Fever Pitch Part 2

The white south, of England middle-cla.s.s Englishman and woman is the most rootless creature on earth; we would rather belong to any other community in the world. Yorkshiremen, Lancastrians, Scots, the Irish, blacks, the rich, the poor, even Americans and Australians have something they can sit in pubs and bars and weep about, songs to sing, things they can grab for and squeeze hard when they feel like it, but we have nothing, or at least nothing we want. Hence the phenomenon of mock-belonging, whereby pasts and backgrounds are manufactured and ma.s.saged in order to provide some kind of acceptable cultural ident.i.ty. Who was it that sang "I Wanna Be Black"? The t.i.tle says it all, and everybody has met people who really do: in the mid-seventies, young, intelligent and otherwise self-aware white men and women in London began to adopt a Jamaican patois that frankly didn't suit them at all. How we all wished we came from the Chicago Projects, or the Kingston ghettos, or the mean streets of north London or Glasgow! All those aitch-dropping, vowel-mangling punk rockers with a public school education! All those Hampshire girls with grandparents in Liverpool or Brum! All those Pogues fans from Hertfordshire singing Irish rebel songs! All those Europhiles who will tell you that though their mothers live in Reigate, their sensibilities reside in Rome!

Ever since I have been old enough to understand what it means to be suburban I have wanted to come from somewhere else, preferably north London. I have already dropped as many aitches as I can the only ones left in my diction have dug themselves too far into definite articles to be winkled out and I use plural verb forms with singular subjects whenever possible. This was a process that began shortly after my first visits to Highbury, continued throughout my suburban grammar school career, and escalated alarmingly when I arrived at university. My sister, on the other hand, who also has problems with her suburban roots, went the other way when she went to college, and suddenly started to speak like the d.u.c.h.ess of Devonshire; when we introduced each other to our respective sets of friends they found the experience perplexing in the extreme. Which of us, they seemed to be wondering, had been adopted? Had she fallen on hard times or had I struck lucky? Our mother, born and bred in south-east London but a Home Counties resident for nearly forty years, cuts the accents neatly down the middle.

In a way n.o.body can blame any of us, the Mockneys or the cod Irish, the black wannabees or the pseudo Sloanes. The 1944 Education Act, the first Labour Government, Elvis, beatniks, the Beatles and the Stones, the sixties ... we never stood a chance. I blame the eleven-plus. Before the war, maybe, our parents could have sc.r.a.ped the money together to send us to minor public schools, and we would have received our p.i.s.spoor cheapskate third-hand cla.s.sical educations and gone to work in a bank; the eleven-plus, designed to create a meritocracy, made state schools safe for nice families again. Post-war grammar school boys and girls stepped into a void; none of the available cultures seemed to belong to us, and we had to pinch one quick. And what is suburban post-war middle-cla.s.s English culture anyway? Jeffrey Archer and Evita Evita, Flanders and Swann and the Goons, Adrian Mole and Merchant-Ivory, Francis Durbridge Presents Francis Durbridge Presents ... and John Cleese's silly walk? It's no wonder we all wanted to be Muddy Waters or Charlie George. ... and John Cleese's silly walk? It's no wonder we all wanted to be Muddy Waters or Charlie George.

The Reading-a.r.s.enal fourth-round Cup-tie in 1972 was the first and most painful of the many exposures to come. Reading was my nearest League team, an unhappy geographical accident that I would have done anything to change; Highbury was thirty-odd miles away, Elm Park a mere eight. Reading fans had Berkshire accents, and incredibly they didn't seem to mind; they didn't even try try to speak like Londoners. I stood with the home supporters the match was all-ticket, and it was much easier to go to Reading than to north London to get one and while I waited my still customary ninety minutes for the game to begin, a whole family (a family!), mother, father and son, all kitted up in blue-and-white scarves and rosettes (rosettes!), started talking to me. to speak like Londoners. I stood with the home supporters the match was all-ticket, and it was much easier to go to Reading than to north London to get one and while I waited my still customary ninety minutes for the game to begin, a whole family (a family!), mother, father and son, all kitted up in blue-and-white scarves and rosettes (rosettes!), started talking to me.

They asked me questions about my team and the stadium, made jokes peasants! about Charlie George's hair, offered me biscuits, lent me their programmes and newspapers. I was beginning to enjoy the conversation. My a.s.sumed c.o.c.kney sounded to my ears flawless against their loathsome burr, and our relationship was beginning to take on a gratifying city-slicker-meets-hicks-from-the-sticks hue.

It was when they asked me about schools that it all went terribly wrong: they had heard about London comprehensives, and wanted to know whether it was all true, and for what seemed like hours I weaved an elaborate fantasy based on the exploits of the half-dozen small-time thugs at the grammar. I can only presume that I had managed to convince myself, and that by this stage my town had, in my head, trans.m.u.ted into a north London village somewhere between Holloway and Islington; because when the father asked where I lived, I told him the truth.

"Maidenhead?" the father repeated, incredulous. "Maidenhead? But that's four miles down the road!"

"Nearer ten," I replied, but he seemed unconvinced that the extra six miles made much difference, and I could see his point. I was blushing.

Then he finished me off. "You shouldn't be supporting a.r.s.enal this afternoon," "You shouldn't be supporting a.r.s.enal this afternoon," he said. he said. "You should be supporting your local team." "You should be supporting your local team."

It was the most humiliating moment of my teenage years. A complete, elaborate and perfectly imagined world came crashing down around me and fell in chunks at my feet. I wanted a.r.s.enal to avenge me, to beat the Third Division team and their pedantic, dull-witted fans into a pulp; but we won 2-1 with a second-half Pat Rice deflection, and at the end of the game the Reading father ruffled my hair and told me that at least it wouldn't take me long to get home.

It didn't stop me, though, and it only took a couple of weeks to rebuild the London Borough of Maidenhead. But I made sure that the next time I went to an away game it was precisely that far away, where people might believe that my Thames Valley hometown had its own tube station and West Indian community and terrible, insoluble social problems.

HAPPY

a.r.s.eNAL v DERBY

12.2.72

For a match to be really, truly memorable back then, the kind of game that sent me home buzzing inside with the fulfilment of it all, these conditions had to be met: I had to go with my dad; we had to eat lunch in the chip shop (sitting down, no sharing of tables); we had to have seats in the Upper West Stand (the West Stand because you can see down the players' tunnel from there and so can greet the arrival of the team on the pitch before anyone in the ground), between the half-way line and the North Bank; a.r.s.enal had to play well and win by two clear goals; the stadium had to be full, or nearly full, which usually implied an opposing team of some significance; the game had to be filmed, by ITV for The Big Match The Big Match on Sunday afternoon rather than by the BBC for on Sunday afternoon rather than by the BBC for Match of the Day Match of the Day (I liked the antic.i.p.ation, I guess); and Dad had to be wearing warm clothes. He often travelled over from France without an overcoat, forgetting that his Sat.u.r.day afternoon was likely to be spent in sub-zero temperatures, and his discomfort was so violent that I felt guilty insisting that we stayed right until the final whistle. (I always did insist, however, and when we reached the car he was often so cold that he could hardly speak; I felt bad about it, but not bad enough to risk missing a goal.) (I liked the antic.i.p.ation, I guess); and Dad had to be wearing warm clothes. He often travelled over from France without an overcoat, forgetting that his Sat.u.r.day afternoon was likely to be spent in sub-zero temperatures, and his discomfort was so violent that I felt guilty insisting that we stayed right until the final whistle. (I always did insist, however, and when we reached the car he was often so cold that he could hardly speak; I felt bad about it, but not bad enough to risk missing a goal.) These were enormous demands, and it is hardly surprising that everything came together just the once, as far as I am aware, for this game against Derby in 1972, when an Alan Ball-inspired a.r.s.enal beat the eventual League Champions 2-0 with two Charlie George goals, one a penalty and the other a superb diving header. And because there was a table for us in the chip shop, and because the referee pointed to the spot when Ball was brought down instead of waving play on, and because my dad remembered his coat, I have allowed this game to become something it wasn't: it now represents for me the whole works, the entire fixation, but that's wrong. a.r.s.enal were too good, Charlie's goal was too spectacular, the crowd was too big and too appreciative of the team's performance ... The 12th of February did did happen, in just the way I have described it, but only its atypicality is important now. Life isn't, and has never been, a 2-0 home victory against the League leaders after a fish-and-chip lunch. happen, in just the way I have described it, but only its atypicality is important now. Life isn't, and has never been, a 2-0 home victory against the League leaders after a fish-and-chip lunch.

MY MUM AND CHARLIE GEORGE

DERBY COUNTY v a.r.s.eNAL

26.2.72

I begged and pleaded and nagged, and eventually my mother gave in and allowed me to travel to away games. Back then I was jubilant; now I'm indignant. What did she think she was doing doing? Didn't she ever read the papers or watch TV? Hadn't she heard of hooligans? Was she really unaware of what Football Specials, the infamous trains that carried fans all over the country, were like like? I could have been killed killed.

Now that I think about it, my mother's part in all this was actually quite mysterious. She didn't like me spending my money on Led Zeppelin records, understandably, or on cinema tickets, and she didn't even seem that keen on me buying books. And yet somehow it was OK for me to travel to London or Derby or Southampton on an almost weekly basis and take my chances with any group of nutters that I happened upon. She has never discouraged my mania for football; in fact it was she who bought my ticket for the Reading Cup-tie, driving down a frozen, snow-covered A4 and queuing up while I was at school. And some eight years later I came home to find on our dining table an impossibly elusive ticket for the West Ham-a.r.s.enal Cup Final that she had bought (for twenty quid, money she didn't really have) from a man at work.

Well, yes, of course course it was something to do with masculinity, but I don't think that her usually tacit, occasionally active football support was supposed to be for my benefit; it was for hers. On Sat.u.r.days, it seems to me now, we enacted a weird little parody of a sitcom married couple: she would take me down to the station, I'd go on the train up to London, do my man's stuff and ring her from the forecourt call-box when I got back for a lift home. She would then put my tea on the table and I ate while I talked about my day and, sweetly, she would ask questions about a subject that she didn't know much about, but tried to take an interest in anyway, for my sake. If things had not gone well she would tiptoe around them; on a good day my satisfaction would fill the living room. In Maidenhead, this was exactly what happened from Monday to Friday, every single weekday evening. The only difference was that in our house we didn't get around to it until the weekend. it was something to do with masculinity, but I don't think that her usually tacit, occasionally active football support was supposed to be for my benefit; it was for hers. On Sat.u.r.days, it seems to me now, we enacted a weird little parody of a sitcom married couple: she would take me down to the station, I'd go on the train up to London, do my man's stuff and ring her from the forecourt call-box when I got back for a lift home. She would then put my tea on the table and I ate while I talked about my day and, sweetly, she would ask questions about a subject that she didn't know much about, but tried to take an interest in anyway, for my sake. If things had not gone well she would tiptoe around them; on a good day my satisfaction would fill the living room. In Maidenhead, this was exactly what happened from Monday to Friday, every single weekday evening. The only difference was that in our house we didn't get around to it until the weekend.

There is, I know, an argument which says that acting out the role of one's father with one's mother isn't necessarily the best way of ensuring psychic health in later years. But then, we all do it at some time or another, chaps, don't we?

Away games were my equivalent of staying late at the office, and the fifth-round Cup-tie at Derby was the first time I had got to do it properly. In those days there were no restrictions on travelling in the way there are now (British Rail eventually abandoned the Football Specials, and the clubs make their own travel arrangements): we could roll up at St Pancras, buy a dirt-cheap train ticket, and pile on to a dilapidated train, the corridors of which were patrolled by police with guard dogs. Much of the journey took place in darkness light bulbs were shattered at wearyingly brief intervals which made reading difficult, although I always, always took a book with me and spent ages finding the carriages which contained middle-aged men who would have no interest in attracting the attention of the alsatians.

At our destination we were met by hundreds and hundreds of police, who then escorted us to the ground by a circuitous route away from the city centre; it was during these walks that my urban hooligan fantasies were given free rein. I was completely safe, protected not only by the law but by my fellow supporters, and I had therefore been liberated to bellow along in my still-unbroken voice with the chanted threats of the others. I didn't look terribly hard, in truth: I was as yet nowhere near as big as I should have been, and wore black-framed Brains-style National Health reading gla.s.ses, although these I hid away for the duration of the route marches, presumably to make myself just that little bit more terrifying. But those who mumble about the loss of ident.i.ty football fans must endure miss the point: this loss of ident.i.ty can be a paradoxically enriching process. Who wants to be stuck with who they are the whole time? I for one wanted time out from being a jug-eared, bespectacled, suburban twerp once in a while; I loved being able to frighten the shoppers in Derby or Norwich or Southampton (and they were were frightened you could see it). My opportunities for intimidating people had been limited hitherto, though I knew it wasn't frightened you could see it). My opportunities for intimidating people had been limited hitherto, though I knew it wasn't me me that made people hurry to the other side of the road, hauling their children after them; it was that made people hurry to the other side of the road, hauling their children after them; it was us us, and I was a part of us, an organ in the hooligan body. The fact that I was the appendix small, useless, hidden out of the way somewhere in the middle didn't matter in the slightest.

If going to the ground was all glory and raw power, standing inside it, and getting back to the station afterwards, was less invigorating. Violence inside the grounds has all but disappeared now, for a variety of reasons: fans are separated properly (back then, if you fancied your chances in the opposition end, you could just walk through the turnstiles), away fans are usually kept back after games until the stadium has cleared, the policing is a lot more sophisticated, and so on. For the first half of the seventies, however, there was a fight at every single a.r.s.enal game I attended. At Highbury they mostly took place on the Clock End, where the opposition's fans stood; usually they were brief flurries, a.r.s.enal fans charging into the enemy, the enemy scattering, the police taking control. These were ritualistic charges, the violence usually contained in the movement itself rather than in fists and boots (it was this "running" that caused the Heysel tragedy, rather than any real physical attack). But occasionally, particularly against West Ham, Tottenham, Chelsea or Manchester United, the trouble was just as likely to be at the North Bank end of the ground where the noise comes from: when away fans could ama.s.s sufficient numbers they would attempt to seize the home fans' territory as if it were an island of strategic military importance.

Consequently it was very difficult to watch football safely at away grounds. Standing in the section "reserved" for visitors didn't ensure any protection; in fact, it merely informed the opposition of your ident.i.ty. Standing at the other end was either dangerous (if the a.r.s.enal fans were intending to invade the home end) or pointless why bother to travel half the length of the country if you then had to pretend to support the opponents? I settled for a place along the side, if possible, where it was quiet; if not, then in the "away" end, but towards a corner, as far from the more gung-ho, members of the a.r.s.enal touring party as possible. But I never enjoyed away games. I felt constantly nervous, often with good reason: at random points throughout the afternoon, fighting would break out, prefaced by the same kind of roar that greeted a goal; but the fact that the roar might occur when the play was nowhere near either end of the pitch was disorienting in the extreme. I have seen players look around, perplexed that their efforts at a throw-in should meet with such vocal enthusiasm.

The afternoon at Derby was worse than most. There had been trouble before the game and at sporadic intervals during it, and though I was way down the terraces, hidden among younger kids and their fathers, I was scared so scared that in fact I was ambivalent about an a.r.s.enal victory. A draw would have suited me fine, but I could live with defeat and an exit from the Cup if it meant I could get back to Derby station without anything untoward happening to my head. It is at times like this that the players have more responsibilities than they could ever perceive or understand; in any case, this sort of perception was not one of Charlie George's most obvious qualities.

Charlie George is one of the few seventies icons who has so far managed to avoid being deconstructed, possibly because he appears at first glance to be one of the identikit George Best/Rodney Marsh/Stan Bowles long-haired, wayward wasters who were two a new pee twenty years ago. It is true that he was as outrageously gifted as the best of the breed, and that these gifts were appallingly underexploited throughout his career (he only played for England once, and towards the end of his time at a.r.s.enal could not even gain a place in the first team); all this and more his temper, his problems with managers, the fierce devotion he attracted from younger fans and women was par for the course, commonplace at a time when football was beginning to resemble pop music in both its presentation and its consumption.

Charlie George differed slightly from the rebel norm on two counts. Firstly, he had actually spent his early teenage years on the terraces of the club for which he later played; and though this is not unusual in itself plenty of Liverpool and Newcastle players supported these clubs when they were young George is one of the few genius misfits to have jumped straight over the perimeter fence into a club shirt and shorts. Best was Irish, Bowles and Marsh were itinerant ... not only was George a.r.s.enal's own, nurtured on the North Bank and in the youth team, but he looked and behaved as if running around on the pitch dressed as a player were the simplest way to avoid ejection from the stadium. Physically, he did not fit the mould: he was powerfully built and over six feet tall, too big to be George Best. On my birthday in 1971, shortly before his goal against Newcastle, one of the frequent red mists that plagued him had descended, and he had grabbed a rugged Newcastle defender by the throat and lifted him from the ground. This was not misfit petulance, this was hard-man menace, and the likely lads on the terraces have never had a more convincing representative.

And secondly, he was not a media rebel. He could not give interviews (his inarticulacy was legendary and genuine); his long, lank hair remained unfeathered and unlayered right up until the time he unwisely decided upon a bubble perm from h.e.l.l some time in the mid-seventies, and when he first played in the team, at the beginning of the 69/70 season, it looked suspiciously as if he were trying to grow out a number one crop; and he seemed uninterested in womanising Susan Farge, the fiancee whose name I still remember, is intimidatingly prominent in most of the off-the-pitch photographs. He was a big star, and the media were interested, but they didn't know what to do with him. The Egg Marketing Board tried, but their slogan, "E for B and Charlie George", was significantly incomprehensible. Somehow, he had made himself unpackageable, media-proof possibly the very last star of any iconic stature to do so. (For some reason, however, he managed to remain in the otherwise colander-like consciousness of my grandmother for some years after his retirement. "Charlie George!" she spat disapprovingly and opaquely circa 1983, when I told her that I was off to Highbury to watch a game. What he means to her will, I fear, never properly be understood.) At Derby he was astonishing on a dreadful, muscle-jellifying winter pitch (Those pitches! The Baseball Ground at Derby, White Hart Lane, Wembley even ... was winter gra.s.s really an eighties innovation, like the video machine or frozen yoghurt?). He scored twice, two screamers, and to the tune of Andrew Lloyd Webber's then-recent hit, we sang "Charlie George! Superstar! How many goals have you scored so far?" (to which the Derby fans, like others all over the country had done before them, replied "Charlie George! Superstar! Walks like a woman and he wears a bra!" It is hard not to laugh when people remember the sixties and seventies as the golden age of terrace wit). Despite Charlie's double, the game finished 2-2 after a late Derby equaliser, and I therefore got the draw I'd been cravenly hoping for, but not the aggro-free walk back to the station that was supposed to be mine as a consequence.

It was Charlie's fault. A goal, for reasons that would require a book in itself to explain, is a provocative gesture, especially when the terraces are already bathed in a sort of half-light of violence, as they were on that afternoon. I understood that Charlie was a professional footballer, and that if an opportunity to score came his way then our tenuous safety should not in itself be a consideration. This much was clear. But whether it was absolutely essential to celebrate by running over to the Derby fans in whose snarling, southern-poof hating, c.o.c.kney baiting, skinheaded, steel-toecapped company we were obliged to spend the remainder of the afternoon, and through whose hostile, alleywayed territory we were obliged to scuttle after the final whistle and making an unambiguous take-that-you-provincial-f.u.c.kers V-sign ... this was much more opaque. The way I saw it, Charlie's sense of responsibility and duty had momentarily let him down.

He got booed off the pitch and fined by the FA; we got chased all the way on to our train, bottles and cans cascading around our ears. Cheers, Charlie.

SOCIAL HISTORY

a.r.s.eNAL v DERBY

29.2.72

The replay finished nil-nil, a game with no merit whatsoever. But it remains the only first-team game that has taken place at Highbury on a midweek afternoon during my a.r.s.enal time: February 1972 was the time of the power workers' strike. For all of us it meant sporadic electricity, candlelight, occasional cold suppers, but for third-year football fans it meant visits to the Electricity Board showroom, where the cut-off rota was posted, in order to discover which of us were able to offer The Big Match The Big Match on Sunday afternoons. For a.r.s.enal, the power crisis meant no floodlights, hence the Tuesday afternoon replay. on Sunday afternoons. For a.r.s.enal, the power crisis meant no floodlights, hence the Tuesday afternoon replay.

I went to the game, despite school, and though I had imagined that the crowd might consist of me, a few other teenage truants, and a scattering of pensioners, in fact there were more than sixty-three thousand people there, the biggest crowd of the season. I was disgusted. No wonder the country was going to the dogs! My truancy prevented me from sharing my disquiet with my mother (an irony that escaped me at the time), but what was going on what was going on?

For this thirtysomething, the midweek afternoon Cup-tie (West Ham played giant-killers Hereford on a Tuesday afternoon as well, and got a forty-two-thousand-plus crowd) now has that wonderful early seventies sheen, like an episode of The Fenn Street Gang The Fenn Street Gang or a packet of Number Six cigarettes; maybe it was just that everyone at Upton Park and Highbury, all one hundred and six thousand of us, wanted to walk down one of the millions of tiny alleys of social history. or a packet of Number Six cigarettes; maybe it was just that everyone at Upton Park and Highbury, all one hundred and six thousand of us, wanted to walk down one of the millions of tiny alleys of social history.

ME AND BOB McNAB

STOKE CITY v a.r.s.eNAL

(Villa Park) 15.4.72

The 71/72 FA Cup was a cracker, an apparently endless source of wonder and tricky trivia questions. Which two teams took eleven hours to settle their fourth qualifying round tie? Which player scored nine goals in his team's first round 11-0 win over Margate? Who did he play for then? Where was he transferred to later? Who were the two Hereford players who scored in their Southern League side's astonishing 2-1 victory against First Division Newcastle? (A clue: the surnames have special resonance for a.r.s.enal fans.) Oxford City and Alvechurch; Ted Macdougall; Bournemouth; Manchester United; Ronnie Radford and Ricky George: one point for each, seven points and you've won a pair of Malcolm Macdonald sideboards.

And then there were the afternoon Cup replays and Charlie's V-sign, and at Villa Park, in our semi-final against Stoke, our goalkeeper Bob Wilson was carried off in the middle of our 1-1 draw (John Radford had to take over) and I spoke to Bob McNab, the a.r.s.enal left-back, a couple of hours before the kick-off.

I went up to Villa Park with Hislam, a wannabee hooligan from Maidenhead whom I ran into on trains every now and again. I was in awe of him. He wore a white butcher's coat covered in crudely drawn red a.r.s.enal slogans, de rigueur de rigueur for anyone with any terrace pretensions; and on the way home from games he would sit down next to me on the 5.35 from Paddington and ask me the score, explaining that he had been detained in the police cells under the pitch and therefore had no idea of what had been going on above his head. Jenkins, the apparently legendary leader of the North Bank (I'd never heard of him, needless to say), was a personal friend of his. for anyone with any terrace pretensions; and on the way home from games he would sit down next to me on the 5.35 from Paddington and ask me the score, explaining that he had been detained in the police cells under the pitch and therefore had no idea of what had been going on above his head. Jenkins, the apparently legendary leader of the North Bank (I'd never heard of him, needless to say), was a personal friend of his.

I was soon to find out, predictably, that this was all rubbish, and that Hislam's relationship with reality was tenuous even on a good day. If there was such a person as Jenkins (the Leader, a scheming hooligan-general responsible for military tactics, probably has its roots in urban, or even suburban, myth) Hislam didn't know him; and even I, desperate to number among my acquaintances a real-life criminal, began to wonder how an ostensibly harmless-looking fourteen-year-old managed to get himself arrested every single Sat.u.r.day for offences which remained frustratingly vague.

Football culture is so amorphous, so unwieldy, so big big (when I listened to Hislam talk about incidents in King's Cross and Euston and the back streets of Paddington, the whole of London seemed within the grasp of its tentacles) that it inevitably attracts more than its fair share of fantasists. If you wish to have taken part in a fearsome battle with Tottenham fans, it doesn't have to have happened within the stadium where it could easily be verified. It could have taken place at a station, or on a route to the ground, or in an enemy pub: football rumours of this kind have always been as thick and as impenetrable as smog. Hislam knew this, and was as happy as Larry inventing his gruesome and improbable lies; football was perfectly equipped to feed his ravenous appet.i.te for self-deception, just as it was able to feed mine. For a while, we had a satisfying symbiosis going. He wanted to believe he was a hooligan, and so did I, and for a while he could have told me anything. (when I listened to Hislam talk about incidents in King's Cross and Euston and the back streets of Paddington, the whole of London seemed within the grasp of its tentacles) that it inevitably attracts more than its fair share of fantasists. If you wish to have taken part in a fearsome battle with Tottenham fans, it doesn't have to have happened within the stadium where it could easily be verified. It could have taken place at a station, or on a route to the ground, or in an enemy pub: football rumours of this kind have always been as thick and as impenetrable as smog. Hislam knew this, and was as happy as Larry inventing his gruesome and improbable lies; football was perfectly equipped to feed his ravenous appet.i.te for self-deception, just as it was able to feed mine. For a while, we had a satisfying symbiosis going. He wanted to believe he was a hooligan, and so did I, and for a while he could have told me anything.

Dad had obtained two terrace tickets for the game for me (I hadn't explained to him the full extent of my football solitude) and Hislam had generously agreed to take the spare. When we arrived at Villa Park we had to find the box office to pick them up. It was one-thirty, and a few of the players were there, distributing tickets to wives and family and friends. Bob McNab, the left-back, was one of them; he hadn't played in the first team since January, and I was surprised to see him. I couldn't believe that Bertie Mee was going to give him his first run-out for three months in an FA Cup semi-final. In the end my curiosity overcame my shyness.

"Are you playing, Bob?"

"Yeah."

Dialogue in works of autobiography is quite naturally viewed with some suspicion. How on earth can the writer remember verbatim conversations that happened fifteen, twenty, fifty years ago? But "Are you playing, Bob?" is one of only four sentences I have ever uttered to any a.r.s.enal player (for the record the others are "How's the leg, Bob?" to Bob Wilson, recovering from injury the following season; "Can I have your autograph, please?" to Charlie George, Pat Rice, Alan Ball and Bertie Mee; and, well, "How's the leg, Brian?" to Brian Marwood outside the a.r.s.enal club shop when I was old enough to know better) and I can therefore vouch for its absolute authenticity.

I have imagined conversations, of course. Even now I frequently take Alan Smith or David O'Leary to the pub, buy them a low-alcohol lager, sit them down and talk until last-orders and beyond about George Graham's alleged parsimony, Charlie Nicholas's fitness or John Lukic's transfer. But the plain truth is that the club means more to us than it does to them. Where were they twenty years ago? Where will they be in twenty years' time? Where will they be in two two years' time, a couple of them? (At Villa Park or Old Trafford, bearing down on the a.r.s.enal goal with the ball at their feet, that's where.) years' time, a couple of them? (At Villa Park or Old Trafford, bearing down on the a.r.s.enal goal with the ball at their feet, that's where.) No, I'm happy with things the way they are, thank you very much. They're players and I'm a fan, and I don't want to blur the boundaries. Men laugh at what they see as the grotesque inadequacy of groupies, but a one-night stand with a star is perfectly understandable, and has its own balance and logic. (If I were a nubile twenty-year-old, I'd probably be down at the training ground throwing my panties at David Rocastle, although this kind of confession from a man, however New he is, is regrettably still not acceptable.) Yet many of us have had opportunities to talk to the players, at boot launches or sports shop openings, in nightclubs or restaurants, and most of us have taken them. ("How's the leg, Bob?" "Thought you were brilliant Sat.u.r.day, Tony." "Hey, make sure you do Tottenham next week, yeah?") And what are these clumsy, embarra.s.sing, fumbling encounters if they are not pa.s.ses, beery gropes in the dark? We're not young and desirable nymphettes, we're grown-ups with pot-bellies, and we have nothing to offer at all. Professional footballers are as beautiful and unattainable as models, and I don't want to be a middle-aged bottom-pincher.

I hadn't worked all this out then, when I saw Bob McNab in his pre-match suit. And when I got into the ground, and two blokes in front of me started talking about team changes, I told them that McNab was playing, because he'd told me himself, and they looked at me and then looked at each other and shook their heads (although when the changes were read out over the tannoy they looked at me again). Meanwhile Hislam had taken himself off up to the top of Villa's ma.s.sive Holte End, to be with The Lads, and was busy telling anyone who would listen how he'd bunked into the ground under the turnstiles (he made this claim to someone he may or may not have known as soon as we walked into the ground). Which of us was the fantasist here? I was, obviously. No one talks to the players before the game, but bunking in without paying ... what would be the point of lying about that if you had a ticket stub in your pocket?

WEMBLEY II THE NIGHTMARE CONTINUES

LEEDS v a.r.s.eNAL

5.5.72

A cla.s.sic anxiety dream, ba.n.a.l in its obviousness. I am attempting to get to Wembley, and I have a ticket for the Final in my pocket. I leave home in plenty of time for the game, but every attempt to travel towards the stadium takes me in the opposite direction. At first this is just an amusing irritation, but eventually it induces panic; at two minutes to three I am in central London, trying to hail a cab and beginning to realise that I'm not going to get to see the match. I like the dream though, in a funny sort of way. I have had it six times now, before every Cup Final that a.r.s.enal have played in since 1972, and so it is a nightmare inextricably linked with success. I wake up sweating, but the sweat serves as the first antic.i.p.atory moment of the day.

My Cup Final ticket had come directly from the club, rather than via touts and my dad, and I was ludicrously proud of it. (Even more eccentric was the joy I took in the compliment slip that came with it, which I stored away for years afterwards.) Cup tickets were allocated on the basis of the numbered vouchers that appeared on the back of the programme. If you had all the programmes, as I did, you were more or less a.s.sured of a ticket; thus the system was supposed to reward loyal fans, although in effect it rewarded those with enough energy to track down the programmes they needed among the ad hoc ad hoc programme stands outside the ground (a laborious process which const.i.tuted a kind of loyalty in itself). I had been to the vast majority of the home games and a few of the aways; I had as much right as any, and probably more right than most, to a spot on the terraces at Wembley, and so my pride came from the feeling of belonging I had lacked in the previous year. programme stands outside the ground (a laborious process which const.i.tuted a kind of loyalty in itself). I had been to the vast majority of the home games and a few of the aways; I had as much right as any, and probably more right than most, to a spot on the terraces at Wembley, and so my pride came from the feeling of belonging I had lacked in the previous year.

(This sense of belonging is crucial to an understanding of why people travel to the meaningless game in Plymouth on a Wednesday night, and without it football would fail as a business. But where does it end? Those fans who travel the length and breadth of the country every week; does the club "belong" to them more than it does to me? And the old geezer who only gets along ten times a season, but has been going to Highbury since 1938 ... doesn't the club belong to him too, and he to the club? Of course. But it took me another few years to discover that; in the meantime, it was no pain, no gain. Unless I had suffered and shivered, wept into my scarf and paid through the nose, it was simply not possible to take pleasure in or credit for the good times.) The game itself was as dismal as all the other a.r.s.enal-Leeds games had been: the two teams had developed something of a History, and their meetings were usually violent and low-scoring. My friend Bob McNab was booked in the first two minutes, and from that moment there was a procession of free kicks and squabbles, ankle taps and pointing fingers, and snarls. What made it worse was that this was the Centenary Cup Final; I am sure that if the top bra.s.s at the FA had had a free hand in choosing who the two finalists would be, a.r.s.enal and Leeds would have come pretty low down on their list. The pre-match anniversary celebrations (I had found my spot on the terraces a good ninety minutes before the kick-off, as was my custom), which consisted of representatives of all the other Cup finalists marching round the pitch behind banners, suddenly appeared almost satirical in its intent. You remember the Matthews Final in '53? Bert Trautmann playing in goal with a broken neck in '56? Tottenham's Double team in '61? Everton's comeback in '66? Osgood's diving header in '70? Now watch Storey and Bremner attempting to gouge lumps out of each other's thighs. The sourness of the game simply exacerbated the tension in my stomach, every bit as debilitating as it had been during the Swindon game three years earlier. If no one was going to bother with any of the niceties of the game (and there were stretches when it appeared that no one was even going to bother with the ball) then winning the Cup became even more important: there wasn't anything else to think about.

At the beginning of the second half, Mick Jones wriggled to the byline and crossed for Allan Clarke to score for Leeds with a ridiculously effortless nod of the head. Inevitably it was the only goal of the game. We hit the post or the bar or something, and had a shot kicked off the line, but these were token Cup Final moments, not to be taken seriously; you could see that the a.r.s.enal players understood the pointlessness of their effort.

As the end of the game approached I braced myself for the grief that I knew would swallow me whole, as it had done after the Swindon match. I was fifteen, and the option of tears was not available as it had been in 1969; when the final whistle went I can recall my knees buckling slightly. I didn't feel sorry for the team or for the rest of the fans, but for myself, although now I realise that all football sorrow takes this form. When our teams lose at Wembley we think of the colleagues and cla.s.smates we have to face on Monday morning, and of the delirium that has been denied us; it seems inconceivable that we will allow ourselves to be this vulnerable ever again. I felt that I didn't have the courage courage to be a football fan. How could I contemplate going through this again? Was I going to come to Wembley every three or four years for the rest of my life and end up feeling like this? to be a football fan. How could I contemplate going through this again? Was I going to come to Wembley every three or four years for the rest of my life and end up feeling like this?

I felt an arm around my shoulders and realised for the first time that I was standing next to three Leeds fans, an old man, his son, and his grandson. "Never mind, lad," said the old man. "They'll be back." For a moment it felt as though he was holding me upright, until the first and most intense spasm of misery pa.s.sed and I regained the strength in my legs. Almost immediately a couple of a.r.s.enal suedeheads with an unmistakable and ominous fury in their eyes pushed their way through the crowd towards the four of us. I stepped back, and they removed the Leeds scarf that was around the little boy's neck. "Give that back," his dad said, but only because he knew it would be a weak father who said nothing, not in any expectation of success. There was a brief windmilling of fists and the two older men staggered backwards; I didn't stay around to find out what kind of beating they took. I ran for the gangway and went straight home, frightened and sick. It was the only manner, really, in which the Centenary Cup Final could have ended.

A NEW FAMILY

a.r.s.eNAL v WOLVES

15.8.72