Part 12 (1/2)

I don't like the fact that for the last couple of years a.r.s.enal have brawled and b.i.t.c.hed 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 a.r.s.enal 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 a.r.s.enal way of upping the ante in order to stake sole claim to the territory.

So in the end, the question of why a.r.s.enal behave like this is not a very interesting one. I suspect that the answer is that they behave like this because they are a.r.s.enal, 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 a.r.s.enal 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 att.i.tude of beleaguered defiance at each minor setback or perceived act of disloyalty has been learned from a.r.s.enal, 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 a.r.s.enal style, I can dish it out but I can't take it.

So that second Champions.h.i.+p win, though less enthralling than the first, was far more satisfying, and more truly indicative of the a.r.s.enal 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 a.r.s.enal 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 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. 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 a.r.s.enal replica away s.h.i.+rt (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 G.o.d, 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 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. 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 a.r.s.enal. Eleven is too young to know something as awful as that.