31.3.86
It wasn’t just the few results after the Villa game, I suspect, that enabled the Arsenal board to see that something had to be done, even though they were bad enough: the particularly pathetic 3-0 FA Cup defeat at Luton has been cited (on the History of Arsenal 1886-1986 video, for example) as the game that provoked manager Don Howe’s resignation, but everyone knows that’s not true. Howe actually resigned after a 3-0 victory over Coventry, because he found out that chairman Peter Hill-Wood had approached Terry Venables behind his back.
We had heard a few “Howe Out” chants on the North Bank, in between the Villa game and his resignation; when he did resign, however, the managerless team fell apart, and the chants then became directed against the chairman, although I couldn’t join in. I know the board went about things in a pretty underhand way, but something had to be done. That Arsenal team—full of cliques and overpaid, over-the-hill stars—would never be bad enough to go down, but never good enough to win anything, and the stasis made you want to scream with frustration.
The girlfriend who had tried, and failed, to get any sense out of me on the morning after the Villa match came with me to the Watford game, her first experience of live football. In a way it was a ludicrous introduction: there were less than twenty thousand in the ground, and most of those that were there had come simply to register their disapproval with everything that had taken place. (I belonged to the other category: those that were there because they were always there.)
After the players had bumbled around for an hour or so, and had gone two down, something strange happened: the North Bank switched allegiance. Each Watford attack was greeted by a roar of encouragement, each near miss (and there were hundreds of them) given an “Oooh!” of commiseration. It was funny, in a way, but it was also desperate. Here were fans who had been completely disenfranchised, who could think of no more hurtful way to express their disgust than to turn their back on the team; it was, in effect, a form of self-mutilation. It was obvious, now, that the bottom had been reached, and it was a relief. We knew that whoever the manager was (Venables quickly made it clear that he didn’t want to get involved in this sort of mess), things could not get any worse.
After the game there was a demonstration outside the main entrance, although it was difficult to ascertain precisely what people wanted; some were chanting for the reinstatement of Howe, others simply giving vent to a vague but real anger. We wandered along to have a look, but none of my crowd could muster the requisite rage needed to participate. From my own point of view, I could still remember my childish, melodramatic behaviour on the telephone the morning after the Villa game, and the demonstration was oddly comforting—the girl who had had to tolerate my sulk could see that I was not the only one, that there was this whole community who cared about what was happening to their Arsenal more than they cared about anything else. The things that I have often tried to explain to people about football—that it is not an escape, or a form of entertainment, but a different version of the world—were clear for her to see; I felt vindicated, somehow.
1986—1992
George
ARSENAL v MANCHESTER UNITED
23.8.86
My mother has two cats, one called O’Leary and the other called Chippy, Liam Brady’s nickname; the walls of her garage still bear the graffiti I chalked up there twenty years ago: “RADFORD FOR ENGLAND!” “CHARLIE GEORGE!” My sister Gill can still, when pushed, name most of the Double team.
Sometime in May 1986 Gill called me at the language school during my midmorning break. She was then working at the BBC, and the Corporation announces big news as it comes in over the tannoy for the benefit of all staff.
“George Graham,” she said, and I thanked her and put the phone down.
This is how things have always worked in my family. I feel bad that Arsenal has intruded into their lives, too.
It wasn’t a very imaginative appointment, and it was obvious that George was second or even third choice for the job, whatever the chairman says now. It is possible that if he hadn’t played for the club, with great distinction, around the time that I started going then he wouldn’t even have been considered for the position. He came from Millwall, whom he had rescued from relegation and then led to promotion, but I can’t remember him setting the world on fire there; I worried that his lack of experience would lead to him treating Arsenal as another Second Division team, and that he would think small, buy small, concentrate on keeping his job rather than attacking the other big teams and, at first, these fears seemed well-founded—the only new player he bought in his first year was Perry Groves from Colchester for £50,000, yet he sold Martin Keown immediately, and Stewart Robson not long after, and these were young players we knew and liked. So the squad got smaller and smaller: Woodcock and Mariner had gone, Caton went, and nobody replaced them.
He won his first game, at home against Manchester United, with a late Charlie Nicholas goal, and we went home cautiously positive. But he lost the next two, and by the middle of October he was in a little trouble. There was a nil-nil draw at home to Oxford which was as poor as anything we had seen in the previous six years, and already the people around me were yelling abuse at him, outraged at his perceived parsimony. In mid-November, however, after thumping Southampton 4-0 (admittedly all four of our goals were scored after the Southampton goalkeeper had been carried off), we went top of the League, and stayed there for a couple of months, and there was more, lots more, to come on top of that. He turned Arsenal into something that anyone under the age of fifty could never have seen before at Highbury, and he saved, in all the ways the word implies, every single Arsenal fan. And goals … where we had come to expect 1-0 wins at Highbury, suddenly fours and fives, even sixes, became commonplace; I have seen five hat-tricks, by three different players, in the last seven months.
The Manchester United game was significant for another reason: it was my first as a season-ticket holder. Pete and I bought terrace tickets that summer, not because we expected the new manager to change anything, really, but because we had come to terms with the hopelessness of our addiction. It was no use pretending any longer that football was a passing fancy, or that we were going to be selective with our games, so I flogged a pile of old punk singles that had somehow acquired value, and used the money to tie myself to the fortunes of George, and have often bitterly regretted it, but never for very long.
The most intense of all footballing relationships is, of course, between fan and club. But the relationship between fan and manager can be just as powerful. Players can rarely alter the whole tone of our lives like managers can, and each time a new one is appointed it is possible to dream bigger dreams than the previous one ever allowed. When an Arsenal manager resigns or is sacked, the occasion is as sombre as the death of a monarch: Bertie Mee quit around the same time as Harold Wilson, but there is no question that the former resignation signified more to me than the latter. Prime Ministers, however manic or unjust or wicked, simply do not have the power to do to me what an Arsenal manager can, and it is no wonder that when I think about the four I have lived with and through, I think about them as relatives.
Bertie Mee was a grandfather, kindly, slightly otherworldly, a member of a generation I didn’t understand; Terry Neill was a new stepfather, matey, jocular, dislikeable however hard he tried; Don Howe was an uncle by marriage, dour and stolid yet probably and unpredictably good for a couple of card tricks at Christmas. But George … George is my dad, less complicated but much more frightening than the real one. (Disconcertingly, he even looks a little bit like my dad—an upright, immaculately groomed, handsome man with an obvious taste for expensive, well-cut formal clothes.)