had written at the same time as Arsenal’s best chance of winning the Championship for eighteen years seemed to be disappearing fast. The script, a pilot for a projected sitcom, had got further than usual; there had been meetings with people from Channel 4, and great enthusiasm, and things looked good. But in despair after a bad result, a home defeat by Derby on the final Saturday of the season, I offered up my work (the acceptance of which would have rescued a career and a self-regard heading for oblivion) on some kind of personal sacrificial altar: if we win the League, I won’t mind the rejection slip. The rejection slip duly came, and hurt like hell for months; but the Championship came too, and now, two years later, when the disappointment has long gone but the thrill of Michael Thomas’s goal still gives me goose pimples when I think about it, I know that the bargain I made was the right one.

In May 1979 the potential for trade-offs was extensive and complicated. On the Thursday before the Cup Final, Mrs Thatcher was attempting to win her first General Election; on the Thursday after, my finals began. Of the three events, the Cup Final, obviously, was the one that concerned me most, although I was also perturbed, just as obviously, by the prospect of Mrs Thatcher becoming Prime Minister. (Maybe in another, quieter week I would have found time and energy to fret about my examinations, but a mediocre degree was now an inevitability, and in any case at British universities it is as easy to graduate as it is to have a birthday: just hang around for a while and it will happen.) Yet the terrible truth is that I was willing to accept a Conservative government if it guaranteed an Arsenal Cup Final win; I could hardly have been expected to anticipate that Mrs Thatcher would go on to become the longest serving Prime Minister this century. (Would I have made the same bargain if I had known? Eleven years of Thatcherism for the FA Cup? Of course not. I wouldn’t have settled for anything less than another Double.)

The fact that the Tories won comfortably on the Thursday didn’t mean that I expected us to win comfortably on the Saturday. I knew that making bargains, like squeezing putty and wearing certain shirts, didn’t guarantee success, and in any case the other finalists, Manchester United, were a proper team, not a roll-over-and-die, only-here-for-the-beer shower, like, well, like Ipswich, say, or Swindon. Manchester United were the kind of team who might well unsportingly ignore General Election deals simply by scoring loads of goals and thrashing us.

For most of the game, however, United played as if they knew what my deal had been and were more than happy to fulfil their side of it. Arsenal scored twice in the first half, the opening goal after twelve minutes (the first time in four games I had seen Arsenal take the lead at Wembley), the second goal right before half-time; the interval was a blissfully relaxed fifteen minutes of raucous celebration. Most of the second half passed by in the same way, until with five minutes to go Manchester United scored … and with two minutes to go, in traumatising and muddled slow motion, they scored again. We had thrown the game away, players and fans all knew that, and as I watched the United players cavort on the touchline at the far end I was left with the terrible feeling that I’d had as a child—that I hated Arsenal, that the club was a burden I could no longer carry but one that I would never, ever be able to throw off.

I was high up on the terraces with the other Arsenal fans, right behind the goal that Manchester United were defending; I sat down, too dizzy with pain and anger and frustration and self-pity to remain on my feet any longer. There were others who did the same, and behind me a pair of teenage girls were weeping silently, not in the hammy fashion of teenage girls at Bay City Rollers concerts, but in a way that suggested a deep and personal grief.

I was looking after a young American lad for the afternoon, a friend of the family, and his mild sympathy but obvious bafflement threw my distress into embarrassing relief: I knew that it was only a game, that worse things happened at sea, that people were starving in Africa, that there might be a nuclear holocaust within the next few months; I knew that the score was still 2-2, for heaven’s sake, and that there was a chance that Arsenal could somehow find a way out of the mire (although I also knew that the tide had turned, and that the players were too demoralised to be able to win the game in extra time). But none of this knowledge could help me. I had been but five minutes away from fulfilling the only fully formed ambition I had ever consciously held since the age of eleven; and if people are allowed to grieve when they are passed over for promotion, or when they fail to win an Oscar, or when their novel is rejected by every publisher in London—and our culture allows them to do so, even though these people may only have dreamed these dreams for a couple of years, rather than the decade, the half-lifetime, that I had been dreaming mine—then I was bloody well entitled to sit down on a lump of concrete for two minutes and try to blink back tears.

And it really was for only two minutes. When the game restarted, Liam Brady took the ball deep into the United half (afterwards he said that he was knackered, and was only trying to prevent the loss of a third goal) and pushed it out wide to Rix. I was watching this, but not seeing it; even when Rix’s cross came over and United’s goalkeeper Gary Bailey missed it I wasn’t paying much attention. But then Alan Sunderland got his foot to the ball, poked it in, right into the goal in front of us, and I was shouting not “Yes” or “Goal” or any of the other noises that customarily come to my throat at these times but just a noise, “AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH”, a noise born of utter joy and stunned disbelief, and suddenly there were people on the concrete terraces again, but they were rolling around on top of each other, bug-eyed and berserk. Brian, the American kid, looked at me, smiled politely and tried to find his hands amidst the mayhem below him so that he could raise them and clap with an enthusiasm I suspected he did not feel.

I floated through my finals as if I had been anaesthetised with a benign, idiocy-inducing drug. Some of my fellow-students, grey with sleeplessness and concern, were perplexed by my mood; others, the football fans, understood and were envious. (At college, just as at school, there were no other Arsenal fans.) I got my mediocre degree without any undue alarm; and some two months later, when I had come down from the Cup Final win and the end-of-year celebrations, I began to face up to the fact that on the afternoon of 12th May I had achieved most of what I had ever wanted to achieve in my life, and that I had no idea what to do with the rest of it. I was twenty-two, and the future suddenly looked blank and scary.

Filling a Hole

ARSENAL v LIVERPOOL

1.5.80

It is hard for me, and for many of us, to think of years as being self-contained, with a beginning on 1st January and an ending 365 days later. I was going to say that 1980 was a torpid, blank, directionless year for me but that would be wrong; it was 79/80that was these things. Football fans talk like that: our years, our units of time, run from August to May (June and July don’t really happen, especially in years which end with an odd number and which therefore contain no World Cup or European Championship). Ask us for the best or the worst period in our lives and we will often answer with four figures—66/67 for Manchester United fans, 67/68 for Manchester City fans, 69/70 for Everton fans, and so on—a silent slash in the middle of them the only concession to the calendar used elsewhere in the western world. We get drunk on New Year’s Eve, just as everyone else does, but really it is after the Cup Final in May that our mental clock is wound back, and we indulge in all the vows and regrets and renewals that ordinary people allow themselves at the end of the conventional year.

Perhaps we should be given a day off work on Cup Final Eve, so that we can gather together and celebrate. We are, after all, a community within a community; and just as the Chinese have their New Year, when in London the streets around Leicester Square are closed off and the London Chinese have a procession and eat traditional food, and the tourists come to watch them, maybe there is a way in which we can mark the passing of another season of dismal failure, dodgy refereeing decisions, bad back-passes and terrible transfer dealing. We could dress up in our horrible new away shirts, and chant and sing; we could eat Wagon Wheels—the marshmallow biscuit that only football fans eat, because it is only sold at football grounds—and gangrenous hamburgers, and drink warm and luridly orange fizz from a plastic bottle, a refreshment manufactured especially for the occasion by a company called something like Stavros of Edmonton. And we could get the police to keep us standing in … oh, forget it. This terrible litany has made me realise just how awful our lives are for these nine months, and that when they are over I want to live every day of the twelve short weeks available to me as if I were a human being.

For me, 79/80 was a season when football—always hitherto the backbone of life—provided the entire skeleton. For the whole season I did nothing else apart from go to the pub, work (in a garage outside Cambridge, because I could think of nothing better to do), hang out with my girlfriend, whose course lasted a year longer than mine, and wait for Saturdays and Wednesdays. The extraordinary thing was that Arsenal in particular seemed to respond to my need for as much football as possible: they played seventy games that season, twenty-eight of them cup-ties of one kind or another. Every time I gave any indication of becoming more listless than was good for me, Arsenal obliged by providing another match.

By April 1980 I was sick to death of my job, and my indecision, and myself. But just when it began to seem as though the holes in my life were too big to be plugged, even by football, Arsenal’s anxiety to distract me became frenzied: between 9th April and 1st May they played six semi-final games, four against Liverpool in the FA Cup and two against Juventus in the Cup-Winners Cup. Only one of these—the first leg of the Juventus tie—was in London, and so everything revolved around the radio. All I can recall about that entire month is that I worked, and slept, and listened to Peter Jones and Bryon Butler live from Villa Park or Hillsborough or Highfield Road.

I’m not a good radio listener, but then very few fans are. The crowd are much quicker than the commentators—the roars and groans precede the descriptions of the action by several seconds—and my inability to see the pitch makes me much more nervous than I would be if I were at the game, or watching on TV. On the radio, every shot at your goal is heading for the top corner, every cross creates panic, every opposition free kick is right on the edge of the area; in those days before televised live games, when Radio 2 was my only link with Arsenal’s distant cup exploits, I used to sit playing with the dial, switching between one station and another, desperate to know what was going on, but equally desperate not to have to hear. Radio football is football reduced to its lowest common denominator. Shorn of the game’s aesthetic pleasures, or the comfort of a crowd that feels the same way as you, or the sense of security that you get when you see that your defenders and goalkeeper are more or less where they should be, all that is left is naked fear. The bleak, ghostly howl that used to afflict Radio 2 in the evenings was entirely apposite.

The last two of those four semi-finals against Liverpool nearly killed me. In the third match, Arsenal took the lead in the first minute and hung on to it for the next eighty-nine; I sat and stood and smoked and wandered around for the entirety of the second half, unable to read or talk or think, until Liverpool equalised in injury time. The equaliser was like the shot from a gun that had been aimed at my head for an hour, the sickening difference being that it didn’t put an end to it all like a bullet would have done—on the contrary, it forced me to go through the whole thing again. In the fourth game, three days later, Arsenal took the lead once more, which was when I became so fearful that I had to turn the radio off and discovered the talismanic properties of the Buzzcocks. This time, Liverpool didn’t come back, and Arsenal reached their third FA Cup Final in three years; the trouble was that I was almost too wrung-out and jumpy and nicotine-poisoned to care.

Liam Brady

ARSENAL v NOTTINGHAM FOREST

5.5.80

For a year I had lived with the possibility of Liam Brady’s transfer to another club in the same way that, in the late fifties and early sixties, American teenagers had lived with the possibility of the impending Apocalypse. I knew it would happen, yet, even so, I allowed myself to hope; I fretted about it daily, read all the papers scrupulously for hints that he might sign a new contract, studied his onfield relationship with the other players at the club carefully in case it revealed signs of bonds too strong to be broken. I had never felt so intensely about an Arsenal player: for five years he was the focus of the team, and therefore the centre of a very important part of myself, and the consciousness of his rumoured desire to leave Arsenal was always with me, a small shadow on any X-ray of my well-being.

Most of this fixation was easy to explain. Brady was a midfield player, a passer, and Arsenal haven’t really had one since he left. It might surprise those who have a rudimentary grasp of the rules of the game to learn that a First Division football team can try to play football without a player who can pass the ball, but it no longer surprises the rest of us: passing went out of fashion just after silk scarves and just before inflatable bananas. Managers, coaches and therefore players now favour alternative methods of moving the ball from one part of the field to another, the chief of which is a sort of wall of muscle strung across the half-way line in order to deflect the ball in the general direction of the forwards. Most, indeed all, football fans regret this. I think I can speak for all of us when I say that we used to like passing, that we felt that on the whole it was a good thing. It was nice to watch, football’s prettiest accessory (a good player could pass to a team-mate we hadn’t seen, or find an angle we wouldn’t have thought of, so there was a pleasing geometry to it), but managers seemed to feel that it was a lot of trouble, and therefore stopped bothering to produce any players who could do it. There are still a couple of passers in England, but then, there are still a number of blacksmiths.

We overrate the seventies, most of us in our thirties. We look back on it as a golden age, and buy the old shirts, and watch old videos, and talk with awe and regret of Keegan and Toshack, Bell and Summerbee, Hector and Todd. We forget that the England team didn’t even qualify for two World Cups, and we overlook the fact that most First Division teams contained at least one player—Storey at Arsenal, Smith at Liverpool, Harris at Chelsea—who simply wasn’t very good at football at all. Commentators and journalists complain about the behaviour of today’s professionals—Gazza’s petulance, Fashanu’s elbows, Arsenal’s brawling—but they chuckle indulgently when they remember Lee and Hunter scrapping all the way back to the dressing rooms after they had been sent off, or Bremner and Keegan being banished for fighting in a Charity Shield game. Players in the seventies weren’t as fast or as fit, and probably most of them weren’t even as skilful; but every single side had someone who could pass the ball.

Liam Brady was one of the best two or three passers of the last twenty years, and this in itself was why he was revered by every single Arsenal fan, but for me there was more to it than that. I worshipped him because he was great, and I worshipped him because, in the parlance, if you cut him he would bleed Arsenal (like Charlie George he was a product of the youth team); but there was a third thing, too. He was intelligent. This intelligence manifested itself primarily in his passing, which was incisive and imaginative and constantly surprising. But it showed off the pitch too: he was articulate, and drily funny, and engaged (“Come on David, put it away” he cried from the commentary box when his friend and old Arsenal colleague David O’Leary was about to take the decisive penalty for Ireland in the 1990 World Cup-tie against Romania); as I progressed through the academic strata, and more and more people seemed to make a distinction between football on the one hand and the life of the mind on the other, Brady seemed to provide a bridge between the two.

Of course, intelligence in a footballer is no bad thing, particularly in a midfield player, a playmaker, although this intelligence is not the same intelligence as that required to enjoy, say, a “difficult” European novel. Paul Gascoigne has the footballing intelligence by the bucketload (and it is a dazzling intelligence, involving, among other skills, astonishing co-ordination and a lightning-fast exploitation of a situation that will change within a couple of seconds), yet his lack of even the most basic common sense is obvious and legendary. All the best footballers have some kind of wit about them: Lineker’s anticipation, Shilton’s positioning, Beckenbauer’s understanding, are products of their brain rather than functions of simple athleticism. Yet it is the classical midfielder whose cerebral attributes receive the most attention, particularly from the sports writers on the quality papers and from the middle-class football fans.

This is not only because the sort of intelligence that Brady and his ilk possess is the most visible, in footballing terms, but because it is analogous to the sort of intelligence that is prized in middle-class culture. Look at the adjectives used to describe playmakers: elegant, aware, subtle, sophisticated, cunning, visionary … these are words that could equally well describe a poet, or a film-maker, or a painter. It is as if the truly gifted footballer is too good for his milieu, and must be placed on a different, higher plane.

Certainly there was an element of this attitude in my deification of Brady. Charlie George, the previous idol of the Arsenal North Bank, had never been mine in the way Liam was. Brady was different (although of course he wasn’t, really—his background was pretty much the same as that of most footballers) because he was languid and mysterious, and though I possessed neither of these qualities, I felt that my education had equipped me to recognise them in others. “A poet of the left foot,” my sister used to remark drily whenever I mentioned his name, which was often, but there was a truth behind her irony: for a time I wanted footballers to be as unlike themselves as possible and, though this was stupid, other people do it still. Pat Nevin, particularly in his Chelsea days, became a much better player when it was discovered that he knew about art and books and politics.

The Nottingham Forest game, a sleepy nil-nil draw on a sleepy, grey, Bank Holiday Monday, was Brady’s last at Highbury; he had decided that his future lay abroad, in Italy, and he was gone for several years. I was there to see him off, and he did a slow, sad lap of honour with the rest of the team. Deep down I think I still hoped that he would change his mind, or that the club would eventually become aware of the irreparable damage it would do to itself if it allowed him to leave. Some said that money was at the heart of it, and that if Arsenal had stumped up more he would have stayed, but I preferred not to believe them. I preferred to believe that it was the promise of Italy itself, its culture and style, that had lured him away, and that the parochial pleasures of Hertfordshire or Essex or wherever he lived had inevitably begun to fill him with an existential ennui. What I knew most of all was that he didn’t want to leave us all, that he was torn, that he loved us as much as we loved him and that one day he would come back.

Just seven months after losing Liam to Juventus I lost my girlfriend to another man, slap-bang in the middle of the first dismal post-Brady season. And though I knew which loss hurt the most—Liam’s transfer induced regret and sadness, but not, thankfully, the insomnia and nausea and impossible, inconsolable bitterness of a twenty-three-year-old broken heart—I think that in some strange way she and Liam got muddled up in my mind. The two of them, Brady and the Lost Girl, haunted me for a long time, five or six years, maybe, so in a way it was predictable that one ghost should melt into the other. After Brady had gone Arsenal tried out a string of midfield players, some of them competent, some not, all of them doomed by the fact that they weren’t the person they were trying to replace: between 1980 and 1986 Talbot, Rix, Rollins, Price, Gatting, Peter Nicholas, Robson, Petrovic, Charlie Nicholas, Davis, Williams and even centre-forward Paul Mariner all played in central midfield.

And I had a string of relationships over the next four or five years, some serious, some not … the parallels were endless. Brady’s often-rumoured return (he played for four different clubs in his eight years in Italy, and before each transfer the English tabloids were full of unforgivably cruel stories about how Arsenal were on the verge of re-signing him) began to take on a shamanistic quality. I knew, of course, that the bouts of vicious, exhausting depression that afflicted me in the early-to-mid eighties were not caused either by Brady or the Lost Girl. They were to do with something else, something much more difficult to comprehend, and something that must have been in me for much longer than either of these two blameless people. But during these terrifying downs, I would think back to times when I had last felt happy, fulfilled, energetic, optimistic; and she and Brady were a part of those times. They weren’t entirely responsible for them, but they were very much there during them, and that was enough to turn these two love affairs into the twin supporting pillars of a different, enchanted age.

Some five or six years after he had gone, Brady did come home, to play for Arsenal in Pat Jennings’s testimonial game. It was a strange night. We were in even more need of him than ever (a graph of Arsenal’s fortunes in the eighties would resemble a U-bend), and before the game I felt nervous, but not in the way that I usually felt nervous before big games—these were the nerves of a former suitor about to embark on an unavoidably painful but long-anticipated reunion. I hoped, I suppose, that an ecstatic and tearful reception would trigger something off in Brady, that he would realise that his absence made him, as well as us, less than whole somehow. But nothing of the kind happened. He played the game, waved at us and flew back to Italy the next morning, and the next time we saw him he was wearing a West Ham shirt and smashing the ball past our goalkeeper John Lukic from the edge of the area.

We never did replace him satisfactorily, but we found different people, with different qualities; it took me a long time to realise that this is as good a way of coping with loss as any.

Arsenalesque

WEST HAM v ARSENAL

10.5.80

Everyone knows the song that Millwall fans sing, to the tune of “Sailing”: “No one likes us/No one likes us/No one likes us/We don’t care.” In fact I have always felt that the song is a little melodramatic, and that if anyone should sing it, it is Arsenal. Every Arsenal fan, the youngest and the oldest, is aware that no one likes us, and every day we hear that dislike reiterated. The average media-attuned football fan—someone who reads a sports page most days, watches TV whenever it is on, reads a fanzine or a football magazine—will come across a slighting reference to Arsenal maybe two or three times a week (about as often as he or she will hear a Lennon and McCartney song, I would guess). I have just finished watching Saint and Greavsie, during the course of which Jimmy Greaves thanked the Wrexham manager for “delighting millions” with the Fourth Division team’s victory over us in the FA Cup; the cover of a football magazine kicking around in the flat promises an article entitled “Why does everyone hate Arsenal?” Last week there was an article in a national newspaper attacking our players for their lack of artistry; one of the players thus abused was eighteen years old and hadn’t even played for the first team at the time.

We’re boring, and lucky, and dirty, and petulant, and rich, and mean, and have been, as far as I can tell, since the 1930s. That was when the greatest football manager of all time, Herbert Chapman, introduced an extra defender and changed the way football was played, thus founding Arsenal’s reputation for negative, unattractive football; yet successive Arsenal teams, notably the Double team in 1971, used an intimidatingly competent defence as a springboard for success. (Thirteen of our league games that year ended nil-nil or 1-0, and it is fair to say that none of them were pretty.) I would guess that “Lucky Arsenal” was born out of “Boring Arsenal”, in that sixty years of 1-0 wins tend to test the credulity and patience of opposing fans.

West Ham, on the other hand, like Tottenham, are famous for their poetry and flair and commitment to good, fluent (“progressive”, in the current argot, a word which for those of us in our thirties is distressingly reminiscent of Emerson, Lake and Palmer and King Crimson) football. Everyone has a soft spot for Peters and Moore and Hurst and Brooking and the West Ham “Academy”, just as everyone loathes and despises Storey and Talbot and Adams and the whole idea and purpose of Arsenal. No matter that the wild-eyed Martin Allen and the brutish Julian Dicks currently represent the Hammers, just as Van Den Hauwe and Fenwick and Edinburgh represent Spurs. No matter that the gifted Merson and the dazzling Limpar play for Arsenal. No matter that in 1989 and 1992 we scored more goals than anyone else in the First Division. The Hammers and the Lilleywhites are the Keepers of the Flame, the Only Followers of the True Path; we are the Gunners, the Visigoths, with King Herod and the Sheriff of Nottingham as our twin centre-halves, their arms in the air appealing for offside.

West Ham, Arsenal’s opponents in the 1980 Cup Final, were in the Second Division that season, and their lowly status made people drool over them even more. To the nation’s delight, Arsenal lost. Saint Trevor of England scored the only goal and slew the odious monster, the Huns were repelled, children could sleep safely in their beds again. So what are we left with, us Arsenal fans, who for most of our lives have allowed ourselves to become identified with the villains? Nothing; and our sense of stoicism and grievance is almost thrilling.

The only things anyone remembers about the game now are Brooking’s rare headed goal, and Willie Young’s monstrous professional foul on Paul Allen, just as the youngest player to appear in a Cup Final was about to score one of the cutest and most romantic goals ever seen at Wembley. Standing on the Wembley terraces among the silent, embarrassed Arsenal fans, deafened by the boos that came from the West Ham end and the neutrals in the stadium, I was appalled by Young’s cynicism.

But that night, watching the highlights on TV, I became aware that a part of me actually enjoyed the foul—not because it stopped Allen from scoring (the game was over, we’d lost, and that hardly mattered), but because it was so comically, parodically Arsenalesque. Who else but an Arsenal defender would have clattered a tiny seventeen-year-old member of the Academy? Motson or Davies, I can’t remember which, was suitably disgusted and pompous about it all; to me, sick of hearing about how the goodies had put the baddies to flight, his righteousness sounded provocative. There was something about it that reminded me of Bill Grundy winding up the Sex Pistols on television in 1976 and then expressing his outrage about their behaviour afterwards. Arsenal, the first of the true punk rockers: our centre-halves were fulfilling a public need for harmless pantomime deviancy long before Johnny Rotten came along.

Life After Football

ARSENAL v VALENCIA

14.5.80

Football teams are extraordinarily inventive in the ways they find to cause their supporters sorrow. They lead at Wembley and then throw it away; they go to the top of the First Division and then stop dead; they draw the difficult away game and lose the home replay; they beat Liverpool one week and lose to Scunthorpe the next; they seduce you, half-way through the season, into believing that they are promotion candidates and then go the other way … always, when you think you have anticipated the worst that can happen, they come up with something new.

Four days after losing one cup final, Arsenal lost another, to Valencia in the European Cup-Winners Cup, and the seventy-game season came to nothing. We outplayed the Spanish team, but couldn’t score, and the game went to penalties; Brady and Rix missed theirs (some say that Rix was never the same again after the trauma of that night, and certainly he never recaptured his form of the late seventies, even though he went on to play for England), and that was that.

As far as I am aware, there isn’t another English club that has lost two finals in a week, although in the years to come, when losing in a final was the most that Arsenal supporters dared to hope, I wondered why I felt quite so stricken. But that week also had a beneficially purgative side effect: after six solid weeks of semi-finals and finals, of listening to the radio and looking for Wembley tickets, the football clutter was gone and there was nothing with which to replace it. Finally I had to think about what I was going to do, rather than what the Arsenal manager was going to do. So I applied for teacher training college back in London, and vowed, not for the last time, that I would never allow football to replace life completely, no matter how many games Arsenal played in a year.

Part of the Game

ARSENAL v SOUTHAMPTON

19.8.80

The first match of the season, so you’re always that bit keener to get along. And over the summer there was an extraordinary bit of transfer business, when we bought Clive Allen for a million pounds, didn’t like the look of him in a couple of preseason friendlies, and swapped him for Kenny Sansom (a striker for a full-back; that’s the Arsenal way) before he’d even played a game. So even though Liam had gone, and Southampton were not the most attractive of opponents, there was a forty-thousand-plus crowd.

Something went wrong—they hadn’t opened enough turnstiles, or the police had made a pig’s ear of controlling the crowd flow, whatever—and there was a huge crush outside the North Bank entrances on the Avenell Road. I could pick both my legs up and remain pinioned and, at one stage, I had to put my arms in the air to give myself just that little bit more room and to stop my fists digging into my chest and stomach. It wasn’t anything that special, really; fans have all been in situations where for a few moments things have looked bad. But I remember struggling for breath when I approached the front of the queue (I was so constricted that I couldn’t fill my lungs properly) which means that it was a little bit worse than usual; when I finally got through the turnstile I sat down on a step for a while, gave myself time to recover, and I noticed that a lot of other people were doing the same.

But the thing was, I trusted the system: I knew that I could not be squashed to death, because that never happened at football matches. The Ibrox thing, well that was different, a freak combination of events; and in any case that was in Scotland during an Old Firm game, and everyone knows that these are especially problematic. No, you see, in England somebody, somewhere, knew what they were doing, and there was this system, which nobody ever explained to us, that prevented accidents of this kind. It might seem as though the authorities, the club and the police were pushing their luck on occasions, but that was because we didn’t understand properly how they were organising things. In the melee in Avenell Road that night some people were laughing, making funny strangled faces as the air was pushed out of them; they were laughing because they were only feet away from unconcerned constables and mounted officers, and they knew that this proximity ensured their safety. How could you die when help was that close?

But I thought about that evening nine years later, on the afternoon of the Hillsborough disaster, and I thought about a lot of other afternoons and evenings too, when it seemed as though there were too many people in the ground, or the crowd had been unevenly distributed. It occurred to me that I could have died that night, and that on a few other occasions I have been much closer to death than I care to think about. There was no plan after all; they really had been riding their luck all that time.

My Brother

ARSENAL v TOTTENHAM

30.8.80

There must be many fathers around the country who have experienced the cruellest, most crushing rejection of all: their children have ended up supporting the wrong team. When I contemplate parenthood, something I do more and more as my empathetic biological clock ticks nearer to midnight, I am aware that I am genuinely fearful of this kind of treachery. What would I do if my son or daughter decided, at the age of seven or eight, that Dad was a madman, and that Tottenham or West Ham or Manchester United were the team for them? How would I cope? Would I do the decent parental thing, accept that my days at Highbury were over, and buy a couple of season-tickets at White Hart Lane or Upton Park? Hell, no. I am myself too childish about Arsenal to defer to the whims of a child; I would explain to him or her that, although I would respect any decision of this kind, obviously if they wished to see their team then they would have to take themselves, with their own money, under their own steam. That should wake the little sod up.

I have more than once fantasised about Arsenal playing Tottenham in the Cup Final; in this fantasy my son, as rapt and tense and unhappy as I was when I first supported Arsenal, is a Spurs fan, and as we could not get tickets for Wembley we are watching the game at home on TV. In the last minute the old warhorse Kevin Campbell scores the winner … and I explode into a frenzy of joy, leaping around the sitting room, punching the air, jeering at, jostling, tousling the head of my own traumatized child. I fear that I am capable of this, and therefore the mature, self-knowing thing to do would be to see the vasectomist this afternoon. If my father had been a Swindon Town fan in 1969, on that awful afternoon at Wembley, and had reacted appropriately, we would not have spoken for twenty-two years.

I have already successfully negotiated one hurdle of this kind. In August 1980 my father and his family came back to England after more than ten years abroad in France and America. My half-brother Jonathan was thirteen, and crazy about soccer—partly due to my influence, partly because he had been in the States while the now-defunct North American Soccer League was at its zenith. And so, as quickly as possible, before he had a chance to work out that what was happening at White Hart Lane with Hoddle and Ardiles was infinitely more interesting than what was going on at Highbury with Price and Talbot, I took him to Arsenal.

He’d been once before, in 1973 when, as a six-year-old, he’d shivered uncontrollably through, and stared uncomprehendingly at, a third-round Cup match against Leicester, but he’d long forgotten that, so this early-season local derby was a fresh start. It wasn’t a bad game, and certainly no indicator of the desperate times ahead: Pat Jennings, the Tottenham reject, kept out Crooks and Archibald for most of the first half, and then whichever of Spurs’ terrible post-Pat keepers (Daines? Kendall?) let in a soft one before Stapleton finished them off with a wonderful lob.

But it wasn’t the football that captivated Jonathan. It was the violence. All around us, people were fighting—on the North Bank, on the Clock End, in the Lower East Stand, in the Upper West. Every few minutes a huge gash would appear somewhere in the tightly woven fabric of heads on the terraces as the police separated warring factions, and my little brother was beside himself with excitement; he kept turning round to look at me, his face shining with a disbelieving glee. “This is incredible,” he said, over and over again. I had no trouble with him after that: he came to the next game, a drab, quiet League Cup match against Swansea, and to most of the others that season. And now we have season-tickets together, and he drives me to away games, so it’s all worked out OK.

Is he an Arsenal fan simply because for a long time he expected to see people attempt to kill each other? Or is it just because he looked up to me, as I know he did for a while, inexplicably, when he was younger, and therefore trusted me and my choice of team? Either way, I probably didn’t have the right to inflict Willie Young and John Hawley and the Arsenal offside trap on him for the rest of his days, which is what I have ended up doing. So I feel responsible, but not regretful: if I had not been able to secure his allegiance to the cause, if he had decided to look for his footballing pain elsewhere, then our relationship would have been of an entirely different and possibly much cooler nature.

Here’s a funny thing, though: Jonathan and I sit there, at Highbury, week after week, partly because of the distressing circumstances that led to his existence. My father left my mother in order to set up home with his mother, and my half-brother was born, and somehow all this turned me into an Arsenal fan; how odd, then, that my peculiar kink should have been transferred on to him, like a genetic flaw.

Clowns

ARSENAL v STOKE CITY

13.9.80

How many games like this did we watch, between Brady’s departure and George Graham’s arrival? The away team are struggling, unambitious also-rans; their manager (Ron Saunders, or Gordon Lee, or Graham Turner, or, in this case, Alan Durban) wants a draw at Highbury, and plays five defenders, four midfielders who used to be defenders, and a hopeless centre-forward standing on his own up front, ready to challenge for punts from the goalkeeper. Without Liam (and, after this season, without Frank Stapleton), Arsenal didn’t have the wit or the imagination to break the opposition down, and maybe we won (with a couple of goals from near-post corners, say, or a deflected long-shot and a penalty), or maybe we drew (nil-nil), or maybe we lost 1-0 to a goal on the break, but it didn’t really matter anyway. Arsenal were nowhere near good enough to win the League, yet were much too competent to go down; week after week, year after year, we turned up knowing full well that what we were about to witness would depress us profoundly.

This game against Stoke was very much in the mould—a goalless first half, and then, amid rising discontent, two late goals (ironically, given the towering height of Stoke’s several centre-halves, headed in by the two smallest players on the pitch, Sansom and Rollins). Nobody, not even someone like me, would have been able to remember the game had it not been for the post-match press conference, when Alan Durban became angered by the hostility of the journalists towards his team and his tactics. “If you want entertainment,” he snarled, “go and watch clowns.”

It became one of the most famous football quotes of the decade. The quality papers in particular loved it for its effortless summary of modern football culture: here was conclusive proof that the game had gone to the dogs, that nobody cared about anything other than results any more, that the Corinthian spirit was dead, that hats were no longer thrown in the air. One could see their point. Why should football be different from every other branch of the leisure industry? You won’t find too many Hollywood producers and West End theatre impresarios sneering at the public’s desire to be diverted, so why should football managers get away with it?

Over the last few years, however, I have come to believe that Alan Durban was right. It was not his job to provide entertainment. It was his job to look after the interests of the Stoke City fans, which means avoiding defeat away from home, keeping a struggling team in the First Division, and maybe winning a few cup games to alleviate the gloom. The Stoke fans would have been happy with a nil-nil draw, just as Arsenal fans are happy enough with nil-nil draws at Spurs or Liverpool or Manchester United; at home, we expect to beat more or less everyone, and we don’t particularly care how it is done.

This commitment to results means, inevitably, that fans and journalists see games in a profoundly different way. In 1969 I saw George Best play, and score, for Manchester United at Highbury. The experience should have been profound, like seeing Nijinsky dance, or Maria Callas sing, and though I do talk about it in that way sometimes, to younger fans, or those who missed out on Best for other reasons, my fond account is essentially phoney: I hated that afternoon. Every time he got the ball he frightened me, and I wished then, as I suppose I wish now, that he had been injured. And I have seen Law and Charlton, Hoddle and Ardiles, Dalglish and Rush, Hurst and Peters, and the same thing happened: I have not enjoyed anything these players have ever done at Highbury (even though I have, on occasions, grudgingly admired things they have done against other teams). Gazza’s free kick against Arsenal in the FA Cup semi-final at Wembley was simply astonishing, one of the most remarkable goals I have ever seen … but I wish with all my heart that I had not seen it, and that he had not scored it. Indeed, for the previous month I had been praying that Gascoigne would not be playing, which emphasises the separateness of football: who would buy an expensive ticket for the theatre and hope that the star of the show was indisposed?

Neutrals loved the glorious theatre of that Gascoigne moment, of course, but there were very few neutrals in the stadium. There were Arsenal fans, who were as horrified as I was, and Tottenham fans, who were just as thrilled with the second goal, a two-yard Gary Lineker tap-in after a scramble—in fact, they went even more berserk then, because at 2-0 after ten minutes Arsenal were dead and buried. So where is the relationship between the fan and entertainment, when the fan has such a problematic relationship with some of the game’s greatest moments?

There is such a relationship, but it is far from straightforward. Tottenham, generally regarded as being the better footballing team, are not as well-supported as Arsenal, for example; and teams with a reputation for entertaining (West Ham, Chelsea, Norwich) don’t get queues around the block. The way our team plays is beside the point for most of us, just as winning cups and championships is beside the point. Few of us have chosen our clubs, they have simply been presented to us; and so as they slip from the Second Division to the Third, or sell their best players, or buy players who you know can’t play, or bash the ball for the seven hundredth time towards a nine foot centre-forward, we simply curse, go home, worry for a fortnight and then come back to suffer all over again.

For my own part, I am an Arsenal fan first and a football fan second (and, yes, again, I know all the jokes). I will never be able to enjoy the Gazza goal, and there are countless other similar moments. But I know what entertaining football is, and have loved the relatively few occasions when Arsenal have managed to produce it; and when other teams who are not in competition with Arsenal in any way play with flair and verve, then I can appreciate that, too. Like everyone, I have lamented long and loud the deficiencies of the English game, and the permanently depressing ugliness of the football that our national team plays, but really, deep down, this is pub-speak, and not much more. Complaining about boring football is a little like complaining about the sad ending of King Lear, it misses the point somehow, and this is what Alan Durban understood: that football is an alternative universe, as serious and as stressful as work, with the same worries and hopes and disappointments and occasional elations. I go to football for loads of reasons, but I don’t go for entertainment, and when I look around me on a Saturday and see those panicky, glum faces, I see that others feel the same. For the committed fan, entertaining football exists in the same way as those trees that fall in the middle of the jungle: you presume it happens, but you’re not in a position to appreciate it. Sports journalists and armchair Corinthians are the Amazon Indians who know more than we do—but in another way they know much, much less.

Same Old Arsenal

ARSENAL v BRIGHTON

1.11.80

A nothing game, between two nothing teams; I doubt if anyone else who was there remembers anything about it at all, unless it was their first time, or their last time, and doubtless my two companions for the afternoon, my dad and my half-brother, had forgotten the occasion by the following day. I recall it only because (only because!) it was the last time I was at Highbury with my dad, and though we might well go again sometime (he has made a couple of very small noises recently) the game now has an end-of-an-era aura about it.

The team were in much the same state as we had found them twelve years before, and I am sure that he must have complained about the cold, and Arsenal’s ineptitude, and I am sure that I felt responsible for both, and wanted to apologise. And I wasn’t much different in important ways, either. I was still as gloomy, somehow, as I had been when I was a boy, although because I was now aware of this gloom, understood what it was, it seemed darker and more threatening than it had ever done before. And, of course, the team were still in there, mixed in with it all, leading these lows from the front or trailing them from behind, I don’t know which.

But other things had changed, permanently and for the better, particularly in my dealings with my “other” family. My stepmother had long ceased to be the Enemy—there was a real warmth in our relationship that neither of us could have anticipated years before—and there had never been any problem with the kids; but most important of all, my father and I, almost imperceptibly, had reached the stage where football was no longer the chief method of discourse between us. I lived with him and his family in London for the whole of the 80/81 season, my teacher training year; this was the first time we had had such an arrangement since I was a child, and it was fine. We had other stuff going on by now, as we have done ever since. The failure of his first marriage must still be mixed in there somehow, I suppose, but we have managed to fashion something that works well in its own way; and though there are still frustrations and difficulties, I don’t think that these are ruinous, or that the problems we have are any worse than my friends have with their fathers—indeed, we get along much better than most.

I didn’t think all that at the time, of course, because as far as I knew, a 2-0 home victory over Brighton had no particular significance, and there would be another last game for us some other time—but then, our début together had been equally inauspicious. It’s best just to leave us there, the three of us—Dad topping up his tea with the contents of his hip flask and grumbling about still watching the same old bloody Arsenal, me shifting around uncomfortably in my seat, hoping that somehow things would get better, and Jonathan, still small and pale with cold and, for all I know, wishing that his brother and his father had found a different way to sort out their problems in 1968.

A Trivial Pursuit

ARSENAL v MANCHESTER CITY

24.2.81

I got lost around this time, and stayed lost for the next few years. Between one home game (against Coventry) and the next (a midweek game against Manchester City), I split up with my girlfriend, all the things that had been rotting away inside me for who knows how many years oozed out for the first time, I started my teaching practice in a difficult west London school, and Arsenal got a draw at Stoke and a beating at Forest. It was strange to see the same players trotting out that evening as they had trotted out three weeks before: I felt that they should have had the decency to reinvent themselves, accept that the faces and physiques and shortcomings they had had in the Coventry game belonged to another period entirely.

If there had been a match every weekday evening and weekend afternoon I would have gone, because the games acted as punctuation marks (if only commas) between bleak periods, when I drank too much and smoked too much and weight fell off me gratifyingly quickly. I remember this one so clearly simply because it was the first of them—they all began to merge into each other a little after this; Lord knows nothing much happened on the pitch, apart from Talbot and Sunderland trundling in a couple of goals.

But football had taken on yet another meaning now, connected with my new career. It had occurred to me—as I think it occurs to many young teachers of a similar ilk—that my interests (football and pop music in particular) would be an advantage in the classroom, that I would be able to “identify” with “the kids” because I understood the value of the Jam and Laurie Cunningham. It had not occurred to me that I was as childish as my interests; and that although, yes, I knew what my pupils were talking about most of the time, and that this gave me an entrée of sorts, it didn’t help me to teach them any better. In fact the chief problem I had—namely, that on a bad day there was uproarious mayhem in my classroom—was actually exacerbated by my partisanship. “I’m an Arsenal fan,” I said in my best groovy teacher voice, as a way of introducing myself to some difficult second years. “Boo!” they replied, noisily and at great length.

On my second or third day, I asked a group of third years to write down on a piece of paper their favourite book, favourite song, favourite film and so on, and went around the class talking to them all in turn. This was how I discovered that the bad boy at the back, the one with the mod haircut and the permanent sneer (and the one, inevitably, with the biggest vocabulary and the best writing style), was completely consumed by all things Arsenal, and I pounced. But when I had made my confession, there was no meeting of minds, or fond, slow-motion embrace; instead, I received a look of utter contempt. “You?” he said. “You? What do you know about it?”

For a moment I saw myself through his eyes, a pillock in a tie with an ingratiating smile, desperately trying to worm my way into places I had no right to be, and understood. But then something else—a rage born out of thirteen years of Highbury hell, probably, and an unwillingness to abandon one of the most important elements of my self-identity to chalky, tweedy facelessness—took over, and I went mad.

The madness took a strange form. I wanted to grab that kid by his lapels and bang him against the wall, and yell at him, over and over again, “I know more than you ever will, you snotty little fuckwit!” but I knew that this was not advisable. So I spluttered for a few seconds, and then to my surprise (I watched them as they spewed forth) a torrent of quiz questions gushed out of me. “Who scored for us in the ’69 League Cup Final? Who went in goal when Bob Wilson got carried off in ’72 at Villa Park? Who did we get from Spurs in exchange for David Jenkins? Who … ?” On and on I went; the boy sat there, the questions bouncing off the top of his head like snowballs, while the rest of the class watched in bemused silence.

It worked, in the end—or at least, I managed to convince the boy that I was not the man he had taken me for. The morning after the Manchester City game, the first home game following my trivia explosion, the two of us talked quietly and cordially about the desperate need for a new midfield player, and I never had any trouble with him for the remainder of my practice. But what worried me was that I hadn’t been able to let it go, that football, the great retardant, hadn’t let me act like a grown-up in the face of a young lad’s jibe. Teaching, it seemed to me, was by definition a job for grown-ups, and I appeared to have got stuck somewhere around my fourteenth birthday—stuck in the third year, in fact.

Coach

MY SCHOOL v THEIR SCHOOL

January 1982

I’d seen Kes, of course; I’d laughed at Brian Glover dribbling around kids and pushing them over, awarding himself penalties, doing the commentary. And my friend Ray, the deputy head of the school in Cambridge where I was now a Scale 1 English teacher (Cambridge because a job came up there, because I still had friends there, and because my teacher training year in London had taught me that I should avoid London schools if at all possible) had an endless fund of true stories about headmasters who appointed themselves referees for important matches, and sent the fifteen-year-old star striker of the opposing team off in the first two minutes of the match. I was well aware, therefore, of the way schools football encouraged teachers to behave in an astonishingly foolish manner.

But what would you do, if your fifth years were 2-0 down at half-time in a local derby (although admittedly schools football does tend to throw up a number of local derbies), and you made an astute tactical switch at half-time, and the boys pulled one back, and then, bang on ninety minutes, when your voice is hoarse with frustration and impotence, they equalise? You would probably find yourself, as I did, two feet up in the air, fists punching the sky, letting rip with an undignified and certainly unteacherly howl … and just before your feet hit the touchline, you would remember who you were supposed to be, and how old these kids were, and you would start to feel daft.

On the Pitch

ARSENAL v WEST HAM

1.5.82

Looking back, it was quite clear that the stuff on the terraces was getting worse and that sooner or later something was going to happen that would change it all, somehow. In my experience there was more violence in the seventies—that is to say, there was fighting more or less every week—but in the first half of the eighties, with Millwall’s F-Troop, West Ham’s Inter-City Firm (and the calling cards that these factions were reputed to leave on the battered bodies of their victims), the England fans and their alleged National Front agenda—it was less predictable and much nastier. Police confiscated knives and machetes and other weapons I did not recognise, things with spikes coming out of them; and there was that famous photograph of a fan with a dart sticking from his nose.

One beautiful spring morning in 1982 I took Ray’s son Mark, then a teenager, down to Highbury to see the West Ham game, and explained to him in an insufferably old-hand way how and where the trouble, if any, would start. I pointed to the top right-hand corner of the North Bank and told him that there were probably West Ham fans up there, without colours, who would either find themselves surrounded by police, and thus rendered harmless, or who would attempt to force their way under the roof and drive out the Arsenal fans gathered there; which was why we were safe on the bottom left-hand side, where I had been standing for a few years now. He was duly grateful, I felt, for my guidance and protection.

In the event I was able, by casting an expert eye over the area, to reassure him that there were no Hammers fans there, and we settled down to watch the game; and about three minutes after the kick-off, there was a huge roar immediately behind us and that terrible, eerily muffled sound of boot on denim. Those behind us pushed forward, and we found ourselves being forced towards the pitch—and then there was another roar, and we looked round and saw billowing clouds of thick yellow smoke. “Fucking tear gas!” somebody shouted, and, although thankfully it wasn’t, the alarm inevitably induced panic. There were now so many people pouring out of the North Bank that we were being driven right down against the low wall which separated us from the pitch, and in the end we had no option: Mark and I, and hundreds of others, jumped over it and on to the holy turf just as West Ham were about to take a corner. We stood there for a few moments, feeling rather self-conscious about standing in the penalty-area during a First Division match, and then the referee blew the whistle and took the players off. And that was more or less the end of our involvement in the incident. We were all escorted the length of the pitch down to the Clock End, from where we watched the rest of the game in fairly subdued silence.

But there is a horrible and frightening irony here. At Highbury there is no perimeter fencing. If there had been, then those of us pushed towards the pitch that afternoon would have been in serious trouble. A couple of years later, during an FA Cup semi-final between Everton and Southampton at Arsenal, a few hundred stupid Everton fans ran on to the pitch after their team scored a late winner, and the FA (although they have changed their minds again now) decided that Highbury should no longer be used as a semi-final venue unless the club fenced the fans in. To their eternal credit, the club refused (leaving aside the safety aspects, it obstructs the view), despite the loss of revenue incurred. Hillsborough, however, had the fences, and thus until 1989 was deemed suitable for these games; and it was in an FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest that all those people died. It was the fencing, the very feature which allowed the game to take place there, that killed them, prevented them from getting out of the crush and on to the pitch.

After the West Ham match, a young Arsenal fan was stabbed in one of the streets near the ground, and died where he lay: a sickening end to a dismal afternoon. When I went back to school on Monday morning I ranted and raved at a class of baffled second years about the whole culture of violence. I tried to argue to them that their hooligan paraphernalia—their Doctor Martens and their green flying jackets and their spiky haircuts—all fed the process, but they were too young, and I was too incoherent. And anyway there was something pretty nauseating, although I didn’t appreciate it at the time, about me of all people explaining to a whole load of provincial kids that dressing hard didn’t mean you were hard, and that wanting to be hard in the first place was kind of a pathetic ambition.

The Munsters and Quentin Crisp

SAFFRON WALDEN v TIPTREE

May 1983

I will watch any football match, any time, any place, in any weather conditions. Between the ages of eleven and twenty-five I was an occasional visitor to York Road, home of Maidenhead United of the Athenian, later the Isthmian League; occasionally I even travelled to see them in away games. (I was there on the great day in ’69 when they won the Berks and Bucks Senior Cup, beating Wolverton 3-0 in the final played at, I think, Chesham United’s ground. And at Farnborough once, a man came out of the club house and told the travelling fans to keep the noise down.) In Cambridge, when United or Arsenal weren’t playing, I went to Milton Road, home of Cambridge City, and when I started teaching I went with my friend Ray to watch his son-in-law Les, whose good looks and impeccable behaviour gave him the air of a non-league Gary Lineker, play for Saffron Walden.

Part of the fascination of non-league football is the rest of the crowd: some, though by no means all, of the people who attend the games are hideously mad, perhaps driven so by the quality of the football they have spent years watching. (There are lunatics on the First Division terraces too—my friends and I spent years on the North Bank trying to avoid one who stood near us every week—but they are less noticeable among all the casual consumers.) At Milton Road there was an old man we called Quentin Crisp, because of the disarming femininity of his white hair and wrinkled face: he wore a crash helmet throughout the entire ninety minutes, and spent his afternoons buzzing round and round the stadium like an ageing greyhound (you could see him on his own at the far end of the ground where there was no terracing, picking his way through mud and over debris, gamely determined to complete his circuit), hurling abuse at the linesmen—“I’m going to write to the FA about you”—when he got anywhere near them. At York Road there was (and perhaps still is) an entire family, known to everyone as the Munsters due to a somewhat outlandish and unfortunate physical appearance, who had taken it upon themselves to act as stewards to a crowd of two hundred who really had no need of such services; there was also Harry Taylor, a very old and slightly simple man who couldn’t stay to see the end of midweek games on a Tuesday because Tuesday was bath night, and whose entrance was greeted by a chant of “Harry Harry, Harry Harry, Harry Harry, Harry Taylor” to the tune of the old Hare Krishna chant. Non-league football, perhaps by its very nature, attracts these people, and I say this in the full knowledge that I am one of the people attracted.

What I have always wanted is to find a place where I could lose myself in the patterns and rhythms of football without caring about the score. I have this idea that in the right circumstances the game could serve as a kind of New Age therapy, and the frantic movement before me would somehow absorb and then dissolve everything inside me, but it never works that way. First I become diverted by the eccentricities—the fans, the shouts of the players (“Put him in the tea bar!” urged Maidenhead’s Micky Chatterton, our hero, to a team-mate faced with a particularly tricky winger one afternoon), the peculiar, ramshackle presentation of the entertainment (Cambridge City took the field to the theme from Match of the Day, but frequently the music wound down with a pitiful groan just at the crucial moment). And then once I have been engaged thus, I start to care; and before long Maidenhead and Cambridge City and Walden start to mean more than they should do, and once again I am involved, and then the therapy cannot work.

Saffron Walden’s tiny ground is one of the nicest places I have ever watched football, and the people there always seemed startlingly normal. I went because Ray, Mark and Ben their dog went, and I went because Les was playing; and, after a little while, when I got to know the players, I went to watch a gifted, idle striker called, improbably, Alf Ramsey, rumoured to be a heavy smoker, who in classic Greaves style did nothing apart from score once or twice a game.

When Walden beat Tiptree 3-0 and won something or other—the Essex Senior Cup?—on a mild May evening, there was a warmth to the occasion that professional football will never be able to match. A small, partisan crowd, a good game, a team of players with a genuine affection for their club (Les didn’t play for anyone else throughout his career, and like most of his team-mates lived in the town) … and when, at the end of the game, the crowd went on to the pitch, it wasn’t intended as an act of aggression, or bravado, or scene-stealing, as pitch invasions so frequently are, but to congratulate the team, all of them brothers or sons or husbands of nearly all of the spectators. There is a sourness that is central to the experience of supporting a big team, and you can’t do anything about it apart from live with it and accept that professional sport has to be sour if it is to mean anything at all. But sometimes it’s nice to have a little holiday from it, and wonder what it would be like if Arsenal players all came from London N4 or N5, and had other jobs, and played only because they loved the game and the team they played for. This is sentimental, but teams like Walden inspire sentiment; sometimes, you feel, it would be nice if the theme from the A-Team that marks Arsenal’s entrance on to the pitch wound down horribly, as the tapes did at Cambridge City, and the players looked at each other and laughed.

Charlie Nicholas

ARSENAL v LUTON

27.8.83

How can you not see omens everywhere? In the summer of 1983, after two years, I packed up my teaching job to be a writer; and a couple of weeks later Arsenal signed, against all odds, the hottest property in British football—Charlie Nicholas, the Cannonball Kid, the Celtic player who had scored fifty-something goals in Scotland the previous season. Now we were going to see something. And with Charlie around, I felt that there was no way I could fail with my witty yet sensitive plays, the first of which—oh, the unfathomable mysteries of creativity—was about a teacher who becomes a writer.

It is easy to see now that I should not have linked Charlie’s career to my own, but at the time I found it irresistible to do so. The optimism of Terry Neill and Don Howe and the press swept me along, and as the Charlie hype became more and more feverish during the summer of ’83 (he had, in truth, made a bit of an idiot of himself in the tabloids even before he kicked a ball), it became very easy to believe that the newspapers were talking about me. It was distinctly possible, I felt, that I was on the verge of becoming the Cannonball Kid of television drama, and then of the West End theatre (even though I knew nothing about either, and indeed had frequently expressed my contempt for the stage).

The neat and obvious synchronism of it all still baffles me. The last new dawn, back in ’76 when Terry Neill took over and Malcolm Macdonald came to the club, I was about to depart for university. And the one after Charlie’s arrival, just a year later (when we were top of the First Division for a couple of months, and playing as well as anyone could remember), came right after I walked out of various terrible messes I had made in Cambridge and moved back to London to start a new life. Maybe football teams and people are always having fresh starts; maybe Arsenal and I have more than most, and therefore we are suited to each other.

In the event, Charlie proved to be a pretty accurate indicator of my fortunes. I was there for this, his first game, of course, along with a good forty thousand others, and he was OK: he didn’t score, but he played his part, and we won 2-1. And though he got two in the next game, away at Wolves, that was it in the League until after Christmas (he got one League Cup goal at Tottenham in November). The next game at home, against Manchester United, he looked slow and out of touch, and the team were outclassed—we lost 3-2, but we were never really in the game. (In fact he didn’t score at all at Highbury until 27th December, with a penalty against Birmingham which we greeted with the fervour of a hat-trick against Tottenham.) His first season was, in short, a disaster, as it was for the whole team, and the manager, Terry Neill, got the sack after a dismal run of results in November and early December.

The other Cannonball Kid, the literary version, finished his imaginative play and got a kind and encouraging rejection letter back; then started another, which was also rejected, a little less kindly. And he was doing the most dismal sorts of work—private tuition, proof reading and supply teaching—to pay the rent. He showed no signs of scoring before Christmas either, or for a few more Christmases to come; if he had supported Liverpool, and tied his fortunes to Ian Rush, he would have won a Booker prize by May.

I was twenty-six in 1983, and Charlie Nicholas was just twenty-one; it suddenly occurred to me over the next few weeks, as I looked at the hundreds of Charlie haircuts and earrings on the terraces and regretted that my already thinning hair would not allow me to participate, that my heroes were not going to age as I did. I will reach thirty-five, forty, fifty, but the players never will: Paul Merson, Rocky, Kevin Campbell … I am more than a decade older than the people I love in the current Arsenal team. I am even a year older than David O’Leary, the veteran, the Old Man, whose pace is patently no longer what it was, whose first-team outings are limited to protect his creaking joints and his waning stamina. It doesn’t make any difference, however. To all intents and purposes, I am still twenty years younger than O’Leary, and ten years younger than all the 24-year-olds. In one important sense, I really am: they have done things that I never will, and sometimes I feel that if I could just score once into the North Bank end and run behind the goal to the fans, then I could at last leave behind all childish things.

A Seven-Month Hiccup

CAMBRIDGE UNITED v OLDHAM ATHLETIC

1.10.83

It was the beginning of another typical Cambridge season. They’d won one, drawn a couple, lost a couple, but they always started like this; at the beginning of October my friends and I watched them beat Oldham (whose team, incidentally, included Andy Goram, Mark Ward, Roger Palmer and Martin Buchan) 2-1; they moved into comfortable mid-table obscurity, their natural habitat, and we went home fully and happily prepared for another season of nothingness.

And that was it. Between 1st October and 28th April they failed to beat Palace at home, Leeds away, Huddersfield at home, Portsmouth away, Brighton and Derby at home, Cardiff away, Middlesbrough at home, Newcastle away, Fulham at home, Shrewsbury away, Manchester City at home, Barnsley away, Grimsby at home, Blackburn away, Swansea and Carlisle at home, Charlton and Oldham away, Chelsea at home, Brighton away, Portsmouth at home, Derby away, Cardiff and Wednesday at home, Huddersfield and Palace away, Leeds at home, Middlesbrough away, Barnsley at home and Grimsby away. Thirty-one games without a win, a Football League record (you can look it up), seventeen of them at home … and I saw all seventeen, as well as a fair few games at Highbury. I missed only United’s home defeat by Derby in the FA Cup third round—the girl I was living with took me to Paris for the weekend as a Christmas present. (When I saw the date on the tickets, I was unable, shamingly, to hide my disappointment, and she was understandably hurt.) My friend Simon managed only sixteen of the seventeen League games—he smashed his head on a bookshelf in London a few hours before the Grimsby game on the 28th of December; his girlfriend had to take his car keys away from him because he kept making dazed attempts to drive from Fulham up to the Abbey.

It would, however, be absurd to pretend that my allegiance was sorely tested: I never once thought of abandoning the team simply because they were incapable of beating anyone at all. In fact this long losing-run (which resulted, inevitably, in relegation) became charged with a drama all of its own, a drama which would have been entirely absent in the normal course of events. After a while, when winning a game appeared to be an option that had somehow become impossible, we began to adjust to a different order, and look for things that would replace the satisfaction of winning: goals, draws, a brave performance in the face of overwhelmingly hostile fortune (and the team were terribly, terribly unlucky on occasions, as a team that does not win for six whole months would have to be) … these all became causes for quiet, if occasionally self-mocking, celebration. And in any case Cambridge developed a certain infamy over the course of the year. Whereas previously their results had been deemed unworthy of note, they now always got a mention on Sports Report; telling people that I was there for the duration, even seven years later, has a certain social cachet in some quarters.

In the end I learned, from this period more than any other in my footballing history, that it simply doesn’t matter to me how bad things get, that results have nothing to do with anything. As I have implied before, I would like to be one of those people who treat their local team like their local restaurant, and thus withdraw their patronage if they are being served up noxious rubbish. But unfortunately (and this is one reason why football has got itself into so many messes without having to clear any of them up) there are many fans like me. For us, the consumption is all; the quality of the product is immaterial.

Coconuts

CAMBRIDGE UNITED v NEWCASTLE UNITED

28.4.84

At the end of April, Newcastle, with Keegan and Beardsley and Waddle, came to the Abbey. They were near the top of the Second Division, and they needed a win badly if they were going to make sure of promotion, and Cambridge were already long down by then. Cambridge were awarded a penalty in the first few minutes and scored, though given their recent history this was not in itself enthralling—as we had learned over the previous months that there were countless ways to convert a lead into a defeat. But there were no further goals in the game; in the last five minutes, with Cambridge thumping the ball as far into the allotments as possible, you would have thought that they were about to win the European Cup. At the final whistle the players (most of whom, bought or pulled out of the reserves to stop the rot, had never played in a winning team) embraced each other and waved happily to the ecstatic home fans; and for the first time since October the club DJ was able to play “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts”. It didn’t mean a thing in the long run, and the next season they got relegated again, but after that long, bleak winter it was a memorable couple of hours.

This was the last time I went to the Abbey; that summer I decided to run away from Cambridge and United, and back to London and Arsenal. But the afternoon—eccentric, funny, joyful from one perspective and heartbreaking from another, private in a way that football usually isn’t (there were probably less than three thousand Cambridge fans in the crowd for the Newcastle game)—was a perfect end to my relationship with the club. And sometimes, when it seems to me that supporting a First Division team is a thankless and indefensible chore, I miss them a lot.

Pete

ARSENAL v STOKE CITY

22.9.84

“You must meet my friend,” I am always being told. “He’s a big Arsenal fan.” And I meet the friend, and it turns out that, at best, he looks up the Arsenal score in the paper on Sunday morning or, at worst, he is unable to name a single player since Denis Compton. None of these blind dates ever worked; I was too demanding, and my partners simply weren’t interested in commitment.

So I wasn’t really expecting very much when I was introduced to Pete in the Seven Sisters Road before the Stoke game; but it was a perfect, life-changing match. He was (and still is) as stupid as I am about it all—he has the same ludicrous memory, the same propensity to allow his life to be dominated for nine months of the year by fixture lists and TV schedules. He is gripped by the same stomach-fizzing fear before big games, and the same dreadful glooms after bad defeats. Interestingly, I think he has had the same tendency to let his life drift along a little, the same confusions about what he wants to do with it, and I think that, like me, he has allowed Arsenal to fill gaps that should have been occupied by something else, but then we all do that.

I was twenty-seven when I met him, and without his influence I suppose I might have drifted away from the club over the next few years. I was approaching the age at which drifting sometimes begins (although the things that one is supposed to drift towards—domesticity, children, a job I really cared about—just weren’t there), but with Pete the reverse happened. Our desire for all things football sharpened, and Arsenal began to creep back deep into both of us.

Maybe the timing helped: at the beginning of the 84/85 season Arsenal led the First Division for a few weeks. Nicholas was playing with breathtaking skill in midfield, Mariner and Woodcock looked like the striker partnership we’d been lacking for years, the defence was solid, and yet another of those little sparks of optimism lit me up and led me to believe once again that if things could change for the team then they could change for me. (By Christmas, after a disappointing string of results for me and the team, we were all back in the Slough of Despond.) Maybe if Pete and I had met at the beginning of the following dismal season, things would not have turned out the same way—maybe we would not have had the same incentive to make the partnership work during those crucial first few games.

I suspect, though, that the quality of Arsenal’s early-season football had very little to do with anything. There was another agenda altogether, involving our shared inability to get on with things away from Highbury and our shared need to carve out a little igloo for ourselves to protect us from the icy winds of the mid-eighties and our late twenties. Since I met Pete in 1984, I have missed fewer than half a dozen games at Arsenal in seven years (four in that first year, all connected with the continuing upheaval in my personal life, and none at all for four seasons), and travelled to more away games than I had ever done before. And though there are fans who haven’t missed any games, home or away, for decades, I would have been amazed by my current attendance record if I had known about it in, say, 1975, when I grew up for a few months and stopped going, or even in 1983, when my relationship with the club was polite and cordial but distant. Pete pushed me over the edge, and sometimes I don’t know whether to thank him for that or not.

Heysel

LIVERPOOL v JUVENTUS

29.5.85

When I ran away from Cambridge and came to London in the summer of 1984, I found work teaching English as a foreign language at a school in Soho, a temporary post that somehow lasted four years, in the same way that everything I fell into through lethargy or chance or panic seemed to last much longer than it should have done. But I loved the work and loved the students (mostly young western Europeans taking time out from degree courses); and though the teaching left me plenty of time to write, I didn’t do any, and spent long afternoons in coffee bars in Old Compton Street with other members of staff, or a crowd of charming young Italians. It was a wonderful way to waste my time.

They knew, of course, about the football (the topic somehow seemed to crop up in more than one conversation class). So when the Italian students started to complain, on the afternoon of the 29th of May, that they had no access to a television, and therefore could not watch Juve beat Liverpool in the European Cup Final that night, I offered to come down to the school with the keys so that we could watch the match together.

There were scores of them when I arrived, and I was the only non-Italian in the place; I was pushed, by their cheerful antagonism and my own vague patriotism, into becoming an honorary Liverpool fan for the night. When I turned the TV on, Jimmy Hill and Terry Venables were still talking, and I left the sound down so that the students and I could talk about the game, and I put a little bit of technical vocabulary up on the board while we were still waiting. But after a while, when conversation started to flag, they wanted to know why the game hadn’t started and what the Englishmen were saying, and it wasn’t until then that I understood what was going on.

So I had to explain to a group of beautiful young Italian boys and girls that in Belgium, the English hooligans had caused the deaths of thirty-eight people, most of them Juventus supporters. I don’t know how I would have felt watching the game at home. I would have felt the same rage that I felt that night in the school, and the same despair, and the same terrible sick shame; I doubt if I would have had the same urge to apologise, again and again and again, although perhaps I should have done. I would certainly have cried, in the privacy of my own front room, at the sheer stupidity of it all but in the school I wasn’t able to. Maybe I thought it would be a bit rich, an Englishman weeping in front of Italians on the night of Heysel.

All through 1985, our football had been heading unstoppably for something like this. There was the astonishing Millwall riot at Luton, where the police were routed, and things seemed to go further than they ever have done at an English football ground (it was then that Mrs Thatcher conceived her absurd ID card scheme); there was the Chelsea v Sunderland riot, too, where Chelsea fans invaded the pitch and attacked players. These incidents took place within weeks of each other, and they were just the pick of the bunch. Heysel was coming, as inevitably as Christmas.

In the end, the surprise was that these deaths were caused by something as innocuous as running, the practice that half the juvenile fans in the country had indulged in, and which was intended to do nothing more than frighten the opposition and amuse the runners. The Juventus fans—many of them chic, middle-class men and women—weren’t to know that, though, and why should they have done? They didn’t have the intricate knowledge of English crowd behaviour that the rest of us had absorbed almost without noticing. When they saw a crowd of screaming English hooligans running towards them, they panicked, and ran to the edge of their compound. A wall collapsed and, in the chaos that ensued, people were crushed to death. It was a horrible way to die and we probably watched people do it: we all remember the large bearded man, the one who looked a little like Pavarotti, imploring with his hand for a way out that nobody could provide.

Some of the Liverpool fans who were later arrested must have felt genuinely bewildered. In a sense, their crime was simply being English: it was just that the practices of their culture, taken out of its own context and transferred to somewhere that simply didn’t understand them, killed people. “Murderers! Murderers!” the Arsenal fans chanted at the Liverpool fans the December after Heysel, but I suspect that if exactly the same circumstances were to be recreated with any group of English fans—and these circumstances would include a hopelessly inadequate local police force (Brian Glanville, in his book Champions of Europe, reports that the Belgian police were amazed that the violence began before the game started, when a simple phone call to any metropolitan constabulary in England could have put them right), a ludicrously decrepit stadium, a vicious set of opposing fans, and pitifully poor planning on the part of the relevant football authorities—then the same thing would surely happen.

I think this is why I felt quite so ashamed by the events of that night. I knew that Arsenal fans might have done the same, and that if Arsenal had been playing in the Heysel that night then I would certainly have been there—not fighting, or running at people, but very much a part of the community that spawned this sort of behaviour. And anyone who has ever used football in the ways that it has been used on countless occasions, for the great smell of brute it invariably confers on the user, must have felt ashamed too. Because the real point of the tragedy was this: it was possible for football fans to look at TV coverage of, say, the Luton-Millwall riot, or the Arsenal-West Ham stabbing, and feel a sense of sick horror but no real sense of connection or involvement. The perpetrators were not the kind of people that the rest of us understood, or identified with. But the kids’ stuff that proved murderous in Brussels belonged firmly and clearly on a continuum of apparently harmless but obviously threatening acts—violent chants, wanker signs, the whole petty hard-act works—in which a very large minority of fans had been indulging for nearly twenty years. In short, Heysel was an organic part of a culture that many of us, myself included, had contributed towards. You couldn’t look at those Liverpool fans and ask yourself, as you had been able to do with the Millwall fans at Luton, or the Chelsea fans in their League Cup match, “Who are these people?”; you already knew.

I am still embarrassed by the fact that I watched the game; I should have turned the TV off, told everyone to go home, made a unilateral decision that football no longer mattered, and wouldn’t for quite a while. But everyone I know, more or less, wherever they were watching, stuck with it; in my school room, nobody really cared who won the European Cup any more, but there was still a last, indelible trace of obsession left in us that made us want to talk about the dubious penalty decision which gave Juventus their 1-0 win. I like to think I have an answer for most irrationalities connected with football, but this one seems to defy all explanation.

Dying on its Feet

ARSENAL v LEICESTER

31.8.85

The season following Heysel was the worst I can remember—not just because of Arsenal’s poor form, although that didn’t help (and I regret to say that if we had won the League or the Cup, then I’m sure I would have been able to put all those deaths into some kind of perspective), but because everything seemed poisoned by what had gone on in May. Gates, which had been falling imperceptibly for years, were down even further, and the whacking great holes in the terraces were suddenly noticeable; the atmosphere at games was subdued; without the European competitions, second, third or fourth place in the League was useless (a high position had previously guaranteed a team a place in the UEFA Cup), and as a consequence, most First Division fixtures in the second half of the season were even more meaningless than usual.

One of my Italian students, a young woman with a Juventus season-ticket, found out that I was a football fan and asked if she could come with me to Highbury for the Leicester game. And though she was good company, and the chance of talking to a female European obsessive about the difference between her obsession and mine doesn’t come along too frequently, I was hesitant about it. It definitely wasn’t because I couldn’t take a young lady to stand on the North Bank among the thugs (even an Italian, a Juventus fan, three and a half months after Heysel): as we had seen in May, the people she spent her time with on Sunday afternoons were familiar with the symptoms of the English disease, and she had already waved away my clumsy and pious apologies on behalf of the Liverpool fans. It was more because I was ashamed of the whole thing—the desperate quality of Arsenal’s football, the half-empty stadium, the quiet, uninterested crowd. In the event, she said she enjoyed herself, and even claimed that Juventus were just as bad early-season (Arsenal scored after quarter of an hour and spent the rest of the match trying to keep out a dismal Leicester team). I didn’t bother to tell her that this was as good as we ever got.

In my previous seventeen years of fandom, going to football had always held something above and beyond its complicated and distorted personal meanings. Even if we weren’t winning, there had always been Charlie George or Liam Brady, big, noisy crowds or fascinating sociopathic disturbances, Cambridge United’s gripping losing runs or Arsenal’s endless cup replays. But looking at it all through the Italian girl’s eyes, I could see that post-Heysel there was simply nothing going on at all; for the first time, football seemed to have been stripped right down to its subtext, and without it I would surely have been able to give it all up, as thousands of others seemed to be doing.

Drinking Again

ARSENAL v HEREFORD

8.10.85

There is, I think, a distinction to be made between the type of hooliganism that takes place in this country, and the type involving English fans that takes place abroad. Most fans I have talked to argue that drink hasn’t ever had a very large influence on the domestic violence (there has been trouble even at games with morning kick-offs, a scheme designed to stop people going to the pub before the match); travelling abroad, however, with the duty-free ferry crossings, the long, boring train journeys, the twelve hours to kill in a foreign city … this is a different problem altogether. There were eyewitness reports of widespread drunkenness among the Liverpool fans before Heysel (although one must bear in mind that the Yorkshire police tried, shamefully, to argue that drink had been a factor at Hillsborough), and there is a suspicion that many of the England riots of the early eighties, in Berne and Luxembourg and Italy, were alcohol-fuelled (although probably not alcohol-induced) too.

There was a lot of anguished and long overdue self-flagellation after Heysel; drink, inevitably, was the focus for a great deal of it, and before the start of the new season its sale was banned inside our stadia. This angered some fans, who argued that as drink had only a tenuous connection with hooliganism, the real purpose of this move was to obviate the need for any radical action. Everything was wrong, people said—the relationship between clubs and fans, the state of the grounds and the lack of facilities therein, the lack of fan representation in any decision-making process, the works—and banning the sale of alcohol when everybody did their drinking in pubs (it is, as many fans have pointed out, impossible to get drunk inside a stadium anyway, given the number of people waiting to be served) wasn’t going to help a bit.

I agree, as anybody would, with all of this, but it is still difficult to claim that, even with a few more toilets and a supporters’ representative on the board of directors at every club, Heysel wouldn’t have happened. The point was that banning the sale of alcohol didn’t, couldn’t possibly, do any harm: it wasn’t going to cause any violence, and may even have stopped one or two fights. And, if nothing else, it showed that we were serious about our repentance. The ban could have been taken as a small but felt token towards those in Italy who might have lost loved ones because a few silly boys had had too much to drink.

And what happened? The clubs whined because it affected their relationship with their more affluent fans, and the ban was lifted. On 8th October, seventeen weeks after Heysel, Pete and I and a couple of others decided to buy ourselves a seat in the Lower West Stand for a League Cup game on a miserable night, and to our astonishment were able to buy a round of shorts to keep the cold out: the rule had been changed from “No alcohol” to “No alcohol within sight of the pitch”, as if it were the heady combination of grass and whisky that enraged us all and turned us into lunatics. So where had all the hair-shirt penitence gone? What, practically, were the clubs doing to prove that we were capable of getting a grip on ourselves, and that one day we would be able to play other European teams without wiping out half their supporters? The police were doing things, and the fans were doing things (it was this post-Heysel climate of despair that produced the lifesaving When Saturday Comes and all the club fanzines, and the Football Supporters’ Association, whose Rogan Taylor was such an accomplished, impassioned and intelligent spokesman in the weeks after Hillsborough, four years later); but the clubs, I’m afraid to say, did nothing; this one poignant little gesture would have cost them a few bob, so they scrapped it.

The Pits

ASTON VILLA v ARSENAL

22.1.86

ARSENAL v ASTON VILLA

4.2.86

Away at Villa in the quarter-final of the League Cup in January ’86 was one of the best nights I can remember: fantastic away support in a magnificent stadium I hadn’t visited since I was a kid, a good game and a reasonable result (1-1 after a first-half Charlie Nicholas goal and an early second-half period of domination when Rix and Quinn missed unmissable chances). There was also an interesting historical element to the evening: the freezing January air, near us at least, was thick with marijuana smoke, the first time I had really noticed that there was some sort of different terrace culture emerging.

Over Christmas there had been a mini-revival of sorts: we beat Liverpool at home and Manchester United away on consecutive Saturdays, just when things were beginning to look really bad. (In the run-up to the Liverpool game we lost 6-1 at Everton, and then went three consecutive Saturdays without even scoring. On the middle Saturday we drew nil-nil at home to Birmingham, who were relegated, in what must surely have been the worst game ever played in the history of First Division football.) We began to allow ourselves to hope a little—always a foolish thing to do—but from February through to the end of the season everything fell apart.

Home to Villa in the League Cup quarter-final replay was probably my worst-ever night, a new low in a relationship already studded with them. It wasn’t just the manner of the defeat (this was the night that Don Howe played Mariner in midfield and left Woodcock on the bench); it wasn’t just that there was really nobody left in the League Cup, and we should at least have gone on to Wembley (if we had beaten Villa then it was Oxford in the semis); it wasn’t even that we weren’t going to win anything, for the sixth year in succession. It was more than all these things, although they were in themselves bleak enough.

Part of it was my own latent depression, permanently looking for a way out and liking what it saw at Highbury that night; but even more than that, I was as usual looking to Arsenal to show me that things did not stay bad for ever, that it was possible to change patterns, that losing streaks did not last. Arsenal, however, had other ideas: they seemed to want to show me that troughs could indeed be permanent, that some people, like some clubs, just couldn’t ever find ways out of the rooms they had locked themselves into. It seemed to me that night and for the next few days that we had both of us made too many wrong choices, and had let things slide for far too long, for anything ever to come right; I was back with the feeling, much deeper and much more frightening this time, that I was chained to the club, and thus to this miserable half-life, forever.

I was stunned and exhausted by the defeat (2-1, although the one came in the last minute, and we were well beaten by then): the next morning a girlfriend phoned me at work, and, hearing the tired dejection in my voice, asked me what was wrong. “Haven’t you heard?” I asked her pitifully. She sounded worried and then, when I told her what had happened, I could hear, just for a second, relief—so it wasn’t, after all, the things she had momentarily feared for me—before she remembered who she was talking to, and the relief was replaced by all the sympathy she could muster. I knew she didn’t really understand this sort of pain, and I wouldn’t have had the courage to explain it to her; because this idea, that there was this log-jam, this impasse, and that until Arsenal sorted themselves out then neither could I … this idea was stupid and reprehensible (it gave a whole new meaning to relegation) and, worse than that, I knew now that I really did believe it.

Freeing The Log-Jam

ARSENAL v WATFORD

31.3.86

It wasn’t just the few results after the Villa game, I suspect, that enabled the Arsenal board to see that something had to be done, even though they were bad enough: the particularly pathetic 3-0 FA Cup defeat at Luton has been cited (on the History of Arsenal 1886-1986 video, for example) as the game that provoked manager Don Howe’s resignation, but everyone knows that’s not true. Howe actually resigned after a 3-0 victory over Coventry, because he found out that chairman Peter Hill-Wood had approached Terry Venables behind his back.

We had heard a few “Howe Out” chants on the North Bank, in between the Villa game and his resignation; when he did resign, however, the managerless team fell apart, and the chants then became directed against the chairman, although I couldn’t join in. I know the board went about things in a pretty underhand way, but something had to be done. That Arsenal team—full of cliques and overpaid, over-the-hill stars—would never be bad enough to go down, but never good enough to win anything, and the stasis made you want to scream with frustration.

The girlfriend who had tried, and failed, to get any sense out of me on the morning after the Villa match came with me to the Watford game, her first experience of live football. In a way it was a ludicrous introduction: there were less than twenty thousand in the ground, and most of those that were there had come simply to register their disapproval with everything that had taken place. (I belonged to the other category: those that were there because they were always there.)

After the players had bumbled around for an hour or so, and had gone two down, something strange happened: the North Bank switched allegiance. Each Watford attack was greeted by a roar of encouragement, each near miss (and there were hundreds of them) given an “Oooh!” of commiseration. It was funny, in a way, but it was also desperate. Here were fans who had been completely disenfranchised, who could think of no more hurtful way to express their disgust than to turn their back on the team; it was, in effect, a form of self-mutilation. It was obvious, now, that the bottom had been reached, and it was a relief. We knew that whoever the manager was (Venables quickly made it clear that he didn’t want to get involved in this sort of mess), things could not get any worse.

After the game there was a demonstration outside the main entrance, although it was difficult to ascertain precisely what people wanted; some were chanting for the reinstatement of Howe, others simply giving vent to a vague but real anger. We wandered along to have a look, but none of my crowd could muster the requisite rage needed to participate. From my own point of view, I could still remember my childish, melodramatic behaviour on the telephone the morning after the Villa game, and the demonstration was oddly comforting—the girl who had had to tolerate my sulk could see that I was not the only one, that there was this whole community who cared about what was happening to their Arsenal more than they cared about anything else. The things that I have often tried to explain to people about football—that it is not an escape, or a form of entertainment, but a different version of the world—were clear for her to see; I felt vindicated, somehow.