It wasn’t, in truth, a future I could regard with a great deal of enthusiasm, and even though it was the therapy that seemed to have brought most of this bleakness on, or out, it seemed to me that I needed more of it: the last shred of common sense I had left suggested that many of these problems were in me rather than in the world, that they were of a psychological rather than an actual nature, that I hadn’t been born under a bad sign at all but that I was some sort of self-destructive nutcase, that I literally needed my head seeing to. Except I was flat broke and couldn’t afford to see any more of my lady in Bounds Green, so she sent me to see the man in Hampstead, who had the power to refer me back to her at a preferential rate if he was convinced that I was sick enough. And so it came to pass—and there are a number of Arsenal-loathing football fans all over the country who might find the episode gloriously and hilariously significant—that this Arsenal fan was obliged to preface his attendance at the Littlewoods Cup semi-final replay by visiting a psychiatrist, in order to persuade him that I was round the twist. I got the referral I needed, and I didn’t even have to produce my season-ticket.
I travelled from Hampstead down to Baker Street, from Baker Street to King’s Cross, from King’s Cross to Seven Sisters, and got a bus the rest of the way up the Tottenham High Road; and from Baker Street onwards, the point at which my return journey from the psychiatrist became an outward journey to a football match, I felt better, less isolated, more purposeful (although on the final stage of the journey I felt bad again, but this was a comforting pre-match bad, my stomach churning and my body weary at the thought of the emotional effort to come); I no longer had to try to explain to myself where I was going or where I had been, and I was back in the mainstream. The value of the herd instinct, again: I was only too happy to experience the loss of identity that crowds demand. It was then that it occurred to me that I would never really be able to explain or even remember precisely how the evening had started as it had, and that in some ways, football isn’t a very good metaphor for life at all.
I usually hate games between Arsenal and Tottenham, especially the away games, when the hostile territory brings out the very worst in the Arsenal fans, and I have stopped going to White Hart Lane now. “I hope your wife dies of cancer, Roberts,” a man behind me shouted a few years back. And in September 1987, just before David Pleat was forced to resign his position as Tottenham manager, but just after unsavoury allegations about his personal life had appeared in the tabloids, I sat among several thousand people roaring “Sex case! Sex case! HANG HIM HANG HIM HANG HIM!”, and felt, perhaps understandably, that I was much too delicate a soul for this sort of entertainment; the blow-up dolls being tossed around merrily at our end, and the hundreds of pairs of amusing breast spectacles that were de rigueur for the committed Arsenal fan that afternoon, hardly helped to make the sensitive liberal feel any more at ease. And in 1989, when Spurs beat us at White Hart Lane for the first time for four years, there was an awful and disturbing ugliness in the Arsenal end after the final whistle, and seats were broken, and that was enough for me. The anti-Semitic chanting, even though Arsenal have just as many Jewish fans as Tottenham, is obscene and unforgivable, and over the last few years the rivalry between the two sets of fans has become intolerably hateful.
A cup-tie is different, however. The older season-ticket holders, those who hate Tottenham, but not with the drooling and violent rage of some of the twenty and thirtysomethings, are sufficiently motivated to travel, and so some of the bile is diluted. And the result, and the football, matters more than it does in many of the League games between Arsenal and Spurs, who for most seasons over the last twenty or thirty years have found themselves in mid-table, and consequently there is some sort of a focus for the aggression. Paradoxically, when the game means something then the identity of the opponents signifies less.
Anyway, I know that my middle-class sensibilities were not unduly disturbed, and that there were no chanted sex-case or cancer references to sour my memory of the evening. The game was fast and open, just as it had been on the Sunday, and once again we seemed to spend the whole of the first half watching Clive Allen bear down on the unprotected goal in front of us, but the longer it went on the more I feared for Arsenal. The team was getting younger and younger with each match (Thomas, a full-back replacement for Caesar in the first leg, was playing his first full match, in midfield) and though it was nil-nil at half-time, Allen finally scored, right at the beginning of the second half; shortly afterwards Nicholas was stretchered off, and Ian Allinson, a tryer but hardly the man to save the match, had to come on, and it was all up.
A couple of rows in front of me, a line of middle-aged men and women, blankets over their legs, soup flasks twinkling, started singing the Irish song that the older fans in the seats—I have never heard a North Bank rendition—often used to sing on big nights, and everyone who knew the words (“And then he got up and he sang it again/Over and over and over again”) joined in. So I thought, with, what, six or seven minutes left, that at least I would remember the occasion with some fondness, even though it was to have a bitter and dismal conclusion; and then Allinson, jinking unconvincingly down the left, put in a feeble shot on the turn that totally deceived Clemence and snuck in guiltily at the near post, and there was this enormous explosion of relief and unhinged joy. And Tottenham fell apart, just as they had on Sunday: over the next two minutes Hayes intercepted a bad back-pass and shot into the side netting, Thomas grooved his way through to the edge of the area, with the sort of insouciance we later came to love and hate, and shot just past the post. On my video, you can see, as Anderson goes to take a throw-in, the Arsenal fans literally bouncing with excitement. And there was more to come. As Tottenham’s digital clock stopped on ninety minutes, Rocky picked up a loose cross, chested it down, and hit it through Clemence and into the net; and almost immediately the referee blew the final whistle, and the rows of people disappeared and were replaced by one shuddering heap of ecstatic humanity.
It was the second of three or four lifetime football moments where my delirium was such that I had no idea what I was doing, where everything went blank for a few moments. I know that an old man behind me grabbed me around the neck and wouldn’t let go, and that when I returned to a state approaching normal consciousness the rest of the stadium was empty save for a few Tottenham fans who stood watching us, too stunned and sick to move (in my mind I see white faces, but we were too far away to be able to detect shock-induced pallor), and the Arsenal players were cavorting beneath us, as overjoyed and probably as baffled by their win as we were.
We were all still in the stadium twenty minutes after the final whistle, and then we roared out on to the street, and Pete and I drove back to the Arsenal Tavern, where we were locked in after closing time so that we could watch the highlights of the game on their big TV screen, and so that I could drink much too much.
The depression that I had been living with for the best part of the 1980s packed up and started to leave that night, and within a month I was better. Inevitably part of me wishes that it had been something else that effected the cure—the love of a good woman, or a minor literary triumph, or a transcendent realisation during something like Live Aid that my life was blessed and worth living—something worthy and real and meaningful. It embarrasses me to confess that a decade-long downer lifted because Arsenal won at Spurs in the Littlewoods Cup (I would be slightly less embarrassed if it had been an FA Cup win, but the Littlewoods?), and I have often tried to work out why it happened like this. The win meant a lot to all Arsenal fans, of course: for seven years our team hadn’t even come very close to winning a semi-final, and the decline had begun to look terminal. And there might even be a medical explanation. It could be that the monstrous surge of adrenalin released by a last-minute winner at Tottenham in a semi-final when you were one down with seven minutes left, all hope abandoned, maybe this surge corrects some kind of chemical imbalance in the brain or something.