Fever Pitch

George

ARSENAL v MANCHESTER UNITED

23.8.86

My mother has two cats, one called O’Leary and the other called Chippy, Liam Brady’s nickname; the walls of her garage still bear the graffiti I chalked up there twenty years ago: “RADFORD FOR ENGLAND!” “CHARLIE GEORGE!” My sister Gill can still, when pushed, name most of the Double team.

Sometime in May 1986 Gill called me at the language school during my midmorning break. She was then working at the BBC, and the Corporation announces big news as it comes in over the tannoy for the benefit of all staff.

“George Graham,” she said, and I thanked her and put the phone down.

This is how things have always worked in my family. I feel bad that Arsenal has intruded into their lives, too.

It wasn’t a very imaginative appointment, and it was obvious that George was second or even third choice for the job, whatever the chairman says now. It is possible that if he hadn’t played for the club, with great distinction, around the time that I started going then he wouldn’t even have been considered for the position. He came from Millwall, whom he had rescued from relegation and then led to promotion, but I can’t remember him setting the world on fire there; I worried that his lack of experience would lead to him treating Arsenal as another Second Division team, and that he would think small, buy small, concentrate on keeping his job rather than attacking the other big teams and, at first, these fears seemed well-founded—the only new player he bought in his first year was Perry Groves from Colchester for £50,000, yet he sold Martin Keown immediately, and Stewart Robson not long after, and these were young players we knew and liked. So the squad got smaller and smaller: Woodcock and Mariner had gone, Caton went, and nobody replaced them.

He won his first game, at home against Manchester United, with a late Charlie Nicholas goal, and we went home cautiously positive. But he lost the next two, and by the middle of October he was in a little trouble. There was a nil-nil draw at home to Oxford which was as poor as anything we had seen in the previous six years, and already the people around me were yelling abuse at him, outraged at his perceived parsimony. In mid-November, however, after thumping Southampton 4-0 (admittedly all four of our goals were scored after the Southampton goalkeeper had been carried off), we went top of the League, and stayed there for a couple of months, and there was more, lots more, to come on top of that. He turned Arsenal into something that anyone under the age of fifty could never have seen before at Highbury, and he saved, in all the ways the word implies, every single Arsenal fan. And goals … where we had come to expect 1-0 wins at Highbury, suddenly fours and fives, even sixes, became commonplace; I have seen five hat-tricks, by three different players, in the last seven months.

The Manchester United game was significant for another reason: it was my first as a season-ticket holder. Pete and I bought terrace tickets that summer, not because we expected the new manager to change anything, really, but because we had come to terms with the hopelessness of our addiction. It was no use pretending any longer that football was a passing fancy, or that we were going to be selective with our games, so I flogged a pile of old punk singles that had somehow acquired value, and used the money to tie myself to the fortunes of George, and have often bitterly regretted it, but never for very long.

The most intense of all footballing relationships is, of course, between fan and club. But the relationship between fan and manager can be just as powerful. Players can rarely alter the whole tone of our lives like managers can, and each time a new one is appointed it is possible to dream bigger dreams than the previous one ever allowed. When an Arsenal manager resigns or is sacked, the occasion is as sombre as the death of a monarch: Bertie Mee quit around the same time as Harold Wilson, but there is no question that the former resignation signified more to me than the latter. Prime Ministers, however manic or unjust or wicked, simply do not have the power to do to me what an Arsenal manager can, and it is no wonder that when I think about the four I have lived with and through, I think about them as relatives.

Bertie Mee was a grandfather, kindly, slightly otherworldly, a member of a generation I didn’t understand; Terry Neill was a new stepfather, matey, jocular, dislikeable however hard he tried; Don Howe was an uncle by marriage, dour and stolid yet probably and unpredictably good for a couple of card tricks at Christmas. But George … George is my dad, less complicated but much more frightening than the real one. (Disconcertingly, he even looks a little bit like my dad—an upright, immaculately groomed, handsome man with an obvious taste for expensive, well-cut formal clothes.)

I dream about George quite regularly, perhaps as often as I dream about my other father. In dreams, as in life, he is hard, driven, determined, indecipherable; usually he is expressing disappointment in me for some perceived lapse, quite often of a sexual nature, and I feel guilty as all hell. Sometimes, however, it is the other way around, and I catch him stealing or beating someone up, and I wake up feeling diminished. I do not like to think about these dreams or their meanings for too long.

George ended his fifth year with Arsenal just as he had begun his first, with a home game against Manchester United, but this time Highbury was awash with self-congratulation rather than sceptical anticipation: we had won the 1991 Championship some forty-five minutes before the kick-off, and the stadium was replete with noise and colour and smiles. There was a large banner draped over the edge of the West Stand Upper Tier which read, simply, “George Knows”, and which in a peculiar way isolated and defined my filial relationship with the man. He did know, in a way that fathers very rarely do, and on that enchanted evening every one of his mystifying decisions (the sale of Lukic, the purchase of Linighan, even the persistence with Groves) began to look unfathomably wise. Perhaps little boys want fathers to be this way, to act but never to explain the actions, to triumph on our behalf and then to be able to say, “You doubted me but I was right, and now you must trust me”; it is one of football’s charms that it can fulfil this kind of impossible dream.

A Male Fantasy

ARSENAL v CHARLTON ATHLETIC

18.11.86

Typically, I remember her first game and she doesn’t: a moment ago I poked my head round the bedroom door and asked her the name of the opponents, score and scorers, but all she could tell me was that Arsenal won and Niall Quinn got one. (2-0, and the other goal came courtesy of a Charlton defender.)

It is fair to say that back then, in the first few months of our relationship, we were having trouble (trouble caused by me), and I don’t think either of us thought that we were going to last much longer. The way she tells it now, she thought that the end was coming sooner rather than later, and chose Charlton on a wet and cold November night because she thought she wasn’t going to get too many more opportunities to come to Highbury with me. It wasn’t a great game, but it was a good time to come, because Arsenal were slap-bang in the middle of a tremendous twenty-two-game unbeaten run, and crowds were up, spirits were up, young players (Rocky, Niall, Adams, Hayes, who later became her inexplicable favourite) were in the team and playing well, and the previous Saturday we’d all been down to Southampton to see the new League leaders.

She craned her neck and watched what she could see, and after the game we went to the pub and she said that she’d like to come again. This is what women always say and it usually means that they would like to come again in another life, and not even the next life but the one after that. I said, of course, that she would be welcome whenever; immediately she asked whether there was another home game on the Saturday. There was, and she came to that too, and to most home games for the rest of the season. She has travelled to Villa Park and Carrow Road and other London grounds, and one year she bought a season-ticket. She still comes regularly, and can recognise every member of the Arsenal squad without any difficulty, although there is no doubt that her enthusiasm is on the wane now, and that my perpetual intensity irritates her more as we both get older.

I wouldn’t like to think that it was all this that saved the relationship—in fact, I know it wasn’t. But it certainly had a lubricious effect, initially, and her sudden interest complicated things that were already confused. On New Year’s Day 1987, when she and I went to watch a 3-1 win over Wimbledon, I began to realise why the woman who not only tolerates but actively participates in the football ritual has become for many men something of a fantasy figure: some men I knew, who had wrecked the previous night’s jollities and the bank holiday’s traditional familial calm by dragging themselves off to Goodison or somewhere to watch a morning kick-off, would return home to tensions and baleful glances all of their own making, whereas I was in the fortunate position of being at Highbury because it was an organic part of our day.

Later, however, I began to wonder whether this Arsenal-sharing really was what I wanted. Once, during the height of her sudden passion, we were watching a father struggling into the stadium with a very young child, and I remarked in passing that I wouldn’t take a child of mine to a game until he or she was old enough to want to go; this led on to a conversation about future child-care arrangements on Saturday afternoons, a conversation that haunted me for weeks, months, afterwards. “Alternate home games, I suppose,” she said, and for a while I presumed she meant that she would try to get along to every other match at Highbury, that our children could be left somewhere once a month but no more frequently than that, and that she would come when she could. But what she meant was that we would take it in turns to go, that for half the home games every year I would be at home listening to Sport on Five or Capital Gold (Capital Gold is less authoritative, somehow, but keeps you bang up-to-date with all the London clubs) while she sat in my seat watching my team, the team to which I had introduced her just a few years before. So now where is the advantage? Friends with partners who loathe football get to go to every game; meanwhile I—who have an apparently ideal relationship with a woman who knows why Arsenal aren’t the same without Smithy leading the line—I’m looking at a future sitting in my living room with a pile of Postman Pat videos and the window open, mournfully hoping that a gust of wind will blow a roar my way. It wasn’t what I had anticipated, that evening against Charlton when she said she wanted to go again.

There’s more. All my footballing life I have lived with people—my mum, my dad, my sister, girlfriends, flatmates—who have had to learn to tolerate football-induced moods, and they have all of them, more or less, done so with good humour and tact. Suddenly I found myself living with someone who was attempting to claim moods for herself, and I didn’t like it. Her elation after the 1987 Littlewoods Cup Final … that was her first season. What right did she have to swagger into the pub that Sunday evening with an Arsenal hat on? No right at all. For Pete and me, this was the first trophy since 1979, and how could she, who had only been going for the previous four months, understand what that felt like? “They don’t win things every season, you know,” I kept telling her, with all the pointless and bilious envy of a parent whose Mars Bar-munching child has never experienced the deprivations of wartime rationing.

I soon found that the only way to claim all the emotional territory for myself was to go on a sort of sulk war, confident in the knowledge that when it came to football I could pout and grump any pretender to the Football Pain throne right off the terraces, and eventually I beat her, as I knew I would. It happened at the end of the 88/89 season when, after a home defeat by Derby, it looked as though we were going to miss out on the Championship after having led the First Division for most of the season. And though I was genuinely inconsolable (that evening we went to see Eric Porter in King Lear at the Old Vic, and the play didn’t engage me because I couldn’t see what Lear’s problem was), I nurtured every bit of the misery until it grew to monstrous, terrifying proportions, I behaved badly in order to prove a point, and inevitably we had an argument (about going to see some friends for a cup of tea), and once it had started I knew that Arsenal was all mine once again: she was left with no alternative but to say that it was only a game (she didn’t use those words, thankfully, but the implication was, I felt, clear), that there was always next year, that even this year all hope was not lost, and I leaped on these words triumphantly.

“You don’t understand,” I shouted, as I had wanted to shout for months, and it was true—she didn’t, not really. And I think that once I had been given this opportunity, once I had uttered the words that most football fans carry around with them like a kidney donor card, it was all over. What was she left with? She could attempt, or pretend, to behave even worse than I had done; or she could withdraw, yield ground, leave the agony and the ecstasy more or less entirely to me and use her own distress merely to buttress mine. She is much too gentle a person to attempt to out-tantrum me, so she chose the latter course, and I can safely and smugly say that I am top Arsenal dog in this house, and that when and if we have children it will be my bottom exclusively that fills our season-ticket seat. I’m ashamed, of course I’m ashamed, that I have had to play dirty like this, but for a while back then I was beginning to worry.

From NW3 to N17

TOTTENHAM v ARSENAL

4.3.87

If this book has a centre, then it is here, on the Wednesday night in March 1987 that I travelled from a psychiatrist’s office in Hampstead to White Hart Lane in Tottenham to see a Littlewoods Cup semi-final replay. I didn’t plan it that way, of course: the trip to Hampstead had been arranged well before a replay became necessary. But now, when I am attempting to explain why football has managed to slow me down and speed me up, and how Arsenal and I got all mixed up together in my head, this particular conjunction looks implausibly neat.

It is easier to explain why Arsenal and Spurs needed a replay than it is to explain why I needed a psychiatrist, so I shall begin there. The two legs of the semi-final had produced an aggregate score of 2-2, and even extra time on the Sunday at White Hart Lane had failed to push one of the teams over the edge and out of the competition, although four measly goals in three and a half hours of football is an inadequate indicator of the draining drama of the two games. In the first one, at Highbury, Clive Allen celebrated his typically predatory piece of finishing in the first half by leaping into the air and landing flat on his back from a height of about five feet, one of the most eccentric expressions of joy I have ever seen; and Paul Davis missed an open goal from less than six inches, and Hoddle hit the bar with a brilliant curling free kick, and poor Gus Caesar (Arsenal’s thin squad was being stretched to the point of disaster), tormented beyond all dignity by Waddle, had to be replaced by the only other player we had available, a young man called Michael Thomas, who had never played in the first team before.

In the second game Allen scored again early on, so Spurs were 2-0 up on aggregate, and had four other one-on-ones with Lukic as Arsenal pushed forward, and missed them all; and at half-time the Spurs announcer told the Spurs fans how they could apply for tickets for the Final at Wembley, a misguided and provocative moment of extreme smugness that served to awaken and enrage the subdued Arsenal fans (and, we heard later, the team, who heard the tannoy message in the dressing room) to the extent that when our players came out for the second half, they were met with a proud and defiant roar; thus inspired, the team bravely inched their way back into the game and, even though on paper Adams, Quinn, Hayes, Thomas and Rocastle were no match for Waddle, Hoddle, Ardiles, Gough and Allen, first Viv Anderson, scrappily, and then Niall, refulgently, scored to push the game into extra time. We should have won in the extra thirty minutes—Tottenham were in pieces, and both Hayes and Nicholas could have finished them off—but given the number of chances Tottenham had had over the two games, and our two-goal deficit with three-quarters of the tie gone, a replay was better than anything we had dared hope for. After the game George came on to the pitch and tossed a coin to settle the venue for the deciding match, and when he looked over towards us and pointed straight down at the White Hart Lane mud to indicate that he had lost the call, the Arsenal fans roared again: we’d beaten Spurs twice at their place in the space of a few weeks (the League game at the beginning of January finished 2-1) and had only managed a draw and a defeat against them at Highbury. We would all be back on Wednesday.

This, then, is how the replay came about—football is easy like that. And if you want to know how we came to be in the Littlewoods Cup semi-final, then that’s easy too: we’d beaten Forest at Highbury in the quarter-final, and before that Manchester City, Charlton and Huddersfield over two legs in the second round, and before Huddersfield there was nothing at all. The contrast between the strong, clean, straight lines of a cup run and the messy, tangled, overgrown paths of a life is plangent: I wish I could draw one of those big knock-out trophy diagrams to show how I’d ended up playing on the unfamiliar turf of a Hampstead psychiatrist’s carpet.

The best I can do is as follows. In the spring of 1986, I had become frustrated beyond patience by my inability to find, even seven years after leaving college, a job I wanted to do, and by my failure, six years after losing the Lost Girl, to hold down any kind of permanent, healthy relationship, although temporary and sickly relationships, usually involving some kind of third party, were a dime-a-dozen. And as I had spent a lot of time talking to the principal of my language school, a man who was then training to become a Jungian therapist, and had become interested in what he had to say about the value of therapy, I somehow ended up going to see a lady in Bounds Green once a week.

Huge parts of me didn’t like going. Had Willie Young ever bothered with therapy? Or Peter Storey? Or Tony Adams? Yet every Thursday I sat in a big armchair, flicking the leaves of the rubber plant that dangled over my head, trying to talk about my family and my jobs and my relationships and, as often as not, Arsenal; after a few months of this leaf-flicking, some sort of lid blew off, and I lost the last few pieces of the spurious muddle-through optimism that had been sustaining me for the previous few years. Like most depressions that plague people who have been more fortunate than most, I was ashamed of mine because there appeared to be no convincing cause for it; I just felt as though I had come off the rails somewhere.

I had no idea at what point this might have happened. Indeed, I wasn’t even sure which rails these were. I had loads of friends, including girlfriends, I was in work, I was in regular contact with all the members of my immediate family, I had suffered no bereavements, I had somewhere to live … I was still on all the tracks that I could think of; so what, precisely, was the nature of the derailment? All I know is that I felt, inexplicably, unlucky, cursed in some way that would not be immediately apparent to anyone without a job or a lover or a family. I knew myself to be doomed to a life of dissatisfactions: my talents, whatever they were, would go permanently unrecognised, my relationships wrecked by circumstances entirely beyond my control. And because I knew this beyond any doubt, then there was simply no point in attempting to rectify the situation by looking for work that would stimulate me, or for a personal life that would make me happy. So I stopped writing (because if you are born under a bad sign, as I had been, there is simply no point in persisting with something that will inevitably bring with it only the humiliation of perpetual rejection), and involved myself in as many miserable and debilitating triangular relationships as I possibly could, and settled down to the remainder of my allotted three-score years and ten of unrelieved and terrible nothingness.

It wasn’t, in truth, a future I could regard with a great deal of enthusiasm, and even though it was the therapy that seemed to have brought most of this bleakness on, or out, it seemed to me that I needed more of it: the last shred of common sense I had left suggested that many of these problems were in me rather than in the world, that they were of a psychological rather than an actual nature, that I hadn’t been born under a bad sign at all but that I was some sort of self-destructive nutcase, that I literally needed my head seeing to. Except I was flat broke and couldn’t afford to see any more of my lady in Bounds Green, so she sent me to see the man in Hampstead, who had the power to refer me back to her at a preferential rate if he was convinced that I was sick enough. And so it came to pass—and there are a number of Arsenal-loathing football fans all over the country who might find the episode gloriously and hilariously significant—that this Arsenal fan was obliged to preface his attendance at the Littlewoods Cup semi-final replay by visiting a psychiatrist, in order to persuade him that I was round the twist. I got the referral I needed, and I didn’t even have to produce my season-ticket.

I travelled from Hampstead down to Baker Street, from Baker Street to King’s Cross, from King’s Cross to Seven Sisters, and got a bus the rest of the way up the Tottenham High Road; and from Baker Street onwards, the point at which my return journey from the psychiatrist became an outward journey to a football match, I felt better, less isolated, more purposeful (although on the final stage of the journey I felt bad again, but this was a comforting pre-match bad, my stomach churning and my body weary at the thought of the emotional effort to come); I no longer had to try to explain to myself where I was going or where I had been, and I was back in the mainstream. The value of the herd instinct, again: I was only too happy to experience the loss of identity that crowds demand. It was then that it occurred to me that I would never really be able to explain or even remember precisely how the evening had started as it had, and that in some ways, football isn’t a very good metaphor for life at all.

I usually hate games between Arsenal and Tottenham, especially the away games, when the hostile territory brings out the very worst in the Arsenal fans, and I have stopped going to White Hart Lane now. “I hope your wife dies of cancer, Roberts,” a man behind me shouted a few years back. And in September 1987, just before David Pleat was forced to resign his position as Tottenham manager, but just after unsavoury allegations about his personal life had appeared in the tabloids, I sat among several thousand people roaring “Sex case! Sex case! HANG HIM HANG HIM HANG HIM!”, and felt, perhaps understandably, that I was much too delicate a soul for this sort of entertainment; the blow-up dolls being tossed around merrily at our end, and the hundreds of pairs of amusing breast spectacles that were de rigueur for the committed Arsenal fan that afternoon, hardly helped to make the sensitive liberal feel any more at ease. And in 1989, when Spurs beat us at White Hart Lane for the first time for four years, there was an awful and disturbing ugliness in the Arsenal end after the final whistle, and seats were broken, and that was enough for me. The anti-Semitic chanting, even though Arsenal have just as many Jewish fans as Tottenham, is obscene and unforgivable, and over the last few years the rivalry between the two sets of fans has become intolerably hateful.

A cup-tie is different, however. The older season-ticket holders, those who hate Tottenham, but not with the drooling and violent rage of some of the twenty and thirtysomethings, are sufficiently motivated to travel, and so some of the bile is diluted. And the result, and the football, matters more than it does in many of the League games between Arsenal and Spurs, who for most seasons over the last twenty or thirty years have found themselves in mid-table, and consequently there is some sort of a focus for the aggression. Paradoxically, when the game means something then the identity of the opponents signifies less.

Anyway, I know that my middle-class sensibilities were not unduly disturbed, and that there were no chanted sex-case or cancer references to sour my memory of the evening. The game was fast and open, just as it had been on the Sunday, and once again we seemed to spend the whole of the first half watching Clive Allen bear down on the unprotected goal in front of us, but the longer it went on the more I feared for Arsenal. The team was getting younger and younger with each match (Thomas, a full-back replacement for Caesar in the first leg, was playing his first full match, in midfield) and though it was nil-nil at half-time, Allen finally scored, right at the beginning of the second half; shortly afterwards Nicholas was stretchered off, and Ian Allinson, a tryer but hardly the man to save the match, had to come on, and it was all up.

A couple of rows in front of me, a line of middle-aged men and women, blankets over their legs, soup flasks twinkling, started singing the Irish song that the older fans in the seats—I have never heard a North Bank rendition—often used to sing on big nights, and everyone who knew the words (“And then he got up and he sang it again/Over and over and over again”) joined in. So I thought, with, what, six or seven minutes left, that at least I would remember the occasion with some fondness, even though it was to have a bitter and dismal conclusion; and then Allinson, jinking unconvincingly down the left, put in a feeble shot on the turn that totally deceived Clemence and snuck in guiltily at the near post, and there was this enormous explosion of relief and unhinged joy. And Tottenham fell apart, just as they had on Sunday: over the next two minutes Hayes intercepted a bad back-pass and shot into the side netting, Thomas grooved his way through to the edge of the area, with the sort of insouciance we later came to love and hate, and shot just past the post. On my video, you can see, as Anderson goes to take a throw-in, the Arsenal fans literally bouncing with excitement. And there was more to come. As Tottenham’s digital clock stopped on ninety minutes, Rocky picked up a loose cross, chested it down, and hit it through Clemence and into the net; and almost immediately the referee blew the final whistle, and the rows of people disappeared and were replaced by one shuddering heap of ecstatic humanity.

It was the second of three or four lifetime football moments where my delirium was such that I had no idea what I was doing, where everything went blank for a few moments. I know that an old man behind me grabbed me around the neck and wouldn’t let go, and that when I returned to a state approaching normal consciousness the rest of the stadium was empty save for a few Tottenham fans who stood watching us, too stunned and sick to move (in my mind I see white faces, but we were too far away to be able to detect shock-induced pallor), and the Arsenal players were cavorting beneath us, as overjoyed and probably as baffled by their win as we were.

We were all still in the stadium twenty minutes after the final whistle, and then we roared out on to the street, and Pete and I drove back to the Arsenal Tavern, where we were locked in after closing time so that we could watch the highlights of the game on their big TV screen, and so that I could drink much too much.

The depression that I had been living with for the best part of the 1980s packed up and started to leave that night, and within a month I was better. Inevitably part of me wishes that it had been something else that effected the cure—the love of a good woman, or a minor literary triumph, or a transcendent realisation during something like Live Aid that my life was blessed and worth living—something worthy and real and meaningful. It embarrasses me to confess that a decade-long downer lifted because Arsenal won at Spurs in the Littlewoods Cup (I would be slightly less embarrassed if it had been an FA Cup win, but the Littlewoods?), and I have often tried to work out why it happened like this. The win meant a lot to all Arsenal fans, of course: for seven years our team hadn’t even come very close to winning a semi-final, and the decline had begun to look terminal. And there might even be a medical explanation. It could be that the monstrous surge of adrenalin released by a last-minute winner at Tottenham in a semi-final when you were one down with seven minutes left, all hope abandoned, maybe this surge corrects some kind of chemical imbalance in the brain or something.

The only convincing explanation I can come up with, however, is that I stopped feeling unlucky that night, and that the log-jam that had provoked such despair just over a year before had been sorted, not by me, predictably, but by Arsenal; and so I jumped on to the shoulders of the team and they carried me into the light that had suddenly shone down on all of us. And the lift they gave me enabled me to part company from them, in some ways: though I am still one of Arsenal’s most devoted fans, and though I still go to every home game, and feel the same tensions and elations and glooms that I have always felt, I now understand them to have an entirely separate identity whose success and failure has no relationship with my own. That night, I stopped being an Arsenal lunatic and relearnt how to be a fan, still cranky, and still dangerously obsessive, but only a fan nonetheless.

Just Another Saturday

CHELSEA v ARSENAL

7.3.87

Everyone went to Chelsea on the Saturday to continue the party, and it lasted for about another fifteen minutes, until something—a Hayes miss, or a Caesar back-pass, I can’t remember now—provoked the howls of frustration and irritation that you could have heard on any Saturday of the previous few years. The average football fan is notoriously, almost savagely unsentimental. It has to be said, however, that Stamford Bridge is not a place where moist-eyed affection or indulgent forgiveness will ever thrive. Games at Chelsea are inevitably dismal—it is no coincidence that the only league fixture Arsenal lost during their otherwise all-conquering ’91 Championship season was this one. The track around the outside of the pitch distances the fans from the players, and affects the atmosphere; and as most supporters on the terraces at both ends are completely in the open (and thus liable for a good soaking if there’s one in the offing) there is no noise anyway. In my experience the home fans’ reputation for vicious thuggery and for witless and ugly racism, although there has been a little less of both over the last couple of years, is well deserved, and everyone knows that you’re safer standing, thus receiving the benefit of well-organised and thorough police protection, than you are sitting, and leaving yourself prone to isolation, recognition and ultimately demolition, the very process that did for a friend a few years back.

And the game went on, and the sky darkened, and Arsenal got worse, eventually conceding a goal, which in their hangover listlessness was one goal too many. And you stand there on the huge crumbling terrace, your feet stiffening and then actually burning in the cold, with the Chelsea fans jeering and gesturing at you, and you wonder why you bothered, when you knew, not only in your heart of hearts but with your head as well, that the game would be dull, and the players would be inept, that the feelings engendered on the Wednesday would have dribbled away to a flat nothingness before twenty minutes of the Saturday game had passed when, if you had stayed at home or gone record shopping, you could have kept the embers glowing for another week longer. But then, these are the games, the 1-0 defeats at Chelsea on a miserable March afternoon, that give meaning to the rest, and it is precisely because you have seen so many of them that there is real joy to be had from those others that come once every six, seven, ten years.

At the end of the game the away fans managed a respectful and muted gratitude for their team, a recognition of recent past achievements, but it had been a dismal afternoon, a piece of dues-paying, spadework, absolutely nothing more than that. And yet as we were waiting to be let out (another thing about Chelsea: you are kept behind for a good thirty minutes while the streets outside are cleared of their menace) the sheer awfulness of it all deepened and thus the experience was lent a perverse kind of glory, so that those of us there became entitled to award themselves a campaign medal.

Two things happened. First, it began to snow and the discomfort was such that you wanted to laugh at yourself for tolerating this fan’s life any longer; and secondly, a man came out with a rolling machine and proceeded to drive up and down the pitch with it. He was not the irascible old git of football club legend, but an enormous young man with a monstrous skinhead haircut, and he obviously hated Arsenal with all the passion of his employers’ followers. As he drove towards us on his machine, he gave us the finger, a delighted and maniacal smile on his face; and on his return visit he gave us the finger again, and so it went on—up, back, and the finger. Up, back and the finger. And we had to stand and watch him do it, over and over again, in the dark and the freezing cold, while the snow fell on us in our concrete compound. It was a proper, thorough restoration of normal service.

Golden

ARSENAL v LIVERPOOL

(at Wembley) 11.4.87

And on the other hand, some days are just golden. My depression had gone completely now; all I could feel was the place where the ache had been, and that was a pleasurable sensation, just as when you are recovering from food poisoning and eating again, the soreness of the stomach muscles is pleasurable. I was six days off my thirtieth birthday, and I had the idea that everything had pulled round for me just in time; that thirty was the falls at the end of the river and if I had still been down when I got there I would have gone right over the edge. So I felt good about that, and Arsenal back at Wembley felt good, because with a young team and a new manager the Littlewoods Cup seemed like an unimaginably delicious hors d’oeuvre, rather than a meal in itself. I had just turned twenty-three when we were last all there together, and for me and the team, the seven intervening years had been unpredictably horrible; but now we had come out of the dark and into the light.

There was light, too, a glorious and gloriously apposite April sunshine. And though you are always aware of how it feels when the winter is over, however long that winter might have been, there is nothing like a football stadium, especially Wembley, to remind you, because you stand there in the shadowed dark looking down into the light, on to the brilliant lush green and it’s as if you are in a cinema watching a film about another and more exotic country. It was as sunny outside the stadium as in it, of course, but it didn’t seem that way, because of this trick football grounds have of using just a rectangle of the sunshine so that you can see it and understand it.

So there was all that already, even before the game started. And though we were playing Liverpool (admittedly Liverpool in one of their less mighty guises, pre-Beardsley and Barnes, but post-Dalglish, although he was their sub that day), and thus could only be expected to lose, I really had convinced myself that it wouldn’t matter, and that me being back, and the team being back, was enough. So when Craig Johnston put Rush through, and he paused for a moment, took his time, and smashed the ball neatly and authoritatively past our goalkeeper Lukic’s groping left hand, I was stung but not surprised, and determined not to let the goal and the defeat that was bound to follow spoil my recuperation or my new, springy optimism. But Charlie equalised before half-time, after he had hit the post and caused a massive scramble in the Liverpool penalty area; and in a wonderful second half of football, when both teams played with grace and skill and desire, our substitute, the poor, maligned Perry Groves, skipped past Gillespie, crossed, Charlie swung, the ball hit a defender and rolled gently past the deceived Grobbelaar and into the goal. It all seemed so languid, and the ball trundled in so slowly, that I feared that it would not have the strength to cross the line completely, or it would be cleared before the referee had spotted that it had indeed gone over, but in the end it found just enough puff to touch the net. Nicholas and Groves, one of whom had come from Celtic for nearly three-quarters of a million pounds, the other of whom had come from Colchester United for about one-fifteenth of that sum, ran behind the goal and did a little dance of joy, just the two of them, in front of us; they could not ever have imagined dancing together before, and they never would again, but there they were, yoked just for one tiny moment in the one-hundred-and-one-year history of the club by their unrepeatable and frankly fortuitous collaboration. And that is how Arsenal came to win the Littlewoods Cup, not the most prestigious trophy I know, but much more than Pete and I and the rest of us could have dared hope for two years previously. It was some kind of reward for blind persistence.

One thing I know for sure about being a fan is this: it is not a vicarious pleasure, despite all appearances to the contrary, and those who say that they would rather do than watch are missing the point. Football is a context where watching becomes doing—not in the aerobic sense, because watching a game, smoking your head off while doing so, drinking after it has finished and eating chips on the way home is unlikely to do you a whole lot of Jane Fonda good, in the way that chuffing up and down a pitch is supposed to. But when there is some kind of triumph, the pleasure does not radiate from the players outwards until it reaches the likes of us at the back of the terraces in a pale and diminished form; our fun is not a watery version of the team’s fun, even though they are the ones that get to score the goals and climb the steps at Wembley to meet Princess Diana. The joy we feel on occasions like this is not a celebration of others’ good fortune, but a celebration of our own; and when there is a disastrous defeat the sorrow that engulfs us is, in effect, self-pity, and anyone who wishes to understand how football is consumed must realise this above all things. The players are merely our representatives, chosen by the manager rather than elected by us, but our representatives nonetheless, and sometimes if you look hard you can see the little poles that join them together, and the handles at the side that enable us to move them. I am a part of the club, just as the club is a part of me; and I say this fully aware that the club exploits me, disregards my views, and treats me shoddily on occasions, so my feeling of organic connection is not built on a muddle-headed and sentimental misunderstanding of how professional football works. This Wembley win belonged to me every bit as much as it belonged to Charlie Nicholas or George Graham (does Nicholas, who was dropped by Graham right at the start of the following season, and then sold, remember the afternoon as fondly?), and I worked every bit as hard for it as they did. The only difference between me and them is that I have put in more hours, more years, more decades than them, and so had a better understanding of the afternoon, a sweeter appreciation of why the sun still shines when I remember it.

Bananas

ARSENAL v LIVERPOOL

15.8.87

Because my partner is small, and therefore disadvantaged when it comes to watching football from the terraces, I gave my season-ticket away for the afternoon and bought seats high up in the West Stand for the first game of the new season. It was the afternoon that Smith made his début for Arsenal, and Barnes and Beardsley theirs for Liverpool, and it was hot, and Highbury was heaving.

We were level with the penalty spot at the Clock End of the ground, so we had a perfect view of the Davis diving header that equalised Aldridge’s opening goal, and a perfect view of the astonishing twenty-five-yard header from Nichol that gave Liverpool their winner in the very last minute; we could also see, with terrible clarity, the extraordinary behaviour of the Liverpool fans beneath us and to our right.

In his book on Barnes and race issues in Liverpool, Out of His Skin, Dave Hill only mentions that first game in passing (“Liverpool’s travelling supporters went home delighted, any doubts about the wisdom of the manager’s summer shopping spree already on the retreat.”). He pays more attention to Liverpool’s game a few weeks later against Everton at Anfield in the Littlewoods Cup, during which the away supporters chanted “Niggerpool! Niggerpool”, and “Everton are white!”. (Everton, mysteriously, still haven’t managed to find a black player good enough for their team.)

Yet Barnes’s first game did throw up information that Hill could have used, because we could see quite clearly, as the teams warmed up before the kick-off, that banana after banana was being hurled from the away supporters’ enclosure. The bananas were designed to announce, for the benefit of those unversed in codified terrace abuse, that there was a monkey on the pitch; and as the Liverpool fans have never bothered to bring bananas to previous Arsenal matches, even though we have always had at least one black player in the side since the turn of the decade, one can only presume that John Barnes was the monkey to whom they were referring.

Those who have seen John Barnes, this beautiful, elegant man, play football, or give an interview, or even simply walk out on to a pitch, and have also stood next to the grunting, overweight orang-utans who do things like throw bananas and make monkey noises, will appreciate the dazzling irony of all this. (There may well be attractive, articulate and elegant racists, but they certainly never come to football matches.) And maybe the bananas were not intended as an expression of racial hatred, but as a grotesque form of welcome—maybe these Liverpudlians, with their famous quick and ready wit, merely wanted to welcome Barnes in a way that they thought he could understand, just as the Spurs supporters gave Ardiles and Villa an Argentinian tickertape welcome in ’78. (This latter theory is hard to believe, but it is no harder than believing that so many fans could be so poisonously angry about the arrival at their club of one of the best players in the world.) Yet however hysterically ironic the scene might have been, and whatever the Liverpool fans might have meant, it was a revolting, nauseating sight.

Arsenal, by and large, have no problems with this kind of filth any more, although they have problems with other kinds, particularly anti-Semitism. There are black fans, on the terraces and in the seats, and our best players—Rocastle, Campbell, Wright—are black, and enormously popular. You can still, even now, occasionally hear idiots who jeer the black players on opposing teams. (One night I turned round angrily to confront an Arsenal fan making monkey noises at Manchester United’s Paul Ince, and found that I was abusing a blind man. A blind racist!) And sometimes, when an opposing black player commits a foul, or misses a good chance, or doesn’t miss a good chance, or argues with the referee, you sit quivering in a panic of liberal foreboding. “Please don’t say anything, anybody,” you sit muttering to yourself. “Please don’t ruin it all for me.” (For me, please note, not for the poor bastard who has to play just feet away from some evil fascist stormtrooper—such is the indulgent self-pity of the modern free-thinker.) Then some neanderthal rises to his feet, points at Ince, or Wallace, or Barnes, or Walker, and you hold your breath … and he calls him a cunt, or a wanker, or something else obscene, and you are filled with an absurd sense of metropolitan sophisticate pride, because the adjectival epithet is missing; you know that this would not be the case if you were watching a game on Merseyside or in the West Country or in the North-East, or anywhere that has no real multiracial community. It’s not much to be grateful for, really, the fact that a man calls another man a cunt but not a black cunt.

It seems lame to say that I loathe the baiting of black players that takes place as a matter of routine inside some football grounds, and if I had had any guts I would have either (a) confronted some of the worst perpetrators or (b) stopped going to games. Before remonstrating with the blind racist I was making some frantic calculations—how hard is he? How hard are his mates? How hard are my mates?—until I heard something, a certain whininess in his voice, maybe, that led me to conclude that I wasn’t about to get a pasting, and acted accordingly, but this is rare. More usually I take the view that these people, like the people who smoke on tube trains, know what they’re doing, and their abuse is intended to intimidate anyone, black or white, who feels like doing something about it. And as for not going … what I’m supposed to say is that football grounds are for everyone, not just for racist thugs, and when decent people stop going then the game is in trouble. And part of me believes that (Leeds fans have done amazing things to conquer the foul atmosphere that used to engulf their ground); part of me, however, knows that I can’t stop because of the strength of my obsession.

I wish all the things that other fans like me wish: I wish that football commentators would express outrage more than they do; I wish Arsenal really did insist on the ejection of fans who sing songs about Hitler gassing Jews, instead of forever threatening to do so; I wish all players, black and white, would do more to make their disgust known. (If, say, Everton’s goalkeeper Neville Southall simply walked off the pitch in protest every time his own fans made these noises, then the problems at Goodison Park would stop almost overnight, but I know that things are not done this way.) But most of all, I wish I were enormous and of a violent disposition, so that I could deal with any problem that arises near me in a fashion commensurate with the anger I feel.

The King of Kenilworth Road

LUTON v ARSENAL

31.8.87

Non-footballing friends and family have never met anyone madder than I; indeed, they are convinced that I am as obsessed as it is possible to be. But I know that there are people who would regard the level of my commitment—every home game, a handful of away games, and one or two reserve or youth games each season—as inadequate. People like Neil Kaas, a Luton fan who took me and my half-brother to watch Arsenal at Kenilworth Road as his guest in the days when Luton’s ban on away fans was in operation, are obsessives with all traces of timidity or self-doubt removed; they make me look like the faint-hearted dilettante they suspect me of being.

Eight things you didn’t know about Neil Kaas:

(1) He would, of course, travel to Plymouth on a Wednesday night, thus using up a precious day’s holiday. (He has travelled to Wigan, and Doncaster, and everywhere else; and on the way back from a mid-week game in Hartlepool, the coach broke down, and he and his party watched Police Academy 3 seven times.)

(2) When I first met him, he had just returned from a kibbutz, although when I got to know him better I was amazed that he had managed to tear himself away from the Hatters for any length of time. He explained that he had gone because the Luton fans were about to organise a boycott of all home games in protest against a planned move to Milton Keynes; Neil knew that even though he had given the boycott his sincere backing, he would be unable to maintain it unless he took himself off to the other side of the world.

(3) After a bizarre chain of circumstances too complicated to relate here, he watched a game against QPR from the directors’ box, having been introduced by David Evans to the rest of the Luton board as “the next Chairman of Luton Town”.

(4) He has single-handedly driven Mike Newell and a number of other players away from the club, by ensuring that he is always positioned near the players’ tunnel to abuse viciously and incessantly anybody he believes is not good enough to tread the Kenilworth Road turf.

(5) A report in the Independent once made some reference to a loudmouth with a foghorn voice who sits in the main stand at Luton, said loudmouth precluding enjoyment for anyone in his immediate vicinity; having watched with Neil I can only conclude, regretfully, that he is the man.

(6) He attends every open evening at Luton, occasions which enable the fans to talk to the manager and the directors, although recently he has begun to suspect that they will no longer allow him to ask questions. He is mystified by this, although some of the questions I know him to have asked are not really questions at all, but slanderous and noisy allegations of impropriety and incompetence.

(7) He has written to Luton Council proposing that they commission a statue commemorating Raddy Antic, whose last-minute goal at Maine Road prevented Luton dropping into Division Two.

(8) On Sunday mornings, just a few hours after he has returned from wherever he has been on the Saturday afternoon, he plays for Bushey ‘B’ (a team which suffered the misfortune of having two points deducted when the goalkeeper’s dog stopped a shot on the line) in the Maccabi League, although he has had disciplinary problems of late, both with his manager and with referees, and at the time of writing is sidelined.

This litany contains a truth about Neil, but not the truth, which is that he has a cheerful and ironic perspective on his own excesses, and talks about them as if they were the property of someone else—his younger brother, maybe. And away from Kenilworth Road he is charming, interested, and unflaggingly polite, at least to strangers, so the rage that invariably afflicts him on Saturdays is induced exclusively by Luton.

Luton are not a big club, and they don’t have many fans—their home crowds are between a third and a quarter the size of Arsenal’s. What was memorable about watching this game with him was not the football, which ended up a drab 1-1 draw after Davis had put us into the lead, but the sense of proprietorship that emanates from someone who has to his own satisfaction taken the club over. It seemed, as we walked to our seats, that Neil knew maybe one in three of the crowd, and stopped for a chat with half of those. And when he travels to away games, it is not as a mote in some huge invading army, but as a visible and recognisable face in a ragged crowd of a couple of hundred, maybe even less than that for some of the more problematic midweek fixtures.

Yet this is part of the attraction for him: he is the Lord of Luton, the King of Kenilworth Road. So when his friends hear the results on a Saturday, on national radio and television, or on the tannoys of other League grounds, they think, simply, “Neil Kaas” when they hear the Luton score. Neil Kaas 0 Liverpool 2, Neil Kaas saved from relegation with last-minute goal, Neil Kaas wins Littlewoods Cup …

And this too is an appeal that football has for me, although I could never claim to be a definition of Arsenal in the way that Neil and Luton define each other. This appeal is one that has emerged slowly over the years, but it is a powerful attraction nevertheless: I like the thought of people remembering me on a regular basis.

I know that this happens. On the night of the 26th of May 1989 I came back to my flat after carousing deep into the night to find fourteen or fifteen phone messages from friends all over Britain and Europe, some of whom I hadn’t spoken to for months; often, on the day after an Arsenal calamity or triumph, I receive phone calls from friends, even non-footballing friends, who have been reminded to contact me by a newspaper or a chance idle glance at a sports round-up at the end of a news bulletin. (To prove the point: I just went downstairs to pick up the mail, and there was a postcard, a thank-you note from a friend whom I assisted in a banal and unspectacular way some weeks ago, and whom I haven’t heard from since. At first I was puzzled as to why she should thank me now, long after the event in question—I wasn’t expecting her to do so—but the PS at the end, “Sorry about the Arse”, serves as an explanation.)

Even though you know that anything—Mickey Rourke or Brussels sprouts or Warren Street underground station or toothache, the associations that people might have for you are endless and private—can set somebody off on a train of thought which will end up with you sitting in one of its carriages, you have no idea when this might happen. It is unpredictable and haphazard. With football, there is none of this randomness: you know that on nights like the ’89 Championship night, or on afternoons like the afternoon of the 1992 Wrexham disaster, you are in the thoughts of scores, maybe even hundreds, of people. And I love that, the fact that old girlfriends and other people you have lost touch with and will probably never see again are sitting in front of their TV sets and thinking, momentarily but all at the same time, Nick, just that, and are happy or sad for me. Nobody else gets that, only us.

My Ankle

ARSENAL v WIMBLEDON

19.9.87

I can’t remember how it happened—probably I trod on the ball or something equally graceless. And I didn’t realise the implication of it straight away. I just knew, when I hobbled off the five-a-side court, that my ankle hurt like hell and was swelling like a bastard in front of my eyes. But when I was sitting in my flatmate’s car on the way back to our flat, I began to panic: it was a quarter to one, I couldn’t walk, and I had to be at Highbury by three.

At home, I sat with a bag of frozen peas balanced on the end of my leg while I contemplated the options. My flatmate, his girlfriend and my girlfriend suggested that, since I was completely immobile and in obvious pain, I should sit at home listening to the radio, but obviously that wasn’t possible; and once I realised that I was going to the game somehow, that there were taxis and seats in the Lower West Stand and friends’ shoulders to lean on if necessary, the panic subsided and it became a simple matter of logistics.

It wasn’t so bad, in the end. We got the tube to Arsenal instead of Finsbury Park—not as far to walk—and we all stood outside, not in our usual spot under the North Bank roof, even though it pelted down for the whole of a goalless second half, so that I could lean against a crush barrier and avoid any tumbles down the North Bank when Arsenal scored. But still. Getting soaked to the skin (and insisting that everyone else got soaked to the skin with me), shivering with the pain and trebling my journey time to and from the ground didn’t seem like too bad a price to pay. Not when you consider the cataclysmic alternative, anyway.

The Match

COVENTRY v ARSENAL

13.12.87

Pete and I left around twelve, I guess, for a three p.m., Sunday afternoon kick-off, and got there just in time. It was an awful game, unspeakable, a nil-nil draw in freezing conditions … and it was live on television, so we could have stayed at home. My powers of self-analysis fail me completely here: I don’t know why we went. We just did.

I didn’t see a live League game on television until 1983, and neither did anyone else of my generation. When I was a kid there wasn’t so much football on TV: an hour on Saturday night, an hour on Sunday afternoon, sometimes an hour midweek, when our clubs had European games. We got to see an entire ninety minutes only very rarely. Occasional England games were shown live; then there was the FA Cup Final, and maybe the European Cup Final … two or three live club games a year, maximum.

That was obviously ridiculous. Even Cup semi-finals, or Championship deciders, weren’t televised live; sometimes the stations weren’t even allowed to show us highlights. (When Liverpool just pipped QPR for the Championship in 1976, we got to see the goals on the news, but that was all; there was a whole set of incomprehensible rules about TV coverage that no one understood.) So despite satellite technology, and colour televisions, and 24-inch screens, we had to sit with our ears pressed against transistor radios. Eventually the clubs realised that there was big money to be made, and the TV companies were happy to give it to them; the behaviour of the Football League thereafter has resembled that of the mythical convent girl. The League will let anybody do anything they want—change the time of the kick-off, or the day of the game, or the teams, or the shirts, it doesn’t matter; nothing is too much trouble for them. Meanwhile the fans, the paying customers, are regarded as amenable and gullible idiots. The date advertised on your ticket is meaningless: if ITV or BBC want to change the fixture to a time more convenient to them, they will do so. In 1991, Arsenal fans intending to travel to the crucial match at Sunderland found that after a little television interference (kick-off was changed from three to five), the last train to London left before the game finished. Who cared? Just us, nobody important.

I will continue to attend televised games at Highbury, mostly because I’ve already paid for my ticket. But, sod it, I’m not going to travel to Coventry or Sunderland or anywhere else if I can sit at home and watch the match, and I hope lots of other people do the same. Television will notice our absence, one day. In the end, however much they mike up the crowd, they will be unable to create any atmosphere whatsoever, because there will be nobody there: we’ll all be at home, watching the box. And when that happens, I hope that the managers and the chairmen spare us the pompous and embittered column in the programme complaining about our fickleness.

No Apology Necessary

ARSENAL v EVERTON

24.2.88

I know that I have apologised a great deal during the course of these pages. Football has meant too much to me, and come to represent too many things, and I feel that I have been to watch far too many games, and spent too much money, and fretted about Arsenal when I should have been fretting about something else, and asked for too much indulgence from friends and family. Yet there are occasions when going to watch a game is the most valid and rewarding leisure pursuit I can think of, and Arsenal against Everton, another second-leg Littlewoods Cup semi-final, was one of those times.

It came four days after another huge game, against Manchester United in the FA Cup, a game which Arsenal won 2-1 but only after McClair had sent a penalty high over the bar and into an ecstatic North Bank with the last kick of the game (and Nigel Winterburn pursued him relentlessly and unpleasantly back to the half-way line after he had done so, one of the first hints of this Arsenal team’s embarrassing indiscipline); so it was an enormous week, with gigantic crowds—fifty-three thousand on the Saturday, fifty-one thousand on the Wednesday.

We beat Everton 3-1 that night, 4-1 on aggregate, a comfortable enough win which Arsenal fully deserved, but we had to wait for it. Four minutes before half-time Rocastle beat Everton’s offside trap, went round Southall, and stroked the ball well wide of a completely empty goal; and then three minutes later Hayes was through too, only this time Southall brought him down six inches from the goal-line. Hayes took the penalty himself, and, like McClair, booted it well over the bar. And the crowd is going spare with frustration and worry; you look around and you see faces working, completely absorbed, and the susurration that spreads around the ground after particularly dramatic incidents lasts all the way through half-time because there is so much to talk about but, at the beginning of the second half, Thomas chips Southall and scores, and you want to burst with relief, and the noise that greets the goal has a special depth to it, a bottom that you only get when everyone in the stadium except for the away supporters gives the roar everything they’ve got, even people right up the top in the fifteen quid seats. And though Heath equalises soon after, Rocky then makes up for his earlier miss, and Smith gets another one, and the whole of Highbury, all four sides of the ground, is alive, yelling and hugging itself with delight at the prospect of another Wembley final, and the manner in which it has been achieved. It’s extraordinary, knowing that you have a role to play in all this, that the evening wouldn’t have been the same without you and thousands like you.

Absurdly, I haven’t yet got around to saying that football is a wonderful sport, but of course it is. Goals have a rarity value that points and runs and sets do not, and so there will always be that thrill, the thrill of seeing someone do something that can only be done three or four times in a whole game if you are lucky, not at all if you are not. And I love the pace of it, its lack of formula; and I love the way that small men can destroy big men (watch Beardsley against Adams) in a way that they can’t in other contact sports, and the way that the best team does not necessarily win. And there’s the athleticism (with all due respect to Ian Botham and the England front row, there are very few good fat footballers), and the way that strength and intelligence have to combine. It allows players to look beautiful and balletic in a way that some sports do not: a perfectly-timed diving header, or a perfectly-struck volley, allow the body to achieve a poise and grace that some sportsmen can never exhibit.

But there’s even more to it than all that. During matches like the Everton semi-final, although nights like that are inevitably rare, there is this powerful sensation of being exactly in the right place at the right time; when I am at Highbury on a big night, or, of course, Wembley on an even bigger afternoon, I feel as though I am at the centre of the whole world. When else does this happen in life? Maybe you’ve got a hot ticket for the first night of an Andrew Lloyd Webber show, but you know that the show is going to run for years and years, so you’d actually have to tell people afterwards that you saw it before they did, which is kind of uncool and in any case completely ruins the effect. Or maybe you saw the Stones at Wembley, but then even something like that is repeated for night after night nowadays, and consequently doesn’t have the same one-off impact of a football match. It’s not news, in the same way that an Arsenal v Everton semi-final is news: when you look at your newspaper the next day, whichever one you read, there will be extensive space given over to an account of your evening, the evening to which you contributed simply by turning up and shouting.

You just can’t find this outside a football ground; there is nowhere else you can be in the entire country that will make you feel as though you are at the heart of things. Because whichever nightclub you go to, or play, or film, or whichever concert you see, or restaurant you eat at, life will have been going on elsewhere in your absence, as it always does; but when I am at Highbury for games like these, I feel that the rest of the world has stopped and is gathered outside the gates, waiting to hear the final score.

Welcome to England

ENGLAND v HOLLAND

March 1988

In 1988 I began working for a Far Eastern trading company. I started out as a teacher, but it soon became clear that my middle-management pupils were more perplexed by the bizarre requests they received from their head office than they were by the English language. So the teaching vanished, and instead I did what I can only describe as Other Things, since a generic description of my duties is beyond me. I wrote countless letters to solicitors, and a long essay on Jonathan Swift which was translated and faxed back to base; I ascertained to my employers’ satisfaction what constituted drinking water; I pored over the landscape plans for Hampton Court and took photographs of Beaulieu Motor Museum; I went to see Directors of Social Services to talk about orphanages; I became involved in protracted negotiations for equestrian centres in Warwickshire and pedigree dogs in Scotland. It was varied work.

The managers worked astonishingly hard: their contracted hours were from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Monday to Friday, and from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturday, but these were nominal—a twelve-hour day, like Gordon Gekko’s lunch, was for wimps. But when I told three of my students that Gullit and Van Basten were coming to town to pit their wits against Lineker and Shilton, the temptation was too much even for them, and I was instructed to buy tickets and act as their chaperon and inductor for the evening.

Every couple of years I forget what a miserable experience it is to go to Wembley to watch England play, and give it another try. In ’85 I went to watch a World Cup qualifier a couple of weeks after Scotland’s Jock Stein had died, and listened to the most mind-bogglingly obscene celebratory songs; four years later I went to another one, and sat among people who gave drunken Nazi salutes during the National Anthem. Why I thought that things would be any different for a friendly against Holland I can’t remember, but it turned out to be an embarrassing misapprehension.

Our timing was just right. We were walking down Wembley Way about fifteen minutes before kick-off, with reserved seats in our pockets, and I was feeling pleased with my expert organisation. As we approached our entrance, however, we were met by a determined and indiscriminate mounted police charge, and we were forced back down the road with hundreds of other ticket holders, and my colleagues began to panic. We regrouped and started again; this time our £12.00 tickets were regarded, reluctantly, as certificates of legitimate interest, and we were allowed to approach the stadium. As we did so, the game kicked off and England scored almost immediately, but we missed all that—we were still negotiating admission. One of the entrance doors was hanging off its hinges, and an official told us that large numbers of people had forced their way into the ground.

Once inside, it was obvious that our seats had gone. The gangways were packed with people like us, all clutching now-worthless ticket stubs, all too afraid to confront the crop-headed, thick-necked people sitting in our seats. There wasn’t a steward in sight. “Here come the fucking Wongs”, remarked one of a group of young men, as I led my charges down the steps to find a position from which we could see at least a square of the pitch. I didn’t bother translating. We stood and watched for about half an hour, during which time Holland took a 2-1 lead; the dreadlocked Gullit, the main reason why the game had sold out in the first place, provoked monkey noises every time he touched the ball. Just before half-time we gave up and went home. I got back to my flat just in time to watch the highlights on TV.

People have told me that they’re beginning to turn things round at Wembley now, and post-Italia ’90, what with Gazzamania and Lineker charm, the composition of the average England crowd is changing. This often happens when a team is doing well, and in itself it doesn’t offer much cause for hope, because when they play badly again you lose that lot. It seems to me, and this is not a theory that I can support with any hard evidence, but never mind, that bad teams attract an ugly following.

Only boneheads entertain serious doubts nowadays about the link between social and economic conditions and football violence, but why is it that, say, Birmingham City fans have a markedly worse reputation than Sunderland fans? Even if we accept, for the sake of argument, that the West Midlands suffers from the same kind of social and economic deprivation that plagues the North-East, then how does one explain the impeccable behaviour of the Villa supporters? Two teams from the same city; but one plays in the First Division, and the other languishes in the Third. When Leeds, Chelsea and Manchester United were in the Second Division their fans terrified everybody; when Millwall came up to the First their reputation for monstrous, evil violence evaporated a little. And I don’t think that poor football actually changes the way people behave; it’s not that, although there is an element of compensatory pride involved (“We might not be much good at football, but we can give you a good kicking”); it’s more that—how can I put this tactfully?—there is a higher proportion of nutters among the never-say-die, we’ll-support-you-evermore hardcore than among the sod-that-for-a-lark floating punter.

So among crowds of twenty-five thousand, you’ll find a few hundred troublemakers; when you’re getting crowds of five or six thousand, the same few hundred will still be turning up, and suddenly the tiny minority have become much more significant, and the club are landed with a reputation. And once you’ve got a reputation, you start to appeal to those who are attracted by the promise of violence inherent in that reputation. That, I think, is what happened with Chelsea and Millwall in the late seventies and early eighties; it is also what happened with England between elimination from the World Cup in 1974 and qualification for Italy in 1990. For most of that time they were a desperate side, and they attracted a pretty desperate crowd.

The problem here is that unless a team is playing well, winning things, filling their stadia, clubs simply cannot afford to alienate the very people they are supposed to be purging. I can think of at least one club chairman who has in the past been conspicuously ambivalent about some of the unpleasant characters that keep his club afloat, and I have not been aware of any particularly strident campaigning on the part of the England authorities to drive out one crowd and bring in another (any campaigning of that kind has been done by the fans themselves); they know, deep down, which side their bread is buttered on.

I tried to compensate for the evening by offering to take my new workmates to Highbury, where I knew that we would be left undisturbed whether we stood on the terraces or sat in the seats. But every time I suggested it, they just looked at me and smiled, as if the invitation was an extreme example of the famously incomprehensible English sense of humour. I guess they still think I spend every Saturday afternoon being charged by police horses and then cowering in a gangway somewhere, too frightened to claim the seat I have paid for, and on the evidence of the Holland game it would be an obvious assumption to make; in their position, I would have been on the phone back to Head Office first thing on Thursday morning, begging and pleading for a posting somewhere, anywhere, else in the world.

Gus Caesar

ARSENAL v LUTON

(at Wembley) 24.4.88

The Littlewoods Cup Final that year was a disaster, and sometimes I still find myself drifting back to it: 2-1 up with ten minutes left, and at the end of one of the most one-sided periods of football I have ever seen (Hayes hits the post, Smith hits the bar, Smith one-on-one with Dibble but doesn’t beat him), the ball is on the penalty spot after Rocky has been brought down and Winterburn is about to …

No. He’s missed it again, for the fortieth or fiftieth time since that April afternoon. My daydreams are so vivid that I really do find it hard to believe that he won’t get another chance sometime, and my re-emergence back into my underground journey, or the book I am reading, is ludicrously slow, only achievable once I have forced myself to recognise, sometimes by saying the words under my breath, that the game is over, finished, and will never be played again. But you see, if Winterburn had scored (and why did none of the others volunteer to take it? A Wembley final isn’t the place to take your first one), we would have won 3-1, no question, and retained the Cup we had won the year before; but he didn’t, and Luton went up the other end and scored twice in the last seven minutes and won 3-2. Fairly or unfairly, the Arsenal fans I have spoken to blame one man: Augustus Caesar.

There have been so many players that the crowd have rubbished over the years, and not all of them were bad: Ure, Sammels, Blockley, Rix, Chapman, Hayes, Groves, even Michael Thomas for the second half of the first Championship season and a good chunk of the following year. But Gus was different. There was no debate whatsoever about his talents. Hayes, Groves, Thomas, and Rix all had their defenders among the fans, but Gus had none, or none that I ever came across; the nadir of his Arsenal career was probably during a horrible 1-0 defeat at Wimbledon in January 1990, when every back-pass or clearance he accomplished without disaster was greeted with ironic cheers and applause for the entire game. I can’t begin to imagine how anyone could ever cope with that kind of public humiliation.

Soon after I had stopped teaching and begun to try to write, I read a book called The Hustler by Walter Tevis. I was much taken by Fast Eddie, the character played by Paul Newman in the film, just as I had been much taken with the notion that I was the Cannonball Kid when Charlie Nicholas moved down from Celtic. And as the book seemed to be about anything you wanted to do that was difficult—writing, becoming a footballer, whatever—I paid it extra special attention. At one point (oh God oh God oh God) I typed these words out on a piece of paper and pinned it above my desk:

“That’s what the whole goddamned thing is: you got to commit yourself to the life you picked. And you picked it—most people don’t even do that. You’re smart and you’re young and you’ve got, like I said before, talent.”

As the rejection slips piled up, these words comforted me; and as I began to panic about the way things that everybody else had, like careers and nice flats and a bit of cash for the weekend, seemed to be slipping out of arm’s reach, friends and family began to try to reassure me. “You know you’re good,” they said. “You’ll be OK. Just be patient.” And I did know I was good, and I had committed myself to the life I had picked, and my friends, and Fast Eddie’s friends, couldn’t all be wrong, so I sat back and waited. I know now that I was wrong, stupid, to do so, and I know because Gus Caesar told me so.

Gus is living proof that this self-belief, this driven sense of vocation (and I am not talking about arrogance here, but the simple healthy self-confidence that is absolutely necessary for survival), can be viciously misleading. Did Gus commit himself to the life he had picked? Of course he did. You don’t get anywhere near the first team of a major First Division football club without commitment. And did he know he was good? He must have done, and justifiably so. Think about it. At school he must have been much, much better than his peers, so he gets picked for the school team, and then some representative side, South London Boys or what have you; and he’s still better than anyone else in the team, by miles, so the scouts come to watch, and he’s offered an apprenticeship not with Fulham or Brentford or even West Ham but with the mighty Arsenal. And it’s still not over, even then, because if you look at any First Division youth team of five years ago you won’t recognise most of the names, because most of them have disappeared. (Here’s the Arsenal youth team of April 1987, from a randomly plucked programme: Miller, Hannigan, McGregor, Hillier, Scully, Carstairs, Connelly, Rivero, Cagigao, S. Ball, Esqulant. Of those, only Hillier has come through, although Miller is still with us as a highly rated reserve goalkeeper; Scully is still playing professional football somewhere, though not for Arsenal or any other First Division team. The rest have gone, and gone from a club famous for giving its own players a fair crack.)

But Gus survives, and goes on to play for the reserves. And suddenly, it’s all on for him: Don Howe is in trouble, and flooding the first team with young players—Niall Quinn, Hayes, Rocastle, Adams, Martin Keown. And when Viv Anderson is suspended over Christmas 1985 Gus makes his début, as a right-back, at of all places Old Trafford, and we win 1-0 up there, so he’s part of a back four that’s kept a clean sheet away at Manchester United.

Howe gets the sack, and George Graham keeps him on, and he’s used as a sub in quite a few games over George’s first season, so things are still going well for him—not as well as they are for Rocky and Hayes and Adams and Quinn, but then these players are having an exceptional first full season, and when the squad for the England Under-21s is announced it’s full of Arsenal players, and Gus Caesar is one of them. The England selectors, like the Arsenal fans, are beginning to trust Arsenal’s youth policy implicitly, and Gus gets a call-up even though he isn’t in the first team regularly. But never mind why, he’s in, he’s recognised as one of the best twenty or so young players in the whole country.

Now at this point Gus could be forgiven for relaxing his guard a little. He’s young, he’s got talent, he’s committed to the life he’s picked, and at least some of the self-doubt that plagues everyone with long-shot dreams must have vanished by now. At this stage you have to rely on the judgement of others (I was relying on the judgements of friends and agents and anyone I could find who would read my stuff and tell me it was OK); and when those others include two Arsenal managers and an England coach then you probably reckon that there isn’t much to worry about.

But as it turns out, they are all wrong. So far he has leaped over every hurdle in his path comfortably, but even at this late stage it is possible to be tripped up. Probably the first time we notice that things aren’t right is in January 1987, in that first-leg semi-final against Tottenham: Caesar is painfully, obviously, out of his depth against those Spurs forwards. In truth he looks like a rabbit caught in headlights, frozen to the spot until Waddle or Allen or somebody runs him over, and then he starts to thrash about, horribly and pitifully, and finally George and Theo Foley put him out of his misery by substituting him. He doesn’t get another chance for a while. The next time I remember him turning out is against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge in a 1-1 draw, a week or two before the Luton final, but again there is a moment in the first half where Dixon runs at him, turns him one way, then the other, then back again, like your dad used to do to you when you were a really little kid in the back garden, and eventually strolls past him and puts the ball just the wrong side of the post. We knew that there was going to be trouble at Wembley, when O’Leary was out injured and Gus was the only candidate to replace him. Caesar leaves it late, but when the ball is knocked into the box seven minutes from time, he miskicks so violently that he falls over; at this point he looks like somebody off the street who has won a competition to appear as a centre-half in a Wembley final, and not like a professional footballer at all, and in the ensuing chaos Danny Wilson stoops to head the ball over the line for Luton’s equalising goal.

That’s it. End of story. He’s at the club for another three or four years, but he’s very much the last resort centre-back, and he must have known, when George bought Bould and then Linighan and then Pates, with Adams and O’Leary already at the club, that he didn’t have much of a future—he was the sixth in line for two positions. He was given a free transfer at the end of the 90/91 season, to Cambridge United; but within another couple of months they let him go too, to Bristol City, and a couple of months after that Bristol City let him go to Airdrie. To get where he did, Gus Caesar clearly had more talent than nearly everyone of his generation (the rest of us can only dream about having his kind of skill) and it still wasn’t quite enough.

Sport and life, especially the arty life, are not exactly analogous. One of the great things about sport is its cruel clarity: there is no such thing, for example, as a bad one-hundred-metre runner, or a hopeless centre-half who got lucky; in sport, you get found out. Nor is there such a thing as an unknown genius striker starving in a garret somewhere, because the scouting system is foolproof. (Everyone gets watched.) There are, however, plenty of bad actors or musicians or writers making a decent living, people who happened to be in the right place at the right time, or knew the right people, or whose talents have been misunderstood or overestimated. Even so, I think there is a real resonance in the Gus Caesar story: it contains a terrifying lesson for any aspirants who think that their own unshakeable sense of destiny (and again, this sense of destiny is not to be confused with arrogance—Gus Caesar was not an arrogant footballer) is significant. Gus must have known he was good, just as any pop band who has ever played the Marquee know they are destined for Madison Square Garden and an NME front cover, and just as any writer who has sent off a completed manuscript to Faber and Faber knows that he is two years away from the Booker. You trust that feeling with your life, you feel the strength and determination it gives you coursing through your veins like heroin … and it doesn’t mean anything at all.

Walking Distance

ARSENAL v SHEFFIELD WEDNESDAY

21.1.89

It made sense to move into the area, for other reasons too: your money goes a lot further in decrepit areas of north London than it does in Shepherd’s Bush or Notting Hill, and the public transport up here is good (five minutes from King’s Cross, two tube lines, millions of buses). But really, living within walking distance of the ground was the fulfilment of a pitiful twenty-year ambition, and it’s no use trying to dress it up in logic.

It was fun looking. One flat I saw had a roof terrace which overlooked a section of the front of the stadium, and you could see these huge letters, “RSEN”, no more than that but just enough to get the blood pumping. And the place we got gazumped on was on the route that the open-top bus takes when we win something. The rooms were smaller and darker than the ones we have now, but the living-room window framed the entire West Stand; I would have been able to pause, during the writing of this book, look out, and return to the Amstrad refreshed.

In the end we had to settle for somewhere a little less spiritual overlooking Finsbury Park, and even if you stand on a stool and stick your head out of the window you can’t see anything, not even the Barclays League pennant which at the time of writing (although not, I fear, for much longer) is still ours to flutter. But still! People park their cars in our road before the game! And on a windy day the tannoy is clearly audible, even from inside the flat, if the windows are open! (I don’t know about the audibility of roars, obviously, because I am never at home when the team are, but I would like to think that the noisier celebrations make it this far. Maybe one day I will borrow my brother-in-law’s smart Sony recorder, place it on the chair by the TV under the window and let it run, just out of interest.) And best of all, just a few days after moving in, I was walking down the road—this really happened—and I found, just lying there, filthy dirty and somewhat torn but there nonetheless, a twenty-year-old Peter Marinello bubblegum card. You cannot imagine how happy this made me, to know that I was living in an area so rich in archaeological interest, so steeped in my own past.

As we turned the corner into our new street, the rental-van radio brought us news of a Kevin Richardson goal at Goodison Park, the third in an eventual 3-1 win (and Everton’s goal never crossed the line), which seemed like a pretty good omen. But I was waiting for the following Saturday, my first ever home home game against Sheffield Wednesday, when finally, at the age of thirty-one, I would walk down Avenell Road, through the turnstiles and on to the North Bank as a north Londoner.

What was I expecting to find, when I opened the front door on to the street at twenty to three (twenty to three!) that Saturday afternoon and turned right towards the ground? I imagine I thought it was going to be like one of those sitcom depictions of suburbia, with all the identical front doors opening at precisely the same time, and identically dressed men marching down the street together, clutching identical briefcases, brollies and newspapers. In my street, of course, it would be Arsenal supporters, rather than commuters, who emerged, and they would all be wearing flat caps and faded bar-type red-and-white scarves. And they would see me and smile and wave, and I would immediately become a much-loved and valued member of a happy, working-class Arsenal community.

But no doors opened. Nobody supports Arsenal in my street. Some of my neighbours are what used to be known, years ago, as yuppies, and they have no interest in football; others are transients, squatters or short-lease tenants, never around for long enough to acquire the taste for it. The rest of them … I don’t know. You can’t come up with a theory for everyone, and there’s no accounting for taste. All I know is that there used to be one other fan in our street, a young lad who wandered around in an away shirt, but he moved soon after we got here; and apart from him I could have been back in Maidenhead, were it not for the cars cruising up and down, looking for a matchday parking space.

I suspect that I moved here a good twenty years too late, and that for the last couple of decades the local support has dwindled away steadily. According to the club’s information, a huge percentage of fans live in the Home Counties (when I travelled down from Cambridge, the trains were packed with Arsenal supporters by the time we got to Hatfield). Football in London—at Spurs, Chelsea, Highbury and, to a lesser extent, West Ham—has become a suburban afternoon out. The demographics have changed now, and all those people who used to walk to the game from Islington and Finsbury Park and Stoke Newington have gone: they’re either dead or they’ve sold up, moved out to Essex or Hertfordshire or Middlesex. And though you see a fair few people walking around with club shirts on, and some of the shopkeepers take an interest in the results (one of the guys who runs the news-stand inside the station is a committed and knowledgeable fan, although his brother supports Chelsea), I’m more alone here than I ever thought I would be at the end of the sixties, all those years ago, when I used to pester my dad to buy a house on Avenell Road, and he said I’d get fed up with it.

Tyranny

ARSENAL v CHARLTON

21.3.89

I’m writing about me, now. The boy who fretted his way through the first part of this book has gone; the young man who spent most of his twenties twisted in on himself isn’t around either. I can no longer use age, or rather youth, to explain myself in the way I have been able to do elsewhere.

As I get older, the tyranny that football exerts over my life, and therefore over the lives of people around me, is less reasonable and less attractive. Family and friends know, after long years of wearying experience, that the fixture list always has the last word in any arrangement; they understand, or at least accept, that christenings or weddings or any gatherings, which in other families would take unquestioned precedence, can only be plotted after consultation. So football is regarded as a given disability that has to be worked around. If I were wheelchair-bound, nobody close to me would organise anything in a top-floor flat, so why would they plan anything for a winter Saturday afternoon?

Like everyone, I have a peripheral role to play in the lives of most of the people I know, however, and these people are often uninterested in the forthcoming First Division programme. So there have been wedding invitations that I have reluctantly but unavoidably had to turn down, although I am always careful to provide a socially acceptable excuse involving family problems or work difficulties; “Home to Sheffield United” is deemed an inadequate explanation in situations like these.

And then there are the unpredictable Cup replays, the rearranged midweek fixtures, the games transferred from Saturday to Sunday at short notice in order to accommodate the television schedules, so I have to refuse invitations that clash with potential fixtures, as well as those which clash with actual fixtures. (Or I do arrange something, but warn the parties involved that I might have to pull out at the last moment, which sometimes doesn’t go down too well.)

But it gets harder and harder, and sometimes hurting someone is unavoidable. The Charlton game was rearranged for the same night as a very close friend’s birthday party, a party to which only five people had been invited. Once I realised that there was a conflict of interest, there was the usual brief panic as I contemplated a home game taking place without me; and then I phoned her with a heavy heart and told her what had happened. I was hoping for a laugh and absolution, but I got neither, and from the sound of her voice, from the disappointment and tired impatience it contained, I understood that I wasn’t going to. Instead, she said one of those awful things, “You must do what you think is right”, or “You must do what you want to do”, something like that; one of those chilling deliverances designed to find you out, and I said that I’d have to think about it, but we both knew that I wasn’t going to think about it at all, that I had been exposed as the worthless, shallow worm I was, and I went to the game. I was glad I went, too. Paul Davis scored one of the best goals I have ever seen at Highbury, a diving header after he’d sprinted the length of the pitch following a Charlton attack.

There are two points that arise from incidents like this. Firstly, I have begun to suspect that my relationship is with Highbury, rather than with the team: if the match had taken place at the Valley or Selhurst Park or Upton Park, none of them inaccessible, you might have thought, to a man as obsessive as this one, then I wouldn’t have gone. So what’s this all about? Why am I hell-bent on seeing a match involving Arsenal in one part of London, but not another? What, in the jargon of the therapist, is the fantasy here? What do I imagine would happen to me if I didn’t go to Highbury just for one evening, and missed a game that might have been crucial to the eventual outcome of the Championship race but hardly promised unmissable entertainment? The answer, I think, is this: I am frightened that in the next game, the one after the one I have missed, I won’t understand something that’s going on, a chant or the crowd’s antipathy to one of the players; and so the place I know best in the world, the one spot outside my own home where I feel I belong absolutely and unquestionably, will have become alien to me. I missed the game against Coventry in 1991, and the game against Charlton in 1989, but I was abroad at the time. And though the first of those absences felt odd, the fact that I was several hundred miles from the stadium assuaged the panic and made it tolerable; the only time I have ever been somewhere else in London while Arsenal were at home (I was at Victoria, queuing for a ticket on Freddie Laker’s Skytrain, while we were beating QPR 5-1 in September 1978, and my recall of both score and opponents signifies something), I felt squirmingly uncomfortable.

But one day, soon, it’s going to have to happen again, I know that. Illness (but I’ve been to Highbury with flu and sprained ankles and more or less anything that didn’t require access to a toilet), a future child’s first football match or school play (surely I’d go to the school play … but I fear that I’m daft enough to pass it over and thus ensure that the child spends hours on some Hampstead couch in the year 2025 explaining to a disbelieving shrink that throughout his or her childhood I always put Arsenal first), family bereavement, work …

Which brings me to the second point arising from these rearranged game problems: work. My brother now has a job which demands more than a nine-to-five routine, and though I can’t recall him missing a game through work hitherto, it is only a matter of time. One day soon, this season or next, someone will call an impromptu meeting that won’t end until half past eight or nine o’clock, and he will be sitting staring at a memo while three or four miles away the Merse is humiliating an opposing full-back. And he won’t like it, but he won’t have much choice, so he’ll shrug and get on with it.

I don’t think I could do that kind of job, for the reasons outlined above. But if I did, I hope I’d be able to shrug. I hope I wouldn’t kick out, in my panic, and pout, and plead, and generally reveal myself as someone who has yet to come to terms with the demands of adult life. Writers are luckier than most, but one day, I suppose, I will have to do something at a time disastrously inconvenient to me—I’ll have a one-off chance to interview somebody who can only fit me in on a Saturday afternoon, or there will be some impossible deadline which requires a Wednesday evening in front of the word-processor. Proper writers go on author tours, and appear as guests on Wogan, and all sorts of things fraught with perils, so maybe one day there will be all that to contend with. Not yet, though. The publishers of this book cannot reasonably expect me to write about this kind of neurosis and then ask me to miss a few games to help them publicise it. “I’m mad, remember?” I will tell them. “That’s what this whole thing is about! No way can I do a reading in Waterstone’s on a Wednesday night!” And so I survive a little longer.

Is it really a coincidence, blind luck, that I have not yet found myself in an unavoidable match-missing position in over a decade as a wage-earner? (Even my superiors at the Far Eastern company, usually completely mystified by the compulsion of a social life, were in no doubt that Arsenal came first.) Or has my obsession shaped and guided my ambition? I would prefer to think not, of course, because if it has then the implications are alarming: all those options that I thought were still mine during my teenage years have in that case never existed, and the Stoke game in 1968 effectively prevented me from becoming an entrepreneur or a doctor or a real journalist. (Like many fans, I have never even contemplated becoming a sports-writer. How could I report on Liverpool versus Barcelona when I would rather be at Highbury to watch Arsenal against Wimbledon? Being paid a lot of money to write about the game I love is one of my darkest, clammiest fears.) I prefer to think of my freedom to go to Highbury whenever there is a game as a fortuitous side-effect of my chosen path, and leave it at that.

Hillsborough

ARSENAL v NEWCASTLE

15.4.89

There were rumours emanating from those with radios, but we didn’t really know anything about it until half-time, when there was no score given for the Liverpool-Forest semi-final, and even then nobody had any real idea of the sickening scale of it all. By the end of our game, a dull, distracted 1-0 win, everyone knew there had been deaths. And a few people, those who had been to Hillsborough for the big occasions, were able to guess whereabouts in the ground the tragedy had occurred; but then, nobody who runs the game has ever been interested in the forebodings of fans.

By the time we got home it was clear that this wasn’t just another football accident, the sort that happens once every few years, kills one or two unlucky people, and is generally and casually regarded by all the relevant authorities as one of the hazards of our chosen diversion. The numbers of dead rose by the minute—seven, then a score, then fifty-something and eventually ninety-five—and you realised that if anybody had even a shred of common sense left available to them, nothing would ever be the same again.

It is easy to understand why bereaved families wish to see officers from the South Yorkshire police brought to trial: their error of judgement was catastrophic. Yet, though it is clear that the police messed up badly that afternoon, it would be terribly vengeful to accuse them of anything more than incompetence. Very few of us are unfortunate enough to be in a position where our professional mistakes kill people. The police at Hillsborough were never able to guarantee safety, however many gates they did or didn’t open; no police force at any football ground in the country could do that. It could have happened anywhere. It could have happened at Highbury—on the concrete steps leading out of the North Bank down to the street, maybe (and it doesn’t require a very elaborate fantasy to imagine that); or it could have happened at Loftus Road, where thousands of fans can only gain access to the away end through a coffee bar. And there would have been an enquiry, and newspaper reports, and blame attached to the police, or stewards, or drunken fans, or somebody. But that wouldn’t have been right, not when the whole thing was based on such a ludicrous premise.

The premise was this: that football stadia built in most cases around a hundred years ago (Norwich City’s ground, fifty-eight years old, is the youngest in the First Division) could accommodate between fifteen and sixty-three thousand people without those people coming to any harm. Imagine the entire population of a small town (my own home town has a population of around fifty thousand) trying to get into a large department store, and you will have some idea of the hopefulness of this. These people stood, in blocks of ten or twelve thousand, on steeply banked and in some cases crumbling concrete terracing, modified but essentially unchanged over several decades. Even in the days when the only missiles hurled into the air were flat hats, this patently wasn’t safe: thirty-three people were killed at Burnden Park, Bolton, in 1946 when crush barriers collapsed, and the Ibrox disaster in 1971 was the second to take place there. By the time football became a forum for gang warfare, and containment rather than safety become a priority (those perimeter fences again), a major tragedy became an inevitability. How could anyone have hoped to get away with it? With sixty-thousand-plus crowds, all you can do is shut the gates, tell everyone to squash up, and then pray, very hard. The Ibrox disaster in 1971 was an awful warning that wasn’t heeded: there were specific causes for it, but ultimately what was responsible was the way we watch football, among crowds that are way too big, in grounds that are far too old.

These grounds had been built for a generation of fans that didn’t drive, or even rely on public transport overly much, and so they were placed carefully in the middle of residential areas full of narrow streets and terraced houses. Twenty or thirty years after the catchment areas began to expand dramatically, and people started travelling from ten or twenty or fifty miles away, nothing has changed. This was the time to build new stadia, out of town, with parking facilities and improved safety provisions; the rest of Europe did, and as a consequence the grounds in Italy, Spain, Portugal and France are bigger, better and safer, but typically, in a country whose infrastructure is finally beginning to fall apart, we didn’t bother. Here, tens of thousands of fans walk up narrow, winding underground tunnels, or double-park their cars in tiny, quiet, local streets, while the relevant football authorities seem content to carry on as if nothing at all—behaviour, the fan base, methods of transport, even the state of the grounds themselves, which like the rest of us start to look a bit tatty after the first half-century or so—had changed. There was so much that could and should have been done, and nothing ever was, and everyone trundled along for year after year after year, for a hundred years, until Hillsborough. Hillsborough was the fourth post-war British football disaster, the third in which large numbers of people were crushed to death following some kind of failure in crowd control; it was the first which was attributed to something more than bad luck. So you can blame the police for opening the wrong gate at the wrong time if you like, but in my opinion to do so would be to miss the point.

The Taylor Report, famously and I think rightly, recommended that every football ground should become all-seater. Of course this brings with it new dangers—a possible repeat of the Bradford fire disaster, for example, where people died because highly flammable rubbish had been allowed to accumulate under the stands. And seats in themselves are not going to eliminate hooliganism, and could, if the clubs are very stupid, exacerbate it. Seats can be used as weapons, and long rows of people can obstruct police intervention if trouble does break out, although all-seaters should give clubs greater control over who occupies which part of the ground. The real point is that the likelihood of dying in the way that people at Ibrox and Hillsborough died will be minimised if the clubs implement Lord Justice Taylor’s recommendations properly, and that, as far as I can see, is all that matters.

At the time of writing, the Taylor Report is prompting noisy dissent among fans and among some clubs. The problems are manifold. Changing the stadia to make them safe will prove expensive, and many clubs haven’t got the money. In order to raise the money, some of them will be charging much higher entrance fees, or introducing schemes like the Arsenal and West Ham Bonds, which may mean that many young working-class males, the traditional core of support, will be excluded. Some fans want to continue standing. (Not, I think, because standing is an inherently superior way of watching a game—it isn’t. It’s uncomfortable, and anyone under six feet two has a restricted view. Fans worry that the end of terrace culture will mean the end of noise and atmosphere and all the things that make football memorable, but the all-seated ends at Ibrox make more noise than the Clock End and the North Bank put together; seats in themselves do not turn football grounds into churches.) All ground capacities will be reduced, some to below current average attendance figures. And some clubs will have to close down altogether.

I have listened to and read the arguments of hundreds of fans who disagree with the Taylor Report, and who see the future of football as a modified version of the past, with safer terraces and better facilities, rather than as anything radically different. And what has struck me most is the conservative and almost neurotic sentimental attachments these arguments evince—in a sense, the same kind of neurotic sentimental attachment that informs this book. Every time a club mentions a new stadium, there is an outcry; when Arsenal and Tottenham mooted ground-sharing a few years back, at a projected site near, I think, Alexandra Palace, the protests were loud and long (“Tradition!”), and as a consequence we now find ourselves with an assortment of the tiniest stadia in the world. The Stadium of Light in Lisbon holds 120,000, the Bernabeu in Madrid 95,000, Bayern Munich’s ground 75,000; but Arsenal, the biggest team in the biggest city in Europe, will be able to squeeze in less than forty thousand when their development is completed.

We didn’t want new grounds, and now we don’t want the old ones, not if they have to be modified to ensure our safety and the clubs have to charge more as a consequence. “What if I want to take my kids to a game? I won’t be able to afford it.” But neither can we afford to take our kids to Barbados, or to Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons, or to the opera. Come the Revolution, of course, we will be able to do all those things as often as we like, but until then this seems a particularly poor argument, a whinge rather than a cogent objection.

“What about the little clubs who might go to the wall?” It will be very sad for Chester’s couple of thousand fans if their team goes under—I would be devastated if I were one of them—but that in itself is absolutely no reason why clubs should be allowed to endanger the lives of their fans. If clubs have to close down because they do not have the money for the changes deemed necessary to avoid another Hillsborough, then so be it. Tough. If, like Chester and Wimbledon and scores of other teams, they are poor, it is in part because not enough people care whether they survive or go under (Wimbledon, a First Division team in a densely populated area, attracted tiny crowds even before they were forced to move to the other side of London), and that tells a story of its own. However, the converse of this is that there is absolutely no chance of being crushed on a terrace at these grounds; forcing clubs to install seating for fans who have their own back-garden-sized patch of concrete to stand on is ludicrous.

“What about the supporters who have followed the club through thick and thin, paid the players’ wages? How can clubs really contemplate selling them up the river?” This is an argument that goes right to the heart of football consumption. I have explained elsewhere that if clubs erode their traditional fan base, they could find themselves in serious difficulties, and in my opinion they would be misguided to do so. Obviously the ground improvements have to be paid for somehow, and increased admission prices are inevitable; most of us accept that we will have to pay another couple of quid to watch our team. The bond schemes at Arsenal and West Ham go way beyond that, however: using these price increases to swap one crowd for another, to get rid of the old set of fans and to bring in a new, more affluent group, is a mistake.

Even so, it is a mistake that clubs are perfectly at liberty to make. Football clubs are not hospitals or schools, with a duty to admit us regardless of our financial wherewithal. It is interesting and revealing that opposition to these bond schemes has taken on the tone of a crusade, as if the clubs had a moral obligation to their supporters. What do the clubs owe us, any of us, really? I have stumped up thousands of pounds to watch Arsenal over the last twenty years; but each time money has changed hands, I have received something in return: admission to a game, a train ticket, a programme. Why is football any different from the cinema, say, or a record shop? The difference is that all of us feel these astonishingly deep allegiances, and that until recently we had all anticipated being able to go to watch every game that our team plays for the rest of our lives; now it is beginning to appear as though that will not be possible for some of us. But that won’t be the end of the world. It could even be that increased admission prices will improve the quality of the football we watch; perhaps clubs will be able to play fewer games, the players will become injured less frequently, and there will be no need to play in rubbishy tournaments like the ZDS Cup in order simply to earn a few quid. Again, one must look to Europe: the Italians, the Portuguese and the Spanish have high ticket prices, but they can afford to pay for the best players in Europe and South America. (They are also less obsessed with lower league football than we are. There are third and fourth division clubs, but they are semi-professional, and do not influence the way the game is structured. The First Division takes precedence and the football climate is all the healthier for it.)

Over the years we have come to confuse football with something else, something more necessary, which is why these cries of outrage are so heartfelt and so indignant. We view everything from the top of this mountain of partisan passion; it is no wonder that all our perspectives are wrong. Perhaps it was time to climb down, and see what everyone else in the outside world sees.

For the most part, what the outside world saw made a lot of cold, harsh, practical sense. The cover of The Economist that week carried a picture of the extraordinary shrine of flowers, flags and banners that Liverpool and Everton fans and hundreds of others had created in the goalmouth beneath the Kop at Anfield; the headline, neatly placed just above the crossbar, was “The game that died”. I bought the magazine, for the first and only time, and was shocked to realise how much I found myself agreeing with it. Perhaps it was predictable that a magazine entitled The Economist should be best equipped to penetrate the muddle that football had got itself into; here, after all, is a multi-million-pound industry which doesn’t have two pennies to rub together.

The Economist on the inevitability of the disaster: “Hillsborough was not just a calamitous accident. It was a brutal demonstration of systematic failure.” On the state of the grounds: “Britain’s football grounds now resemble maximum-security prisons, but only the feebleness of the regulations has allowed the clubs to go on pretending that crowd safety is compatible with prison architecture.” On the football authorities: “For complacency and incompetence, there’s nothing like a cartel; and of Britain’s surviving cartels, the Football League is one of the smuggest and slackest.” On the people who own football clubs: “Like old-fashioned newspaper magnates,(they are willing to pay for prestige—which they see in terms of owning star players, rather than comfortable modern stadiums.” And on what needs to be done: “Having fewer clubs, operating out of smarter stadiums, ought to revive the interest of those who have been driven away from football during the past ten years.”

These views and others in the same issue—well-informed, well-argued, devoid of the football authorities’ dilatory self-interest, the Government’s loathing for the game (if Hillsborough did nothing else, it wrecked Thatcher’s ludicrously misbegotten ID-card scheme) and the distorting obsession of the fans—helped one to begin looking at the whole football débâcle with something approaching clarity. It was only after Hillsborough, when outsiders began to take an interest in the way football conducts itself, that it became clear just how deeply entrenched in the football way of looking at things we had all become. And that way, as parts of this book demonstrate, is not always the wisest.

On 1st May, two weeks and two days later, Arsenal played Norwich at Highbury, our first game since the disaster. It was a glorious Bank Holiday afternoon, and Arsenal played wonderfully well, and won 5-0; as far as everyone there that day, myself included, was concerned, everything seemed more or less all right with the world again. The mourning period was over, the TV cameras were there, the sun was out, Arsenal were scoring goals galore … after the bleakness of the previous fortnight, the match took on a celebratory air. It was a tired and muted celebration, but it was a celebration nonetheless, and from this distance that looks particularly bizarre now.

What were we all thinking of that afternoon? How on earth did the Forest-Liverpool game ever get replayed? It’s all a part of the same thing, in a way. I went to the Arsenal-Norwich game, and loved it, for the same reasons I had watched the Liverpool-Juventus final after the Heysel disaster, and for the same reasons that football hasn’t really changed that much in over a hundred years: because the passions the game induces consume everything, including tact and common sense. If it is possible to attend and enjoy a football match sixteen days after nearly a hundred people died at one—and it is possible, I did it, despite my new post-Hillsborough realism—then perhaps it is a little easier to understand the culture and circumstances that allowed these deaths to happen. Nothing ever matters, apart from football.

The Greatest Moment Ever

LIVERPOOL v ARSENAL

26.5.89

In all the time I have been watching football, twenty-three seasons, only seven teams have won the First Division Championship: Leeds United, Everton, Arsenal, Derby County, Nottingham Forest, Aston Villa and, a staggering eleven times, Liverpool. Five different teams came top in my first five years, so it seemed to me then that the League was something that came your way every once in a while, even though you might have to wait for it; but as the seventies came and went, and then the eighties, it began to dawn on me that Arsenal might never win the League again in my lifetime. That isn’t as melodramatic as it sounds. Wolves fans celebrating their third championship in six years in 1959 could hardly have anticipated that their team would spend much of the next thirty years in the Second and Third Divisions; Manchester City supporters in their mid-forties when the Blues last won the League in 1968 are in their early seventies now.

Like all fans, the overwhelming majority of the games I have seen have been League games. And as most of the time Arsenal have had no real interest in the First Division title after Christmas, nor ever really come close to going down, I would estimate that around half of these games are meaningless, at least in the way that sportswriters talk about meaningless games. There are no chewed nails and chewed knuckles and screwed-up faces; your ear doesn’t become sore from being pressed up hard against a radio, trying to hear how Liverpool are getting on; you are not, in truth, thrown into agonies of despair or eye-popping fits of ecstasy by the result. Any meanings such games throw up are the ones that you, rather than the First Division table, bring to them.

And after maybe ten years of this, the Championship becomes something you either believe in or you don’t, like God. You concede that it’s possible, of course, and you try to respect the views of those who have managed to remain credulous. Between approximately 1975 and 1989 I didn’t believe. I hoped, at the beginning of each season; and a couple of times—the middle of the 86/87 season, for example, when we were top for eight or nine weeks—I was almost lured out of my agnostic’s cave. But in my heart of hearts I knew that it would never happen, just as I knew that they were not, as I used to think when I was young, going to find a cure for death before I got old.

In 1989, eighteen years after the last time Arsenal had won the League, I reluctantly and foolishly allowed myself to believe it was indeed possible that Arsenal could win the Championship. They were top of the First Division between January and May; on the last full weekend of the Hillsborough-elongated season they were five points clear of Liverpool with three games left to play. Liverpool had a game in hand, but the accepted wisdom was that Hillsborough and its attendant strains would make it impossible for them to keep winning, and two of Arsenal’s three games were at home to weaker teams. The other was against Liverpool, away, a game that would conclude the First Division season.

No sooner had I become a born-again member of the Church of the Latterday Championship Believers, however, than Arsenal ground to a catastrophic halt. They lost, dismally, at home to Derby; and in the final game at Highbury, against Wimbledon, they twice threw away the lead to draw 2-2 against a team they had destroyed 5-1 on the opening day of the season. It was after the Derby game that I raged into an argument with my partner about a cup of tea, but after the Wimbledon game I had no rage left, just a numbing disappointment. For the first time I understood the women in soap operas who have been crushed by love affairs before, and can’t allow themselves to fall for somebody again: I had never before seen all that as a matter of choice, but now I too had left myself nakedly exposed when I could have remained hard and cynical. I wouldn’t allow it to happen again, never, ever, and I had been a fool, I knew that now, just as I knew it would take me years to recover from the terrible disappointment of getting so close and failing.

It wasn’t quite all over. Liverpool had two games left, against West Ham and against us, both at Anfield. Because the two teams were so close, the mathematics of it all were peculiarly complicated: whatever score Liverpool beat West Ham by, Arsenal had to halve. If Liverpool won 2-0, we would have to win 1-0, and so on. In the event Liverpool won 5-1, which meant that we needed a two-goal victory; “YOU HAVEN’T GOT A PRAYER, ARSENAL”, was the back-page headline of the Daily Mirror.

I didn’t go to Anfield. The fixture was originally scheduled for earlier in the season, when the result wouldn’t have been so crucial, and by the time it was clear that this game would decide the Championship, the tickets had long gone. In the morning I walked down to Highbury to buy a new team shirt, just because I felt I had to do something, and though admittedly wearing a shirt in front of a television set would not, on the face of it, appear to offer the team an awful lot of encouragement, I knew it would make me feel better. Even at noon, some eight hours before the evening kick-off, there were already scores of coaches and cars around the ground, and on the way home I wished everyone I passed good luck; their positiveness (“Three-one”, “Two-nil, no trouble”, even a breezy “Four-one”) on this beautiful May morning made me sad for them, as if these chirpy and bravely confident young men and women were off to the Somme to lose their lives, rather than to Anfield to lose, at worst, their faith.

I went to work in the afternoon, and felt sick with nerves despite myself; afterwards I went straight round to an Arsenal-supporting friend’s house, just a street away from the North Bank, to watch the game. Everything about the night was memorable, right from the moment when the teams came on to the pitch and the Arsenal players ran over to the Kop and presented individuals in the crowd with bunches of flowers. And as the game progressed, and it became obvious that Arsenal were going to go down fighting, it occurred to me just how well I knew my team, their faces and their mannerisms, and how fond I was of each individual member of it. Merson’s gap-toothed smile and tatty soul-boy haircut, Adams’s manful and endearing attempts to come to terms with his own inadequacies, Rocastle’s pumped-up elegance, Smith’s lovable diligence … I could find it in me to forgive them for coming so close and blowing it: they were young, and they’d had a fantastic season and as a supporter you cannot really ask for more than that.

I got excited when we scored right at the beginning of the second half, and I got excited again about ten minutes from time, when Thomas had a clear chance and hit it straight at Grobbelaar, but Liverpool seemed to be growing stronger and to be creating chances at the end, and finally, with the clock in the corner of the TV screen showing that the ninety minutes had passed, I got ready to muster a brave smile for a brave team. “If Arsenal are to lose the Championship, having had such a lead at one time, it’s somewhat poetic justice that they have got a result on the last day, even though they’re not to win it,” said co-commentator David Pleat as Kevin Richardson received treatment for an injury with the Kop already celebrating. “They will see that as scant consolation, I should think, David,” replied Brian Moore. Scant consolation indeed, for all of us.

Richardson finally got up, ninety-two minutes gone now, and even managed a penalty-area tackle on John Barnes; then Lukic bowled the ball out to Dixon, Dixon on, inevitably, to Smith, a brilliant Smith flick-on … and suddenly, in the last minute of the last game of the season, Thomas was through, on his own, with a chance to win the Championship for Arsenal. “It’s up for grabs now!” Brian Moore yelled; and even then I found that I was reining myself in, learning from recent lapses in hardened scepticism, thinking, well, at least we came close at the end there, instead of thinking, please Michael, please Michael, please put it in, please God let him score. And then he was turning a somersault, and I was flat out on the floor, and everybody in the living room jumped on top of me. Eighteen years, all forgotten in a second.

What is the correct analogy for a moment like that? In Pete Davies’s brilliant book about the 1990 World Cup, All Played Out, he notices that the players use sexual imagery when trying to explain what it feels like to score a goal. I can see that sometimes, for some of the more workaday transcendent moments. Smith’s third goal in our 3-0 win against Liverpool in December 1990, for example, four days after we’d been beaten 6-2 at home by Manchester United—that felt pretty good, a perfect release to an hour of mounting excitement. And four or five years back, at Norwich, Arsenal scored four times in sixteen minutes after trailing for most of the game, a quarter of an hour which also had a kind of sexual otherworldliness to it.

The trouble with the orgasm as metaphor here is that the orgasm, though obviously pleasurable, is familiar, repeatable (within a couple of hours if you’ve been eating your greens), and predictable, particularly for a man—if you’re having sex then you know what’s coming, as it were. Maybe if I hadn’t made love for eighteen years, and had given up hope of doing so for another eighteen, and then suddenly, out of the blue, an opportunity presented itself … maybe in these circumstances it would be possible to recreate an approximation of that Anfield moment. Even though there is no question that sex is a nicer activity than watching football (no nil-nil draws, no offside trap, no cup upsets, and you’re warm), in the normal run of things, the feelings it engenders are simply not as intense as those brought about by a once-in-a-lifetime last-minute Championship winner.

None of the moments that people describe as the best in their lives seem analogous to me. Childbirth must be extraordinarily moving, but it doesn’t really have the crucial surprise element, and in any case lasts too long; the fulfilment of personal ambition—promotions, awards, what have you—doesn’t have the last-minute time factor, nor the element of powerlessness that I felt that night. And what else is there that can possibly provide the suddenness? A huge pools win, maybe, but the gaining of large sums of money affects a different part of the psyche altogether, and has none of the communal ecstasy of football.

There is then, literally, nothing to describe it. I have exhausted all the available options. I can recall nothing else that I have coveted for two decades (what else is there that can reasonably be coveted for that long?), nor can I recall anything else that I have desired as both man and boy. So please, be tolerant of those who describe a sporting moment as their best ever. We do not lack imagination, nor have we had sad and barren lives; it is just that real life is paler, duller, and contains less potential for unexpected delirium.

When the final whistle blew (just one more heart-stopping moment, when Thomas turned and knocked a terrifyingly casual back-pass to Lukic, perfectly safely but with a coolness that I didn’t feel) I ran straight out of the door to the off-licence on Blackstock Road; I had my arms outstretched, like a little boy playing aeroplanes, and as I flew down the street, old ladies came to the door and applauded my progress, as if I were Michael Thomas himself; then I was grievously ripped off for a bottle of cheap champagne, I realised later, by a shopkeeper who could see that the light of intelligence had gone from my eyes altogether. I could hear whoops and screams from pubs and shops and houses all around me; and as fans began to congregate at the stadium, some draped in banners, some sitting on top of tooting cars, everyone embracing strangers at every opportunity, and TV cameras arrived to film the party for the late news, and club officials leaned out of windows to wave at the bouncing crowd, it occurred to me that I was glad I hadn’t been up to Anfield, and missed out on this joyful, almost Latin explosion on my doorstep. After twenty-one years I no longer felt, as I had done during the Double year, that if I hadn’t been to the games I had no right to partake in the celebrations; I’d done the work, years and years and years of it, and I belonged.

Seats

ARSENAL v COVENTRY

22.8.89

These are some of the things that have happened to me in my thirties: I have become a mortgage holder; I have stopped buying New Musical Express and the Face, and, inexplicably, I have started keeping back copies of Q Magazine under a shelf in my living room; I have become an uncle; I have bought a CD player; I have registered with an accountant; I have noticed that certain types of music—hip-hop, indie guitar pop, thrash metal—all sound the same, and have no tune; I have come to prefer restaurants to clubs, and dinners with friends to parties; I have developed an aversion to the feeling that a bellyful of beer gives you, even though I still enjoy a pint; I have started to covet items of furniture; I have bought one of those cork boards you put up in the kitchen; I have started to develop certain views—on the squatters who live in my street, for example, and about unreasonably loud parties—which are not altogether consistent with the attitudes I held when I was younger. And, in 1989, I bought a season-ticket for the seats, after standing on the North Bank for over fifteen years. These details do not tell the whole story of how I got old, but they tell some of it.

You just get tired. I got tired of the queues, and the squash, and tumbling half-way down the terrace every time Arsenal scored, and the fact that my view of the near goal was always partially obscured at big games, and it seemed to me that being able to arrive at the ground two minutes before kick-off without being disadvantaged in any way had much to recommend it. I didn’t miss the terraces, really, and in fact I enjoyed them, the backdrop they provided, their noise and colour, more than I ever had when I stood on them. This Coventry game was our first in the seats, and Thomas and Marwood scored directly in front of us, at our end, and from our side.

There are five of us: Pete, of course, and my brother, and my girlfriend, although her place is usually taken by someone else nowadays, and me, and Andy, who used to be Rat when we were kids in the Schoolboys’ Enclosure—I bumped into him on the North Bank in George’s second season, a decade or so after I had lost touch with him, and he too was ready to leave the terraces behind.

What you’re really doing, when you buy a seat season-ticket, is upping the belonging a notch. I’d had my own spot on the terraces, but I had no proprietorial rights over it and if some bloody big-game casual fan stood in it, all I could do was raise my eyebrows. Now I really do have my own home in the stadium, complete with flatmates, and neighbours with whom I am on cordial terms, and with whom I converse on topics of shared interest, namely the need for a new midfielder/striker/way of playing. So I correspond to the stereotype of the ageing football fan, but I don’t regret it. After a while, you stop wanting to live from hand to mouth, day to day, game to game, and you begin wanting to ensure that the remainder of your days are secure.

Smoking

ARSENAL v LIVERPOOL

25.10.89

I remember the game for conventional reasons, for substitute Smith’s late winner and thus a handy Cup win over the old enemy. But most of all I remember it as the only time in the 1980s and, hitherto, the 1990s, that I had no nicotine in my bloodstream for the entire ninety minutes. I have gone through games without smoking in that time: during the first half of the 83/84 season I was on nicotine chewing gum, but never managed to kick that, and in the end went back to the cigarettes. But in October ’89, after a visit to Allen Carr the anti-smoking guru, I went cold turkey for ten days, and this game came right in the middle of that unhappy period.

I want to stop smoking and, like many people who wish to do the same, I firmly believe that abstinence is just around the corner. I won’t buy a carton of duty-frees, or a lighter, or even a household-sized box of matches because, given the imminence of my cessation, it would be a waste of money. What stops me from doing so now, today, this minute, are the things that have always stopped me: a difficult period of work up ahead, requiring the kind of concentration that only a Silk Cut can facilitate; the fear of the overwhelming domestic tension that would doubtless accompany screaming desperation; and, inevitably and pathetically, the Arsenal.

They do give me some leeway. There’s the first half of the season, before the FA Cup begins, and before the Championship has warmed up. And there are times like now, when with my team out of everything by the end of January I am looking at almost five months of dull but tension-free afternoons. (But I’ve got this book to write, and deadlines, and …) And yet some seasons—the 88/89 Championship year, for example, or the chase for the Double in 90/91 where every game between January and May was crucial—I cannot contemplate what it would be like to sit there without a smoke. Two down against Tottenham in a Cup semi-final at Wembley with eleven minutes gone and no fag? Inconceivable.

Am I going to hide behind Arsenal forever? Will they always serve as an excuse for smoking, and never having to go away at weekends, and not taking on work that might clash with a home fixture? The Liverpool game was, I think, their way of telling me that it’s not their fault, that it is I who control my actions, and not they; and though actually I do remember that I survived the evening without running on to the pitch and shaking the players silly, I have forgotten it all when the forthcoming fixtures convince me that now is not the right time to tackle my nicotine addiction. I have argued before that having Arsenal on my back, like a hump, year after year after year, is a real disability. But I use that disability too, I milk it for all it is worth.

Seven Goals and a Punch-Up

ARSENAL v NORWICH

4.11.89

For a match to be really, truly memorable, the kind of game that sends you home buzzing inside with the fulfilment of it all, you require as many of the following features as possible:

(1) Goals: As many as possible. There is an argument which says that goals begin to lose their value in particularly easy victories, but I have never found this to be a problem. (I enjoyed the last goal in Arsenal’s 7-1 win over Sheffield Wednesday as much as I enjoyed the first.) If the goals are to be shared, then it is best if the other team get theirs first: I have a particular penchant for the 3-2 home victory, with a late winner after losing 2-0 at half-time.

(2) Outrageously bad refereeing decisions: I prefer Arsenal to be the victim, rather than the recipient, of these, as long as they don’t cost us the match. Indignation is a crucial ingredient of the perfect footballing experience; I cannot therefore agree with match commentators who argue that a referee has had a good game if he isn’t noticed (although like everybody else, I don’t like the game stopped every few seconds). I prefer to notice them, and howl at them, and feel cheated by them.

(3) A noisy crowd: In my experience, crowds are at their best when their team is losing but playing well, which is one of the reasons why coming back for a 3-2 win is my favourite kind of score.

(4) Rain, a greasy surface, etc: Football in August, on a perfect grassy-green pitch, is aesthetically more appealing, although I do like a bit of slithery chaos in the goalmouth. Too much mud and the teams can’t play at all, but you can’t beat the sight of players sliding ten or fifteen yards for a tackle or in an attempt to get a touch to a cross. There’s something intensifying about peering through driving rain, too.

(5) Opposition misses a penalty: Arsenal’s goalkeeper John Lukic was the penalty king, so I have seen a fair few of these; Brian McClair’s last-minute horror in the fifth-round FA Cup-tie in 1988—so wild that it nearly cleared the North Bank roof—remains my favourite. However, I retain a residual fondness for Nigel Clough’s efforts, also in the last minute, during a League game in 1990, when he missed; the referee ordered the kick to be retaken, and he missed again.

(6) Member of opposition team receives a red card: “It’s disappointing to hear the reaction of the crowd,” remarked Barry Davies during the Portsmouth-Forest FA Cup quarter-final in 1992, when Forest’s Brian Laws was sent off and the Portsmouth supporters went mad; but what does he expect? For fans, a sending-off is always a magic moment, although it is crucial that this doesn’t happen too early. First-half dismissals frequently result either in boringly easy victories for the team with eleven men (c.f., Forest v West Ham, FA Cup semi-final, 1991), or in an impenetrable defensive reorganisation which kills the game dead; second-half sendings-off in a tight game are impossibly gratifying. If I had to plump for just one dismissal to take on to a desert island with me, it would have to be Bob Hazell of Wolves, sent off in the last minute of a fourth-round cup-tie at Highbury in 1978, when the score was 1-1. As I remember it, he took a swing at Rix, who was trying to get the ball off him so that we could take a corner quickly; from said corner, Macdonald, freed of his disgraced marker for the first time in the game and thus completely unmarked, headed us into a winning lead. I also enjoyed, enormously, Tony Coton’s long and lonely march at Highbury in 1986—there is something special about seeing a goalkeeper go—and Massing’s murderous assault on Caniggia, followed by his valedictory wave to the crowd, during the opening game of the 1990 World Cup.

(7) Some kind of “disgraceful incident” (aka “silliness”, aka “nonsense”, aka “unpleasantness”): We are entering doubtful moral territory here—obviously players have a responsibility not to provoke a highly flammable crowd. A brawl between Coventry and Wimbledon on a wet November afternoon in front of a stupefied crowd of ten thousand is one thing, but a brawl between Celtic and Rangers players, given the barely controllable sectarian bitterness on the terraces, is quite another. Yet one has to conclude, regretfully and with a not inconsiderable degree of Corinthian sadness, that there is nothing like a punch-up to enliven an otherwise dull game. The side-effects are invariably beneficent—the players and the crowd become more committed, the plot thickens, the pulse quickens—and as long as the match doesn’t degenerate as a consequence into some kind of sour grudge-match, brawls strike me as being a pretty desirable feature, like a roof terrace or a fireplace. If I were a sportswriter or a representative of the football authorities, then no doubt I would purse my lips, make disapproving noises, insist that the transgressors be brought to justice—argy-bargy, like soft drugs, would be no fun if it were officially sanctioned. Luckily, however, I have no such responsibility: I am a fan, with no duty to toe the moral line whatsoever.

The Arsenal-Norwich game at the end of 1989 had seven goals, and Arsenal came back from 2-0 down and then 3-2 down to win 4-3. It had two penalties, one in the last minute with the score at 3-3 (both, incidentally, terrible decisions on the part of the referee) … and Norwich’s Gunn saved it, the ball rolled back to Dixon, who scuffed it, and it trickled, very gently, into the empty net. And then, all hell broke loose, with more or less everyone bar the Arsenal keeper involved in a bout of fisticuffs which seemed to last forever but which was probably over in a matter of seconds. Nobody was sent off, but never mind: how was it not possible to enjoy a game like that?

The two teams were fined heavily, which was only right, of course. In situations like this, the FA could hardly send them a letter thanking the players for giving the fans what they want. And given Arsenal’s later problems, discussed elsewhere, the fight has in retrospect lost some of its gloss. But it’s this centre of the world thing again: after the game we went home knowing that what we had seen, live, was the most significant sporting moment of the afternoon, a moment which would be talked about for weeks, months, which would make the news, which everyone would be asking you about at work on Monday morning. So, in the end, one has to conclude that it was a privilege to be there, to see all those grown men make fools of themselves in front of thirty-five thousand people; I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

Saddam Hussein and Warren Barton

ARSENAL v EVERTON

19.1.91

A little-known fact: football fans knew before anybody else that the Gulf War had started. We were sat in front of the TV, waiting for the highlights of the Chelsea-Tottenham Rumbelows Cup-tie just before midnight, when Nick Owen looked at his monitor, announced a newsflash, and expressed the hope that we would be able to go to Stamford Bridge shortly. (The report of the game in the Daily Mirror made peculiar reading the next morning, incidentally, given the circumstances: “Wave after wave of attacks left Tottenham hanging on for grim life”, that kind of thing.) ITV beat the BBC to the news by several minutes.

Like most people, I was frightened: by the possibility of nuclear and chemical weapons being used; of Israel’s involvement; of hundreds of thousands of people dying. By three o’clock on the Saturday afternoon, sixty-three hours after the start of the conflict, I was more discombobulated than I can recall being at the start of a football match: I’d watched too much late-night television, and dreamed too many strange dreams.

There was a different buzz in the crowd, too. The North Bank chanted “Saddam Hussein is a homosexual” and “Saddam run from Arsenal”. (The first message is scarcely in need of decoding; in the second, “Arsenal” refers to the fans rather than the players. Which makes the chant self-aggrandising, rather than ridiculing, and which paradoxically reveals a respect for the Iraqi leader absent in the speculation about his sexual preferences. A consistent ideology is probably too much to ask for.)

It was an interesting experience, watching a football match with the world at war; one I had never had before. How was Highbury to become the centre of the universe, with a million men preparing to kill each other a thousand miles away? Easy. Merse’s goal just after half-time earned us a 1-0 win, which would not in itself have been enough to distract attention away from Baghdad; but when Warren Barton’s free-kick got Wimbledon a result up at Anfield, and we went top of the League for the first time that season, everything became focused again. Eight points behind in December and one point clear in January … By a quarter to five, Saddam was forgotten, and Highbury was humming.

Typical Arsenal

ARSENAL v MANCHESTER UNITED

6.5.91

In May 1991 we won the League again, for the second time in three years and the third time in my whole life. In the end there was none of the drama of 1989: Liverpool collapsed ignominiously, and we were allowed to run away with it. On the evening of the 6th May, Liverpool lost at Forest before our home game against Manchester United, and the United game was thus transformed into a riotous, raucous celebration.

If ever a season has exemplified Arsenal, it was that one. It wasn’t just that we lost only one League game all season, and conceded an astonishingly miserly eighteen goals, although these statistics are in themselves indicative of the team’s traditional tenacity. It was that the Championship was achieved despite almost comical antagonism and adversity. We had two points deducted after becoming involved, in retrospect unwisely, in another brawl, less than a year after the exciting Norwich fracas; soon afterwards, our captain was imprisoned after a stupendously idiotic piece of drunken driving. And these incidents came on top of heaps of others, on and off the pitch—fights, tabloid reports of obnoxious drunken behaviour, mass displays of petulance and indiscipline (most notably at Aston Villa at the end of 1989, when most of the team surrounded an unhelpful linesman long after the final whistle, gesturing and shouting to the extent that those of us who had travelled to support them couldn’t help but feel embarrassed), and so on and on and on. Each of these transgressions isolated the club and its devotees further and further from the lip-pursing, right-thinking, Arsenal-hating mainland; Highbury became a Devil’s Island in the middle of north London, the home of no-goods and miscreants.

“You can stick your fucking two points up your arse,” the crowd sang gleefully, over and over again, throughout the Manchester United game, and it began to seem like the quintessential Arsenal song: take our points, imprison our captain, hate our football, sod the lot of you. It was our night, a show of solidarity and defiance that had no grey areas of vicarious pleasure for anyone else, an acclamation of the virtues of all things unvirtuous. Arsenal aren’t a Nottingham Forest or a West Ham or even a Liverpool, a team that inspires affection or admiration in other football fans; we share our pleasures with nobody but ourselves.

I don’t like the fact that for the last couple of years Arsenal have brawled and bitched their way through their seasons, of course I don’t. And I would rather that Tony Adams hadn’t skidded his way down a residential street after a bucketful of lager, that the club hadn’t paid all of his wages while he was inside, that Ian Wright hadn’t spat at Oldham fans, that Nigel Winterburn hadn’t involved himself in a bizarre row with a supporter on the touchline at Highbury. These are, on the whole, Bad Things. But in a sense my feelings are beside the point. It is part of the essential Arsenal experience that they are loathed, and in an era in which more or less everybody plays with an offside trap and an extra defender, perhaps these distasteful incidents are the Arsenal way of upping the ante in order to stake sole claim to the territory.

So in the end, the question of why Arsenal behave like this is not a very interesting one. I suspect that the answer is that they behave like this because they are Arsenal, and they understand their allotted role in the football scheme of things. A more interesting question is this: what does it do to the fans? How is your psyche affected, when you commit yourself for a lifetime to the team that everybody loves to hate? Are football fans like the dogs that come to resemble their masters?

Emphatically, yes. The West Ham fans I know have an innate sense of underdog moral authority, the Tottenham fans give off an air of smug, ersatz sophistication, the Manchester United fans are imbued with a frustrated grandeur, Liverpool fans are simply grand. And as for Arsenal fans … It is impossible to believe that we have remained unaffected by loving what the rest of the world regards as fundamentally unlovable. Ever since 15th March 1969, I have been aware of the isolation my team induces, maybe even demands. My partner believes that my tendency to adopt an attitude of beleaguered defiance at each minor setback or perceived act of disloyalty has been learned from Arsenal, and she may be right. Like the club, I am not equipped with a particularly thick skin; my oversensitivity to criticism means that I am more likely to pull up the drawbridge and bitterly bemoan my lot than I am to offer a quick handshake and get on with the game. In true Arsenal style, I can dish it out but I can’t take it.

So that second Championship win, though less enthralling than the first, was far more satisfying, and more truly indicative of the Arsenal way: the club and the fans closed ranks and overcame, with a magnificently single-minded sense of purpose, almost insurmountable difficulties all of their own making. It was a triumph not only for the team, but for what the team has come to represent, and by extension for what all Arsenal fans have become. The 6th May was our night, and everybody else could go hang.

Playing

FRIENDS v OTHER FRIENDS

every Wednesday night

I started playing football seriously—that is to say, I started to care about what I was doing, rather than simply going through the motions to appease a schoolteacher—at the same time as I started watching. There were the games at school with the tennis ball, and the games in the street with a punctured plastic ball, two- or three-a-side; there were the games with my sister in the back garden, games up to ten in which she received a nine-goal start and threatened to go indoors if I scored; there were games with the local aspirant goalkeeper in the nearby playing fields after The Big Match on a Sunday afternoon, where we would re-enact high-scoring League games and I would provide live commentary at the same time. I played five-a-side in the local sports centre before I went to university, and second- or third-team football at college. I played for the staff team when I was teaching in Cambridge, and a mixed game twice a week with friends during the summer, and for the last six or seven years, all the football enthusiasts I know have been gathering on a five-a-side court in West London once a week. So I have been playing for two-thirds of my life, and I would like to play throughout as many of the three or four decades remaining to me as possible.

I’m a striker; or rather, I am not a goalkeeper, defender or midfield player, and not only can I remember without difficulty some of the goals I scored five or ten or fifteen years ago, I still, privately, take great pleasure in doing so, although I am sure that this sort of indulgence will result in my eventual blindness. I’m no good at football, needless to say, although happily that is also true of the friends I play with. We are just good enough to make it worthwhile: every week one of us scores a blinding goal, a scorching right-foot volley or a side-foot into a corner that caps a mazy run through a bewildered opposition defence, and we think about it secretly and guiltily (this is not what grown men should dream about) until the next time. Some of us have no hair on the tops of our heads, although this, we remind each other, has never been a handicap to Ray Wilkins, or that brilliant Sampdoria winger whose name escapes me; many of us are a few pounds overweight; most of us are in our mid-thirties. And even though there is an unspoken agreement that we don’t tackle very hard, a relief for those of us who never could, I have noticed in the last couple of years that I wake up on Thursday mornings almost paralysed by stiffening joints, pulled hamstrings and sore Achilles tendons; my knee is swollen and puffy for the next two days, a legacy of the medial ligament torn in a game ten years ago (the subsequent exploratory operation was the closest I ever got to being a real footballer); whatever pace I had has been eroded by my advancing years and my self-abusive lifestyle. By the end of our sixty minutes I am bright red with exertion, and my Arsenal replica away shirt (old model) and shorts are sopping wet.

This is how close I came to becoming a professional: at college, one or two of the first team (I was in the third team in my final year) played for the Blues, a team consisting of the eleven best players in the whole of the University. To my knowledge, two Blues players in my time went on to play at a professional level. The best one, the university god, a blond striker who seemed to glow with talent in the way stars do, played as sub a few times for Torquay United in the Fourth Division—he may even have scored for them once. Another played for Cambridge City—City, Quentin Crisp’s team, the team with the wonky Match of the Day tape and a crowd of two hundred, not United—as a full-back; we went to see him, and he was way off the pace.

So … if I had ranked number one in my college, as opposed to number twenty-five or thirty, then I might have been able, if I had been lucky, to look bad in a very poor semi-professional team. Sport doesn’t allow you to dream in the way that writing or acting or painting or middle-management does: I knew when I was eleven that I would never play for Arsenal. Eleven is too young to know something as awful as that.

Luckily, it is possible to be a professional footballer without walking on to a League pitch, and without being blessed with a footballer’s physique or pace or stamina or talent. There are the grimaces and gestures—the screwed-up eyes and slumped shoulders when you miss a good chance, the high-fives when you score, the clenched fists and hand-claps when your teammates require encouragement, the open arms and upturned palms indicating your superior positioning and your teammate’s greed, the finger pointing to where you would like a pass delivered, and, after the pass has been delivered just right and you have messed up anyway, the raised hand acknowledging both facts. And sometimes, when you receive the ball with your back to goal and knock a short pass out wide, you know you have done it just right, just so, and that were it not for your paunch (but then, look at Molby) and your lack of hair (Wilkins, that Sampdoria winger—Lombardo?—again), and your lack of height (Hillier, Limpar), were it not for all those peripherals, you would have looked just like Alan Smith.

A Sixties Revival

ARSENAL v ASTON VILLA

11.1.92

There was a part of me that was afraid to write all this down in a book, just as a part of me was afraid to explain to a therapist precisely what it had all come to mean: I was worried that by so doing it would all go, and I’d be left with this great big hole where football used to be. It hasn’t happened, not yet, anyway. What has happened is more disturbing: I have begun to relish the misery that football provides. I am looking forward to more Championships, and days out at Wembley, and last-minute victories over Tottenham at White Hart Lane, of course I am, and when they come I will go as berserk as anyone. I don’t want them yet, though. I want to defer the pleasure. I have been cold and bored and unhappy for so long that when Arsenal are good, I feel slightly but unmistakably disoriented, but I shouldn’t have worried. What goes around, comes around. I started this book in the summer of 1991. Arsenal were the runaway First Division champions, about to enter the European Cup for the first time in exactly twenty years. They had the biggest squad, the brightest prospects, the strongest defence, the deadliest attack, the most astute manager; after their final match of the 90/91 season, in which they crushed poor Coventry 6-1 with four goals in the last twenty-odd minutes, the papers were full of us. “READY TO RULE EUROPE”; “THEY’RE GUNNER RULE FOR FIVE YEARS”; “WE’RE THE BEST EVER”; “CHAMPIONS SET SIGHTS ON THE BIGGEST PRIZE OF ALL”. There had been nothing in my time to compare with this sort of rich optimism. Even Arsenal-haters among my friends were predicting a triumphant and stately procession through to the European Cup Final, as well as another League title for sure, no trouble.

There was a little hiccup at the beginning of the season, but the team had found their form by the time the European Cup started in the middle of September: they crushed the Austrian champions 6-1, a magnificent performance which we believed would scare the rest of the continent rigid. We drew Benfica of Portugal in the next round, and I travelled on one of the two supporters’ club planes to Lisbon, where we hung on for a creditable 1-1 draw in front of eighty thousand Portuguese in the intimidating Stadium of Light. In the return at Highbury, however, we got stuffed, overrun, outplayed, and it was all over, maybe for another twenty years. Then we dropped out of the running for the Championship, after a string of terrible results over Christmas; and then, unbelievably and cataclysmically, we were knocked out of the FA Cup by Wrexham, who had the previous season finished bottom of the Fourth Division as Arsenal finished top of the First.

It was strange, trying to write about how miserable most of my footballing life has been in the midst of all that post-Championship hope and glory. So as the season crumbled to dust, and Highbury became a place for discontented players and unhappy fans once more, and the future began to look so dismal that it was impossible to remember why we thought it bright in the first place, I began to feel comfortable again. The Great Collapse of 1992 had a sort of sympathetic magic to it. Wrexham was a quite brilliant and entirely authentic recreation of Swindon, humiliating enough to enable me to relive childhood trauma; at the same time as I was trying to recall the old boring, boring Arsenal of the sixties, and seventies, and, yes, the eighties, Wright and Campbell and Smith and the rest obligingly stopped scoring, and began to look as inept as their historical counterparts had ever done.

Against Aston Villa, one week after Wrexham, my whole life flashed before my eyes. A nil-nil draw, against a nothing team, in a meaningless game, in front of a restive, occasionally angry but for the most part wearily tolerant crowd, in the freezing January cold … All that was missing was Ian Ure falling over his feet, and my dad, grumbling away in the seat next to me.