One more thing about the kind of audience that football has decided it wants: the clubs have got to make sure that they’re good, that there aren’t any lean years, because the new crowd won’t tolerate failure. These are not the sort of people who will come to watch you play Wimbledon in March when you’re eleventh in the First Division and out of all the Cup competitions. Why should they? They’ve got plenty of other things to do. So, Arsenal … no more seventeen-year losing streaks, like the one between 1953 and 1970, right? No flirting with relegation, like in 1975 and 1976, or the odd half-decade where you don’t even get to a final, like we had between 1981 and 1987. We mug punters put up with that, and at least twenty thousand of us would turn up no matter how bad you were (and sometimes you were very, very bad indeed); but this new lot … I’m not so sure.
The Whole Package
ARSENAL v COVENTRY
4.11.72
The only trouble with the North Bank was that I bought the whole package. In the second half of my third game there (the middle one against Manchester City was memorable only because our new signing Jeff Blockley, an incompetent to rival Ian Ure, pushed a City corner against the underside of the bar with his hands, the ball bounced down behind the line and the referee wouldn’t give them the penalty or the goal—how we laughed!), Coventry City’s Tommy Hutchison scored a stunning solo goal. He picked the ball up about forty yards out on the left wing, left a trail of Arsenal defenders in his wake, and curled the ball round Geoff Barnett as he came out right into the far corner. On the North Bank there was a split second of silence as we watched the Coventry fans cavorting around on the Clock End like dolphins, and then came the fierce, unanimous and heartfelt chant, “You’re going to get your fucking heads kicked in.”
I had heard it before, obviously. For a good fifteen years it was the formal response to any goal scored by any away team at any football ground in the country (variations at Highbury were “You’re going home in a London ambulance.” “We’ll see you all outside.” and “Clock End, do your job.” (the Arsenal supporters at the Clock End being nearer to the opposing fans, and thus charged with the responsibility of vengeance). The only difference on this occasion was that I roared along with the imprecation for the first time. I was as outraged by the goal, as offended and as stricken, as anyone on the terrace; it was fortunate that there was an entire football pitch between me and the Coventry fans, or, or … or I would have done such things, I knew not what they were, but they would have been the terror of N5.
In many ways, of course, this was funny, in the way that the vast majority of teenage hooligan pretensions are funny, and yet even now I find it difficult to laugh at myself: half my life ago, and I’m still embarrassed. I like to think that there was none of me, the adult man, in that furious fifteen-year-old, but I suspect that this is over-optimistic. A lot of the fifteen-year-old remains, inevitably (as it does in millions of men), which accounts for some of the embarrassment; the rest of it stems from the recognition of the adult in the boy. Either way, it’s bad news.
I did learn, in the end. I learned that my threatening anybody was preposterous—I might just as well have promised the Coventry fans to bear their children—and that in any case violence and its attendant culture is uncool (none of the women I have ever wanted to sleep with would have been particularly impressed with me that afternoon). The big lesson, though, the one that tells you football is only a game and that if your team loses there’s no need to go berserk … I like to think I’ve learned that one. But I can still feel it in me, sometimes, at away games when we’re surrounded by opposing fans and the referee’s giving us nothing and we’re hanging on and hanging on and then Adams slips and their centre-forward’s in and then there’s this terrible needling bellow from all around you … Then I’m back to remembering just two of the three lessons, which is enough in some ways but not enough in others.
Masculinity has somehow acquired a more specific, less abstract meaning than femininity. Many people seem to regard femininity as a quality; but according to a large number of both men and women, masculinity is a shared set of assumptions and values that men can either accept or reject. You like football? Then you also like soul music, beer, thumping people, grabbing ladies’ breasts, and money. You’re a rugby or a cricket man? You like Dire Straits or Mozart, wine, pinching ladies’ bottoms and money. You don’t fit into either camp? Macho, nein danke? In which case it must follow that you’re a pacifist vegetarian, studiously oblivious to the charms of Michelle Pfeiffer, who thinks that only leering wideboys listen to Luther Vandross.
It’s easy to forget that we can pick and choose. Theoretically it is possible to like football, soul music and beer, for example, but to abhor breast-grabbing and bottom-pinching (or, one has to concede, vice versa); one can admire Muriel Spark and Bryan Robson. Interestingly it is men who seem to be more aware than women of the opportunities for mix ’n’ match: a feminist colleague of mine literally refused to believe that I watched Arsenal, a disbelief that apparently had its roots in the fact that we had once had a conversation about a feminist novel. How could I possibly have read the book and have been to Highbury? Tell a thinking woman that you like football and you’re in for a pretty sobering glimpse of the female conception of the male.
And yet I have to accept that my spiteful fury during the Coventry game was the logical conclusion to what had begun four years before. At fifteen I was not capable of picking and choosing, nor of recognising that this culture was not necessarily discrete. If I wanted to spend Saturdays at Highbury watching football, then I also had to wave a spear with as much venom as I could muster. If, as seems probable given my sporadically fatherless state, part of my obsession with Arsenal was that it gave me a quick way to fill a previously empty trolley in the Masculinity Supermarket, then it is perhaps understandable if I didn’t sort out until later on what was rubbish and what was worth keeping. I just threw in everything I saw, and stupid, blind, violent rage was certainly in my field of vision.
I was lucky (and it was luck, I can take no credit for it) that I nauseated myself pretty quickly; lucky most of all that the women I fancied, and the men I wanted to befriend (at this stage those verbs belonged exactly where I have placed them), would have had nothing to do with me if I hadn’t. If I’d met the kind of girl who accepted or even encouraged masculine belligerence then I might not have had to bother. (What was that anti-Vietnam slogan? “Women say yes to men who say no”?) But there are football fans, thousands of them, who have neither the need nor the desire to get a perspective on their own aggression. I worry for them and I despise them and I’m frightened of them; and some of them, grown men in their mid-thirties with kids, are too old now to go around threatening to kick heads, but they do anyway.
Carol Blackburn
ARSENAL v DERBY