But Gus survives, and goes on to play for the reserves. And suddenly, it’s all on for him: Don Howe is in trouble, and flooding the first team with young players—Niall Quinn, Hayes, Rocastle, Adams, Martin Keown. And when Viv Anderson is suspended over Christmas 1985 Gus makes his début, as a right-back, at of all places Old Trafford, and we win 1-0 up there, so he’s part of a back four that’s kept a clean sheet away at Manchester United.
Howe gets the sack, and George Graham keeps him on, and he’s used as a sub in quite a few games over George’s first season, so things are still going well for him—not as well as they are for Rocky and Hayes and Adams and Quinn, but then these players are having an exceptional first full season, and when the squad for the England Under-21s is announced it’s full of Arsenal players, and Gus Caesar is one of them. The England selectors, like the Arsenal fans, are beginning to trust Arsenal’s youth policy implicitly, and Gus gets a call-up even though he isn’t in the first team regularly. But never mind why, he’s in, he’s recognised as one of the best twenty or so young players in the whole country.
Now at this point Gus could be forgiven for relaxing his guard a little. He’s young, he’s got talent, he’s committed to the life he’s picked, and at least some of the self-doubt that plagues everyone with long-shot dreams must have vanished by now. At this stage you have to rely on the judgement of others (I was relying on the judgements of friends and agents and anyone I could find who would read my stuff and tell me it was OK); and when those others include two Arsenal managers and an England coach then you probably reckon that there isn’t much to worry about.
But as it turns out, they are all wrong. So far he has leaped over every hurdle in his path comfortably, but even at this late stage it is possible to be tripped up. Probably the first time we notice that things aren’t right is in January 1987, in that first-leg semi-final against Tottenham: Caesar is painfully, obviously, out of his depth against those Spurs forwards. In truth he looks like a rabbit caught in headlights, frozen to the spot until Waddle or Allen or somebody runs him over, and then he starts to thrash about, horribly and pitifully, and finally George and Theo Foley put him out of his misery by substituting him. He doesn’t get another chance for a while. The next time I remember him turning out is against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge in a 1-1 draw, a week or two before the Luton final, but again there is a moment in the first half where Dixon runs at him, turns him one way, then the other, then back again, like your dad used to do to you when you were a really little kid in the back garden, and eventually strolls past him and puts the ball just the wrong side of the post. We knew that there was going to be trouble at Wembley, when O’Leary was out injured and Gus was the only candidate to replace him. Caesar leaves it late, but when the ball is knocked into the box seven minutes from time, he miskicks so violently that he falls over; at this point he looks like somebody off the street who has won a competition to appear as a centre-half in a Wembley final, and not like a professional footballer at all, and in the ensuing chaos Danny Wilson stoops to head the ball over the line for Luton’s equalising goal.
That’s it. End of story. He’s at the club for another three or four years, but he’s very much the last resort centre-back, and he must have known, when George bought Bould and then Linighan and then Pates, with Adams and O’Leary already at the club, that he didn’t have much of a future—he was the sixth in line for two positions. He was given a free transfer at the end of the 90/91 season, to Cambridge United; but within another couple of months they let him go too, to Bristol City, and a couple of months after that Bristol City let him go to Airdrie. To get where he did, Gus Caesar clearly had more talent than nearly everyone of his generation (the rest of us can only dream about having his kind of skill) and it still wasn’t quite enough.
Sport and life, especially the arty life, are not exactly analogous. One of the great things about sport is its cruel clarity: there is no such thing, for example, as a bad one-hundred-metre runner, or a hopeless centre-half who got lucky; in sport, you get found out. Nor is there such a thing as an unknown genius striker starving in a garret somewhere, because the scouting system is foolproof. (Everyone gets watched.) There are, however, plenty of bad actors or musicians or writers making a decent living, people who happened to be in the right place at the right time, or knew the right people, or whose talents have been misunderstood or overestimated. Even so, I think there is a real resonance in the Gus Caesar story: it contains a terrifying lesson for any aspirants who think that their own unshakeable sense of destiny (and again, this sense of destiny is not to be confused with arrogance—Gus Caesar was not an arrogant footballer) is significant. Gus must have known he was good, just as any pop band who has ever played the Marquee know they are destined for Madison Square Garden and an NME front cover, and just as any writer who has sent off a completed manuscript to Faber and Faber knows that he is two years away from the Booker. You trust that feeling with your life, you feel the strength and determination it gives you coursing through your veins like heroin … and it doesn’t mean anything at all.
Walking Distance
ARSENAL v SHEFFIELD WEDNESDAY
21.1.89
It made sense to move into the area, for other reasons too: your money goes a lot further in decrepit areas of north London than it does in Shepherd’s Bush or Notting Hill, and the public transport up here is good (five minutes from King’s Cross, two tube lines, millions of buses). But really, living within walking distance of the ground was the fulfilment of a pitiful twenty-year ambition, and it’s no use trying to dress it up in logic.
It was fun looking. One flat I saw had a roof terrace which overlooked a section of the front of the stadium, and you could see these huge letters, “RSEN”, no more than that but just enough to get the blood pumping. And the place we got gazumped on was on the route that the open-top bus takes when we win something. The rooms were smaller and darker than the ones we have now, but the living-room window framed the entire West Stand; I would have been able to pause, during the writing of this book, look out, and return to the Amstrad refreshed.
In the end we had to settle for somewhere a little less spiritual overlooking Finsbury Park, and even if you stand on a stool and stick your head out of the window you can’t see anything, not even the Barclays League pennant which at the time of writing (although not, I fear, for much longer) is still ours to flutter. But still! People park their cars in our road before the game! And on a windy day the tannoy is clearly audible, even from inside the flat, if the windows are open! (I don’t know about the audibility of roars, obviously, because I am never at home when the team are, but I would like to think that the noisier celebrations make it this far. Maybe one day I will borrow my brother-in-law’s smart Sony recorder, place it on the chair by the TV under the window and let it run, just out of interest.) And best of all, just a few days after moving in, I was walking down the road—this really happened—and I found, just lying there, filthy dirty and somewhat torn but there nonetheless, a twenty-year-old Peter Marinello bubblegum card. You cannot imagine how happy this made me, to know that I was living in an area so rich in archaeological interest, so steeped in my own past.