Over the years we have come to confuse football with something else, something more necessary, which is why these cries of outrage are so heartfelt and so indignant. We view everything from the top of this mountain of partisan passion; it is no wonder that all our perspectives are wrong. Perhaps it was time to climb down, and see what everyone else in the outside world sees.
For the most part, what the outside world saw made a lot of cold, harsh, practical sense. The cover of The Economist that week carried a picture of the extraordinary shrine of flowers, flags and banners that Liverpool and Everton fans and hundreds of others had created in the goalmouth beneath the Kop at Anfield; the headline, neatly placed just above the crossbar, was “The game that died”. I bought the magazine, for the first and only time, and was shocked to realise how much I found myself agreeing with it. Perhaps it was predictable that a magazine entitled The Economist should be best equipped to penetrate the muddle that football had got itself into; here, after all, is a multi-million-pound industry which doesn’t have two pennies to rub together.
The Economist on the inevitability of the disaster: “Hillsborough was not just a calamitous accident. It was a brutal demonstration of systematic failure.” On the state of the grounds: “Britain’s football grounds now resemble maximum-security prisons, but only the feebleness of the regulations has allowed the clubs to go on pretending that crowd safety is compatible with prison architecture.” On the football authorities: “For complacency and incompetence, there’s nothing like a cartel; and of Britain’s surviving cartels, the Football League is one of the smuggest and slackest.” On the people who own football clubs: “Like old-fashioned newspaper magnates,(they are willing to pay for prestige—which they see in terms of owning star players, rather than comfortable modern stadiums.” And on what needs to be done: “Having fewer clubs, operating out of smarter stadiums, ought to revive the interest of those who have been driven away from football during the past ten years.”
These views and others in the same issue—well-informed, well-argued, devoid of the football authorities’ dilatory self-interest, the Government’s loathing for the game (if Hillsborough did nothing else, it wrecked Thatcher’s ludicrously misbegotten ID-card scheme) and the distorting obsession of the fans—helped one to begin looking at the whole football débâcle with something approaching clarity. It was only after Hillsborough, when outsiders began to take an interest in the way football conducts itself, that it became clear just how deeply entrenched in the football way of looking at things we had all become. And that way, as parts of this book demonstrate, is not always the wisest.
On 1st May, two weeks and two days later, Arsenal played Norwich at Highbury, our first game since the disaster. It was a glorious Bank Holiday afternoon, and Arsenal played wonderfully well, and won 5-0; as far as everyone there that day, myself included, was concerned, everything seemed more or less all right with the world again. The mourning period was over, the TV cameras were there, the sun was out, Arsenal were scoring goals galore … after the bleakness of the previous fortnight, the match took on a celebratory air. It was a tired and muted celebration, but it was a celebration nonetheless, and from this distance that looks particularly bizarre now.
What were we all thinking of that afternoon? How on earth did the Forest-Liverpool game ever get replayed? It’s all a part of the same thing, in a way. I went to the Arsenal-Norwich game, and loved it, for the same reasons I had watched the Liverpool-Juventus final after the Heysel disaster, and for the same reasons that football hasn’t really changed that much in over a hundred years: because the passions the game induces consume everything, including tact and common sense. If it is possible to attend and enjoy a football match sixteen days after nearly a hundred people died at one—and it is possible, I did it, despite my new post-Hillsborough realism—then perhaps it is a little easier to understand the culture and circumstances that allowed these deaths to happen. Nothing ever matters, apart from football.
The Greatest Moment Ever
LIVERPOOL v ARSENAL
26.5.89
In all the time I have been watching football, twenty-three seasons, only seven teams have won the First Division Championship: Leeds United, Everton, Arsenal, Derby County, Nottingham Forest, Aston Villa and, a staggering eleven times, Liverpool. Five different teams came top in my first five years, so it seemed to me then that the League was something that came your way every once in a while, even though you might have to wait for it; but as the seventies came and went, and then the eighties, it began to dawn on me that Arsenal might never win the League again in my lifetime. That isn’t as melodramatic as it sounds. Wolves fans celebrating their third championship in six years in 1959 could hardly have anticipated that their team would spend much of the next thirty years in the Second and Third Divisions; Manchester City supporters in their mid-forties when the Blues last won the League in 1968 are in their early seventies now.
Like all fans, the overwhelming majority of the games I have seen have been League games. And as most of the time Arsenal have had no real interest in the First Division title after Christmas, nor ever really come close to going down, I would estimate that around half of these games are meaningless, at least in the way that sportswriters talk about meaningless games. There are no chewed nails and chewed knuckles and screwed-up faces; your ear doesn’t become sore from being pressed up hard against a radio, trying to hear how Liverpool are getting on; you are not, in truth, thrown into agonies of despair or eye-popping fits of ecstasy by the result. Any meanings such games throw up are the ones that you, rather than the First Division table, bring to them.
And after maybe ten years of this, the Championship becomes something you either believe in or you don’t, like God. You concede that it’s possible, of course, and you try to respect the views of those who have managed to remain credulous. Between approximately 1975 and 1989 I didn’t believe. I hoped, at the beginning of each season; and a couple of times—the middle of the 86/87 season, for example, when we were top for eight or nine weeks—I was almost lured out of my agnostic’s cave. But in my heart of hearts I knew that it would never happen, just as I knew that they were not, as I used to think when I was young, going to find a cure for death before I got old.
In 1989, eighteen years after the last time Arsenal had won the League, I reluctantly and foolishly allowed myself to believe it was indeed possible that Arsenal could win the Championship. They were top of the First Division between January and May; on the last full weekend of the Hillsborough-elongated season they were five points clear of Liverpool with three games left to play. Liverpool had a game in hand, but the accepted wisdom was that Hillsborough and its attendant strains would make it impossible for them to keep winning, and two of Arsenal’s three games were at home to weaker teams. The other was against Liverpool, away, a game that would conclude the First Division season.