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 th
at 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 Mill wall 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 proporti
on 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.