Part 4 (2/2)

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

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

BOYS AND GIRLS

a.r.s.eNAL v LEICESTER CITY

2.4.77

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

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

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

Our relations.h.i.+p the first serious, long-term, stay-the-night, meet-the-family, what-about-kids-one-day sort of thing for either of us was in part all about discovering for the first time the mysteries of our counterparts counterparts in the opposite s.e.x. I had had girlfriends before, of course; but she and I had similar backgrounds and similar pretensions, similar interests and att.i.tudes. Our differences, which were enormous, arose mostly because of our genders; if I had been born a girl, she was the sort of girl, I realised and hoped, that I would have been. It was probably for this reason that I was so intrigued by her tastes and whims and fancies, and her belongings induced in me a fascination for girls' rooms that continued for as long as girls had rooms. (Now I am in my thirties they don't have rooms any more they have flats or houses, and they are often shared with a man anyway. It is a sad loss.) in the opposite s.e.x. I had had girlfriends before, of course; but she and I had similar backgrounds and similar pretensions, similar interests and att.i.tudes. Our differences, which were enormous, arose mostly because of our genders; if I had been born a girl, she was the sort of girl, I realised and hoped, that I would have been. It was probably for this reason that I was so intrigued by her tastes and whims and fancies, and her belongings induced in me a fascination for girls' rooms that continued for as long as girls had rooms. (Now I am in my thirties they don't have rooms any more they have flats or houses, and they are often shared with a man anyway. It is a sad loss.) Her room helped me to understand that girls were much quirkier than boys, a realisation that stung me. She had a collection of Yevtushenko's poems (who the h.e.l.l was Yevtushenko?) and unfathomable obsessions with Anne Boleyn and the Brontes; she liked all the sensitive singer/songwriters, and was familiar with the ideas of Germaine Greer; she knew a little about paintings and cla.s.sical music, knowledge gleaned from somewhere outside the A-level syllabus. How had that happened? How come I had to rely on a couple of Chandler paperbacks and the first Ramones alb.u.m to provide me with some kind of ident.i.ty? Girls' rooms provided countless clues to their character and background and tastes; boys, by contrast, were as interchangeable and unformed as foetuses, and their rooms, apart from the odd Athena poster here and there (I had a Rod Stewart poster on my wall, which I liked to think was aggressively, authentically and self-consciously down-market) were as blank as the womb.

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

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

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

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

JUST LIKE A WOMAN

CAMBRIDGE UNITED v EXETER CITY

29.4.78

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

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

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

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

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

WEMBLEY III THE HORROR RETURNS

a.r.s.eNAL v IPSWICH

(at Wembley) 6.5.78

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

The only flaw in the system is that these enthusiastic neutrals, these unimpeachable servants of the game, invariably decide that their endeavours are best recompensed not by a trip to London to see the big game, but by a phone call to their local tout: a good 90 per cent of them just flog the tickets they are given, and these tickets eventually end up in the hands of the fans who were denied them in the first place. It is a ludicrous process, a typically scandalous slice of Football a.s.sociation idiocy: everybody knows what is going to happen, and n.o.body does anything about it.

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

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

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

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

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

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