When the final whistle blew (just one more heart-stopping moment, when Thomas turned and knocked a terrifyingly casual back-pass to Lukic, perfectly safely but with a coolness that I didn’t feel) I ran straight out of the door to the off-licence on Blackstock Road; I had my arms outstretched, like a little boy playing aeroplanes, and as I flew down the street, old ladies came to the door and applauded my progress, as if I were Michael Thomas himself; then I was grievously ripped off for a bottle of cheap champagne, I realised later, by a shopkeeper who could see that the light of intelligence had gone from my eyes altogether. I could hear whoops and screams from pubs and shops and houses all around me; and as fans began to congregate at the stadium, some draped in banners, some sitting on top of tooting cars, everyone embracing strangers at every opportunity, and TV cameras arrived to film the party for the late news, and club officials leaned out of windows to wave at the bouncing crowd, it occurred to me that I was glad I hadn’t been up to Anfield, and missed out on this joyful, almost Latin explosion on my doorstep. After twenty-one years I no longer felt, as I had done during the Double year, that if I hadn’t been to the games I had no right to partake in the celebrations; I’d done the work, years and years and years of it, and I belonged.
Seats
ARSENAL v COVENTRY
22.8.89
These are some of the things that have happened to me in my thirties: I have become a mortgage holder; I have stopped buying New Musical Express and the Face, and, inexplicably, I have started keeping back copies of Q Magazine under a shelf in my living room; I have become an uncle; I have bought a CD player; I have registered with an accountant; I have noticed that certain types of music—hip-hop, indie guitar pop, thrash metal—all sound the same, and have no tune; I have come to prefer restaurants to clubs, and dinners with friends to parties; I have developed an aversion to the feeling that a bellyful of beer gives you, even though I still enjoy a pint; I have started to covet items of furniture; I have bought one of those cork boards you put up in the kitchen; I have started to develop certain views—on the squatters who live in my street, for example, and about unreasonably loud parties—which are not altogether consistent with the attitudes I held when I was younger. And, in 1989, I bought a season-ticket for the seats, after standing on the North Bank for over fifteen years. These details do not tell the whole story of how I got old, but they tell some of it.
You just get tired. I got tired of the queues, and the squash, and tumbling half-way down the terrace every time Arsenal scored, and the fact that my view of the near goal was always partially obscured at big games, and it seemed to me that being able to arrive at the ground two minutes before kick-off without being disadvantaged in any way had much to recommend it. I didn’t miss the terraces, really, and in fact I enjoyed them, the backdrop they provided, their noise and colour, more than I ever had when I stood on them. This Coventry game was our first in the seats, and Thomas and Marwood scored directly in front of us, at our end, and from our side.
There are five of us: Pete, of course, and my brother, and my girlfriend, although her place is usually taken by someone else nowadays, and me, and Andy, who used to be Rat when we were kids in the Schoolboys’ Enclosure—I bumped into him on the North Bank in George’s second season, a decade or so after I had lost touch with him, and he too was ready to leave the terraces behind.
What you’re really doing, when you buy a seat season-ticket, is upping the belonging a notch. I’d had my own spot on the terraces, but I had no proprietorial rights over it and if some bloody big-game casual fan stood in it, all I could do was raise my eyebrows. Now I really do have my own home in the stadium, complete with flatmates, and neighbours with whom I am on cordial terms, and with whom I converse on topics of shared interest, namely the need for a new midfielder/striker/way of playing. So I correspond to the stereotype of the ageing football fan, but I don’t regret it. After a while, you stop wanting to live from hand to mouth, day to day, game to game, and you begin wanting to ensure that the remainder of your days are secure.
Smoking
ARSENAL v LIVERPOOL
25.10.89
I remember the game for conventional reasons, for substitute Smith’s late winner and thus a handy Cup win over the old enemy. But most of all I remember it as the only time in the 1980s and, hitherto, the 1990s, that I had no nicotine in my bloodstream for the entire ninety minutes. I have gone through games without smoking in that time: during the first half of the 83/84 season I was on nicotine chewing gum, but never managed to kick that, and in the end went back to the cigarettes. But in October ’89, after a visit to Allen Carr the anti-smoking guru, I went cold turkey for ten days, and this game came right in the middle of that unhappy period.
I want to stop smoking and, like many people who wish to do the same, I firmly believe that abstinence is just around the corner. I won’t buy a carton of duty-frees, or a lighter, or even a household-sized box of matches because, given the imminence of my cessation, it would be a waste of money. What stops me from doing so now, today, this minute, are the things that have always stopped me: a difficult period of work up ahead, requiring the kind of concentration that only a Silk Cut can facilitate; the fear of the overwhelming domestic tension that would doubtless accompany screaming desperation; and, inevitably and pathetically, the Arsenal.
They do give me some leeway. There’s the first half of the season, before the FA Cup begins, and before the Championship has warmed up. And there are times like now, when with my team out of everything by the end of January I am looking at almost five months of dull but tension-free afternoons. (But I’ve got this book to write, and deadlines, and …) And yet some seasons—the 88/89 Championship year, for example, or the chase for the Double in 90/91 where every game between January and May was crucial—I cannot contemplate what it would be like to sit there without a smoke. Two down against Tottenham in a Cup semi-final at Wembley with eleven minutes gone and no fag? Inconceivable.
Am I going to hide behind Arsenal forever? Will they always serve as an excuse for smoking, and never having to go away at weekends, and not taking on work that might clash with a home fixture? The Liverpool game was, I think, their way of telling me that it’s not their fault, that it is I who control my actions, and not they; and though actually I do remember that I survived the evening without running on to the pitch and shaking the players silly, I have forgotten it all when the forthcoming fixtures convince me that now is not the right time to tackle my nicotine addiction. I have argued before that having Arsenal on my back, like a hump, year after year after year, is a real disability. But I use that disability too, I milk it for all it is worth.
Seven Goals and a Punch-Up
ARSENAL v NORWICH
4.11.89
For a match to be really, truly memorable, the kind of game that sends you home buzzing inside with the fulfilment of it all, you require as many of the following features as possible:
(1) Goals: As many as possible. There is an argument which says that goals begin to lose their value in particularly easy victories, but I have never found this to be a problem. (I enjoyed the last goal in Arsenal’s 7-1 win over Sheffield Wednesday as much as I enjoyed the first.) If the goals are to be shared, then it is best if the other team get theirs first: I have a particular penchant for the 3-2 home victory, with a late winner after losing 2-0 at half-time.