Thirteen years later I am still ashamed of my unwillingness, my inability, to help, and the reason I feel ashamed is partly to do with the awareness that I haven’t changed a bit. I don’t want to look after anybody when I’m at a match; I am not capable of looking after anybody at a match. I am writing some nine hours before Arsenal play Benfica in the European Cup, the most important match at Highbury for years, and my partner will be with me: what happens if she keels over? Would I have the decency, the maturity, the common sense, to make sure that she was properly looked after? Or would I shove her limp body to one side, carry on screaming at the linesman, and hope that she is still breathing at the end of ninety minutes, always presuming, of course, that extra time and penalties are not required?
I know that these worries are prompted by the little boy in me, who is allowed to run riot when it comes to footbalclass="underline" this little boy feels that women are always going to faint at football matches, that they are weak, that their presence at games will inevitably result in distraction and disaster, even though my present partner has been to Highbury probably forty or fifty times and has shown no signs of fainting whatsoever. (In fact it is I who have come closest to fainting on occasions, when the tension of the last five minutes of a cup-tie constricts my chest and forces all the blood out of my head, if that is biologically possible; and sometimes, when Arsenal score, I see stars, literally—well, little splodges of light, literally—which cannot be a sign of great physical robustness.) But then, that is what football has done to me. It has turned me into someone who would not help if my girlfriend went into labour at an impossible moment (I have often wondered about what would happen if I was due to become a father on an Arsenal Cup Final day); and for the duration of the games I am an eleven-year-old. When I described football as a retardant, I meant it.
Wembley III—the Horror Returns
ARSENAL v IPSWICH
(at Wembley) 6.5.78
It is a truth universally acknowledged that ticket distribution for Cup Finals is a farce: the two clubs involved, as all supporters know, get less than half the tickets, which means that thirty or forty thousand people with no direct interest in the game get the other half. The Football Association’s rationale is that the Cup Final is for everybody involved with football, not just the fans, and it’s not a bad one: it is, I think, quite reasonable to invite referees and linesmen and amateur players and local league secretaries to the biggest day in football’s year. There is more than one way to watch a game, after all, and on this sort of occasion enthusiastic neutrals have their place.
The only flaw in the system is that these enthusiastic neutrals, these unimpeachable servants of the game, invariably decide that their endeavours are best recompensed not by a trip to London to see the big game, but by a phone call to their local tout: a good 90 per cent of them just flog the tickets they are given, and these tickets eventually end up in the hands of the fans who were denied them in the first place. It is a ludicrous process, a typically scandalous slice of Football Association idiocy: everybody knows what is going to happen, and nobody does anything about it.
Dad got me a ticket for the Ipswich final via work contacts, but there were others available, even at university, because the Blues are customarily sent half a dozen. (The following year, when Arsenal were again in the Final, I ended up with two tickets. One was from my next-door-neighbour, who had associations with a very big club in the north-west of England, a club that has been in trouble before with the FA for its cavalier distribution of Cup Final tickets: he simply wrote to them and asked for one, and they sent it to him.) There were, no doubt, many more deserving recipients of a seat than I, people who had spent the season travelling the length of the country watching Arsenal rather than messing around at college, but I was a genuine fan of one of the Cup Final teams, at least, and as such more entitled than many who were there.
My companions for the afternoon were affable, welcoming middle-aged men in their late thirties and early forties who simply had no conception of the import of the afternoon for the rest of us. To them it was an afternoon out, a fun thing to do on a Saturday afternoon; if I were to meet them again, they would, I think, be unable to recall the score that afternoon, or the scorer (at half-time they talked office politics), and in a way I envied them their indifference. Perhaps there is an argument which says that Cup Final tickets are wasted on the fans, in the way that youth is wasted on the young; these men, who knew just enough about football to get them through the afternoon, actively enjoyed the occasion, its drama and its noise and its momentum, whereas I hated every minute of it, as I had hated every Cup Final involving Arsenal.
I had now been an Arsenal supporter for ten seasons—just under half my life. In only two of those ten seasons had Arsenal won trophies; they had reached finals, and failed horribly, in another two. But these triumphs and failures had all occurred in my first four years, and I had gone from the age of fifteen, when I was living one life, to the age of twenty-one, when I was living a completely different one. Like gas lamps and horse-drawn carriages—or perhaps like Spirographs and Sekidens—Wembley and championships were beginning to seem as though they belonged to a previous world.
When we reached, and then won, the FA Cup semi-final in 1978, it felt as though the sun had come out after several years of November afternoons. Arsenal-haters will have forgotten, or will simply refuse to believe, that this Arsenal team was capable of playing delightful, even enthralling footbalclass="underline" Rix and Brady, Stapleton and Macdonald, Sunderland and, best of all, for one season only, Alan Hudson … for three or four months it looked as if this was a team that could make us happy in all the ways in which it is possible to be made happy at football.
If I were writing a novel, Arsenal would win the ’78 Cup Final. A win makes more sense rhythmically and thematically; another Wembley defeat at this point would stretch the reader’s patience and sense of justice. The only excuses I can offer for my poor plotting are that Brady was patently unfit and should never have played, and Supermac, who had made some typical and unwise remarks in the press about what he was going to do to the Ipswich back four, was worse than useless. (He had made the same compound error, of boasting loudly and then failing to deliver, four years earlier, when he was playing for Newcastle; some time after the Ipswich fiasco the Guardian printed a Cup trivia question: “What is taken to the Cup Final every year but never used?” The answer they wanted was the ribbons for the losing team, which are never tied on to the handle of the Cup, but some smartass wrote in and suggested Malcolm Macdonald.) It was an overwhelmingly one-sided final, even though Ipswich didn’t score until the second half; we never looked like getting the goal back, and lost 1-0.
So I had now lost three out of three at Wembley, and was convinced that I would never, ever see Arsenal running around Wembley with anything at all. Yet ’78 is perhaps the least painful of the defeats, because I was with people who were not pained by it at all, not even the man with the red-and-white scarf (suspiciously clean, as if he had bought it outside the stadium). It is a strange paradox that while the grief of football fans (and it is real grief) is private—we each have an individual relationship with our clubs, and I think that we are secretly convinced that none of the other fans understands quite why we have been harder hit than anyone else—we are forced to mourn in public, surrounded by people whose hurt is expressed in forms different from our own.