It seems lame to say that I loathe the baiting of black players that takes place as a matter of routine inside some football grounds, and if I had had any guts I would have either (a) confronted some of the worst perpetrators or (b) stopped going to games. Before remonstrating with the blind racist I was making some frantic calculations—how hard is he? How hard are his mates? How hard are my mates?—until I heard something, a certain whininess in his voice, maybe, that led me to conclude that I wasn’t about to get a pasting, and acted accordingly, but this is rare. More usually I take the view that these people, like the people who smoke on tube trains, know what they’re doing, and their abuse is intended to intimidate anyone, black or white, who feels like doing something about it. And as for not going … what I’m supposed to say is that football grounds are for everyone, not just for racist thugs, and when decent people stop going then the game is in trouble. And part of me believes that (Leeds fans have done amazing things to conquer the foul atmosphere that used to engulf their ground); part of me, however, knows that I can’t stop because of the strength of my obsession.
I wish all the things that other fans like me wish: I wish that football commentators would express outrage more than they do; I wish Arsenal really did insist on the ejection of fans who sing songs about Hitler gassing Jews, instead of forever threatening to do so; I wish all players, black and white, would do more to make their disgust known. (If, say, Everton’s goalkeeper Neville Southall simply walked off the pitch in protest every time his own fans made these noises, then the problems at Goodison Park would stop almost overnight, but I know that things are not done this way.) But most of all, I wish I were enormous and of a violent disposition, so that I could deal with any problem that arises near me in a fashion commensurate with the anger I feel.
The King of Kenilworth Road
LUTON v ARSENAL
31.8.87
Non-footballing friends and family have never met anyone madder than I; indeed, they are convinced that I am as obsessed as it is possible to be. But I know that there are people who would regard the level of my commitment—every home game, a handful of away games, and one or two reserve or youth games each season—as inadequate. People like Neil Kaas, a Luton fan who took me and my half-brother to watch Arsenal at Kenilworth Road as his guest in the days when Luton’s ban on away fans was in operation, are obsessives with all traces of timidity or self-doubt removed; they make me look like the faint-hearted dilettante they suspect me of being.
Eight things you didn’t know about Neil Kaas:
(1) He would, of course, travel to Plymouth on a Wednesday night, thus using up a precious day’s holiday. (He has travelled to Wigan, and Doncaster, and everywhere else; and on the way back from a mid-week game in Hartlepool, the coach broke down, and he and his party watched Police Academy 3 seven times.)
(2) When I first met him, he had just returned from a kibbutz, although when I got to know him better I was amazed that he had managed to tear himself away from the Hatters for any length of time. He explained that he had gone because the Luton fans were about to organise a boycott of all home games in protest against a planned move to Milton Keynes; Neil knew that even though he had given the boycott his sincere backing, he would be unable to maintain it unless he took himself off to the other side of the world.
(3) After a bizarre chain of circumstances too complicated to relate here, he watched a game against QPR from the directors’ box, having been introduced by David Evans to the rest of the Luton board as “the next Chairman of Luton Town”.
(4) He has single-handedly driven Mike Newell and a number of other players away from the club, by ensuring that he is always positioned near the players’ tunnel to abuse viciously and incessantly anybody he believes is not good enough to tread the Kenilworth Road turf.
(5) A report in the Independent once made some reference to a loudmouth with a foghorn voice who sits in the main stand at Luton, said loudmouth precluding enjoyment for anyone in his immediate vicinity; having watched with Neil I can only conclude, regretfully, that he is the man.
(6) He attends every open evening at Luton, occasions which enable the fans to talk to the manager and the directors, although recently he has begun to suspect that they will no longer allow him to ask questions. He is mystified by this, although some of the questions I know him to have asked are not really questions at all, but slanderous and noisy allegations of impropriety and incompetence.
(7) He has written to Luton Council proposing that they commission a statue commemorating Raddy Antic, whose last-minute goal at Maine Road prevented Luton dropping into Division Two.
(8) On Sunday mornings, just a few hours after he has returned from wherever he has been on the Saturday afternoon, he plays for Bushey ‘B’ (a team which suffered the misfortune of having two points deducted when the goalkeeper’s dog stopped a shot on the line) in the Maccabi League, although he has had disciplinary problems of late, both with his manager and with referees, and at the time of writing is sidelined.
This litany contains a truth about Neil, but not the truth, which is that he has a cheerful and ironic perspective on his own excesses, and talks about them as if they were the property of someone else—his younger brother, maybe. And away from Kenilworth Road he is charming, interested, and unflaggingly polite, at least to strangers, so the rage that invariably afflicts him on Saturdays is induced exclusively by Luton.
Luton are not a big club, and they don’t have many fans—their home crowds are between a third and a quarter the size of Arsenal’s. What was memorable about watching this game with him was not the football, which ended up a drab 1-1 draw after Davis had put us into the lead, but the sense of proprietorship that emanates from someone who has to his own satisfaction taken the club over. It seemed, as we walked to our seats, that Neil knew maybe one in three of the crowd, and stopped for a chat with half of those. And when he travels to away games, it is not as a mote in some huge invading army, but as a visible and recognisable face in a ragged crowd of a couple of hundred, maybe even less than that for some of the more problematic midweek fixtures.
Yet this is part of the attraction for him: he is the Lord of Luton, the King of Kenilworth Road. So when his friends hear the results on a Saturday, on national radio and television, or on the tannoys of other League grounds, they think, simply, “Neil Kaas” when they hear the Luton score. Neil Kaas 0 Liverpool 2, Neil Kaas saved from relegation with last-minute goal, Neil Kaas wins Littlewoods Cup …
And this too is an appeal that football has for me, although I could never claim to be a definition of Arsenal in the way that Neil and Luton define each other. This appeal is one that has emerged slowly over the years, but it is a powerful attraction nevertheless: I like the thought of people remembering me on a regular basis.