Part 5 (1/2)

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

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

SUGAR MICE AND BUZZc.o.c.kS ALb.u.mS

CAMBRIDGE UNITED v ORIENT

4.11.78

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

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

There have been hundreds of similar bits of nonsense, all designed to guarantee victories for one or other of my two teams. During a.r.s.enal's protracted and nerve-racking semi-final campaign against Liverpool in 1980, I turned the radio off half-way through the second half of the last game; a.r.s.enal were winning 1-0, and as Liverpool had equalised in the last seconds of the previous game, I couldn't bear to hear it through to the end. I played a Buzzc.o.c.ks alb.u.m instead (the Singles Going Steady Singles Going Steady compilation alb.u.m), knowing that side one would take me through to the final whistle. We won the match, and I insisted that my flatmate, who worked in a record store, should play the alb.u.m at twenty past four on Cup Final afternoon, although it did no good. (I have my suspicions that he might have forgotten.) compilation alb.u.m), knowing that side one would take me through to the final whistle. We won the match, and I insisted that my flatmate, who worked in a record store, should play the alb.u.m at twenty past four on Cup Final afternoon, although it did no good. (I have my suspicions that he might have forgotten.) I have tried ”smoking” goals in (a.r.s.enal once scored as three of us were lighting cigarettes), and eating cheese-and-onion crisps at a certain point in the first half; I have tried not setting the video for live games (the team seems to have suffered badly in the past when I have taped the matches in order to study the performance when I get home); I have tried lucky socks, and lucky s.h.i.+rts, and lucky hats, and lucky friends, and have attempted to exclude others who I feel bring with them nothing but trouble for the team.

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

WEMBLEYIV THE CATHARSIS

a.r.s.eNAL v MANCHESTER UNITED

(at Wembley) 12.5.79

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

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

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

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

In May 1979 the potential for trade-offs was extensive and complicated. On the Thursday before the Cup Final, Mrs Thatcher was attempting to win her first General Election; on the Thursday after, my finals began. Of the three events, the Cup Final, obviously, was the one that concerned me most, although I was also perturbed, just as obviously, by the prospect of Mrs Thatcher becoming Prime Minister. (Maybe in another, quieter week I would have found time and energy to fret about my examinations, but a mediocre degree was now an inevitability, and in any case at British universities it is as easy to graduate as it is to have a birthday: just hang around for a while and it will happen.) Yet the terrible truth is that I was willing to accept a Conservative government if it guaranteed an a.r.s.enal Cup Final win; I could hardly have been expected to antic.i.p.ate that Mrs Thatcher would go on to become the longest serving Prime Minister this century. (Would I have made the same bargain if I had known? Eleven years of Thatcherism for the FA Cup? Of course not. I wouldn't have settled for anything less than another Double.) The fact that the Tories won comfortably on the Thursday didn't mean that I expected us to win comfortably on the Sat.u.r.day. I knew that making bargains, like squeezing putty and wearing certain s.h.i.+rts, didn't guarantee success, and in any case the other finalists, Manchester United, were a proper team, not a roll-over-and-die, only-here-for-the-beer shower, like, well, like Ipswich, say, or Swindon. Manchester United were the kind of team who might well unsportingly ignore General Election deals simply by scoring loads of goals and thras.h.i.+ng us.

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

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

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

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

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

FILLING A HOLE

a.r.s.eNAL v LIVERPOOL

1.5.80

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

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

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

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

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

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