Part 9 (2/2)

(5) A report in the Independent 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. 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 a truth about Neil, but not truth about Neil, but not the 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 Sat.u.r.days is induced exclusively by Luton. 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 Sat.u.r.days 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 a.r.s.enal'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 proprietors.h.i.+p 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 Sat.u.r.day, 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 a.r.s.enal 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 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 a.r.s.enal 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 a.s.sisted in a ba.n.a.l 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 a.r.s.e”, serves as an explanation.) Even though you know that anything Mickey Rourke or Brussels sprouts or Warren Street underground station or toothache, the a.s.sociations 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 Champions.h.i.+p 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 all at the same time, Nick, just that, and are happy or sad for me. n.o.body else gets that, only us.

MY ANKLE

a.r.s.eNAL 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 h.e.l.l and was swelling like a b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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 a.r.s.enal 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 a.r.s.enal scored. But still. Getting soaked to the skin (and insisting that everyone else got soaked to the skin with me), s.h.i.+vering 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 a.r.s.eNAL

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-a.n.a.lysis 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 Champions.h.i.+p deciders, weren't televised live; sometimes the stations weren't even allowed to show us highlights. (When Liverpool just pipped QPR for the Champions.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+rts, 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, a.r.s.enal 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, n.o.body 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 n.o.body 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

a.r.s.eNAL 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 a.r.s.enal 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 a.r.s.enal 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 a.r.s.enal 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 a.r.s.enal team's embarra.s.sing indiscipline); so it was an enormous week, with gigantic crowds fifty-three thousand on the Sat.u.r.day, fifty-one thousand on the Wednesday.

We beat Everton 3-1 that night, 4-1 on aggregate, a comfortable enough win which a.r.s.enal 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 news, in the same way that an a.r.s.enal v Everton semi-final is news: when you look at your newspaper the next day, whichever one you read, there will be extensive s.p.a.ce given over to an account of your your evening, the evening to which you contributed simply by turning up and shouting. evening, the evening to which you contributed simply by turning up and shouting.

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