31.3.73
At this point I feel that I have to defend the accuracy of my memory, and perhaps that of all football fans. I have never kept a football diary, and I have forgotten hundreds and hundreds of games entirely; but I have measured out my life in Arsenal fixtures, and any event of any significance has a footballing shadow. The first time I was best man at a wedding? We lost 1-0 to Spurs in the FA Cup third round, and I listened to the account of Pat Jennings’ tragic mistake in a windy Cornish car park. When did my first real love affair end? The day after a disappointing 2-2 draw with Coventry in 1981. That these events are commemorated is perhaps understandable, but what I cannot explain is why I remember some of the other stuff. My sister, for example, recalls coming to Highbury twice, but knows no more than that; I know that she saw a 1-0 win against Birmingham in 1973 (a Ray Kennedy goal, on the afternoon that Liam Brady made his début) and a 2-0 win against Stoke in 1980 (Hollins and Sansom). My half-brother first came in January 1973 to see a 2-2 cup-tie against Leicester, but how come it is I rather than he who knows this? Why, when somebody tells me that he or she came to Highbury in 1976 to see a 5-2 game against Newcastle, do I feel compelled to tell them that the score was actually 5-3? Why can’t I smile politely and agree that, yes, that was a great game?
I know how annoying we are, how cranky we must seem, but there is nothing much we can do about it now. (My father is much the same about Bournemouth football and Hampshire cricket in the 1940s.) These scores and scorers and occasions are of a piece: Pat’s slip against Tottenham was not, of course, as important as Steve’s wedding, but to me the two events have now become intrinsic and complementary parts of some new and different whole. An obsessive’s memory is therefore, perhaps, more creative than that of an ordinary person; not in the sense that we make things up, but in the sense that we have baroque cinematic recall, full of jump-cuts and split-screen innovation. Who else but a football fan would use a fumble on a muddy field three hundred miles away to recall a wedding? Obsession requires a commendable mental agility.
It is this agility that allows me to date the arrival of my adolescence quite precisely: it arrived on Thursday, 30th November 1972, when Dad took me to London to buy some new clothes. I chose a pair of Oxford bags, a black polo-neck jumper, a black raincoat and a pair of black stack-heeled shoes; I remember the date because on the Saturday, when Arsenal played Leeds United at Highbury and beat them 2-1, I was wearing the entire outfit and feeling better inside myself than I had ever felt. I developed a new hairstyle (supposed to resemble Rod Stewart’s, but I never found the courage for the spikes) to go with the clobber; and I developed an interest in girls to go with the haircut. One of these three innovations changed everything.
The Derby game was a really big one. After the indifferent spell that had brought about the end of the Total Football experiment, Arsenal had clawed their way back into the Championship race simply by being what they had always been—mean, fierce, competitive, hard to beat. If they won this game (against the reigning champions), then they stood a chance of going top of the First Division for the first time since the Double year; they were level on points with Liverpool, who were at home to Tottenham that afternoon. And looking at the programme for the Derby game, one is reminded of how extraordinarily balanced football fortunes are. If we had beaten Derby, there would have been every prospect of winning the Championship again; in fact, we lost it by three points, the very gap we allowed to open up that afternoon. The following Saturday we were playing Second Division Sunderland in the FA Cup semi-final, and we lost that too. The two defeats prompted Bertie Mee to break the whole team up, but he never got a new one together again, and three years later he was gone. If we’d won either of the games—and we should and could have won both—then the modern history of the club might have been entirely different.
So the course of the next decade was to be mapped out for Arsenal that afternoon, but I didn’t care. The previous evening Carol Blackburn, my girlfriend of some three or four weeks (I can remember watching the TV highlights of the Chelsea-Arsenal FA Cup quarter-final at Stamford Bridge with her—she was a Chelsea fan—at a friend’s house a fortnight before) had packed me in. She was, I thought, beautiful, with the long, straight, centre-parted hair and the melting doe eyes of Olivia Newton-John; her beauty had reduced me to nervous and miserable silence for much of the duration of our relationship, and it was no real surprise when she moved on to a boy called Daz, a year older than me and already, incredibly, at work.
I was unhappy during the game (I watched it from the Clock End, although I don’t know why; perhaps I felt that the focused energy of the North Bank would be inappropriate), but not because of what was going on in front of me: for the first time in nearly five years of watching Arsenal events on the pitch seemed meaningless, and it hardly registered that we lost 1-0 and blew the chance to go top. I knew instinctively, as Arsenal searched for an equaliser in the later stages of the game, that we would not score, that even if the Derby centre-half caught the ball and threw it at the referee we would miss the resultant penalty. How could we possibly win or draw, with me feeling like this? Football as metaphor, again.
I regretted our defeat against Derby, of course, although not as much as I regretted being dumped by Carol Blackburn. But what I regretted most of all—and this regret came to me much, much later on—was the wedge that had been driven between me and the club. Between 1968 and 1973, Saturdays were the whole point of my entire week, and whatever happened at school or at home was just so much fluff, the adverts in between the two halves of the Big Match. In that time football was life, and I am not speaking metaphorically: I experienced the big things—the pain of loss (Wembley ’68 and ’72), joy (the Double year), thwarted ambition (the European Cup quarter-final against Ajax), love (Charlie George) and ennui (most Saturdays, really)—only at Highbury. I even made new friends, through the youth team or the transfer market. What Carol Blackburn did was to give me another sort of life, the real, untransposed kind in which things happened to me rather than to the club, and as we all know, that is a rum sort of a gift.
Goodbye to all that
ARSENAL v MANCHESTER CITY
4.10.75
I have a few programmes for the 73/74 season, so I must have been to some of the games that year, but I can’t remember any of them. I know that the following season I didn’t go at all, and that the season after that, 75/76, I only went the once, with my Uncle Brian and my young cousin Michael.
I stopped partly because Arsenal were dire: George, McLintock and Kennedy had gone, and were never properly replaced, Radford and Armstrong were way past their best, Ball couldn’t be bothered, a couple of the young players (Brady, Stapleton and O’Leary were all playing) were having understandable difficulties settling in to a struggling side, and some of the new purchases simply weren’t up to the mark. (Terry Mancini, for example, a bald, cheerful and uncomplicated centre-half, seemed to have been bought for the Second Division promotion campaign that was beginning to look inevitable.) In seven years Highbury had once again become the unhappy home of a moribund football team, just as it had been when I first fell in love with it.
This time around, though, I didn’t want to know (and neither did a good ten thousand others). I’d seen it all before. What I hadn’t seen before were the high school and convent girls who worked in the Maidenhead High Street branch of Boots at weekends; and thus it was that some time in 1974, my after-school clearing-up and restocking job (which I had taken on only because I needed to find some football money) became an after-school and Saturday job.