(2) Outrageously bad refereeing decisions: I prefer Arsenal to be the victim, rather than the recipient, of these, as long as they don’t cost us the match. Indignation is a crucial ingredient of the perfect footballing experience; I cannot therefore agree with match commentators who argue that a referee has had a good game if he isn’t noticed (although like everybody else, I don’t like the game stopped every few seconds). I prefer to notice them, and howl at them, and feel cheated by them.
(3) A noisy crowd: In my experience, crowds are at their best when their team is losing but playing well, which is one of the reasons why coming back for a 3-2 win is my favourite kind of score.
(4) Rain, a greasy surface, etc: Football in August, on a perfect grassy-green pitch, is aesthetically more appealing, although I do like a bit of slithery chaos in the goalmouth. Too much mud and the teams can’t play at all, but you can’t beat the sight of players sliding ten or fifteen yards for a tackle or in an attempt to get a touch to a cross. There’s something intensifying about peering through driving rain, too.
(5) Opposition misses a penalty: Arsenal’s goalkeeper John Lukic was the penalty king, so I have seen a fair few of these; Brian McClair’s last-minute horror in the fifth-round FA Cup-tie in 1988—so wild that it nearly cleared the North Bank roof—remains my favourite. However, I retain a residual fondness for Nigel Clough’s efforts, also in the last minute, during a League game in 1990, when he missed; the referee ordered the kick to be retaken, and he missed again.
(6) Member of opposition team receives a red card: “It’s disappointing to hear the reaction of the crowd,” remarked Barry Davies during the Portsmouth-Forest FA Cup quarter-final in 1992, when Forest’s Brian Laws was sent off and the Portsmouth supporters went mad; but what does he expect? For fans, a sending-off is always a magic moment, although it is crucial that this doesn’t happen too early. First-half dismissals frequently result either in boringly easy victories for the team with eleven men (c.f., Forest v West Ham, FA Cup semi-final, 1991), or in an impenetrable defensive reorganisation which kills the game dead; second-half sendings-off in a tight game are impossibly gratifying. If I had to plump for just one dismissal to take on to a desert island with me, it would have to be Bob Hazell of Wolves, sent off in the last minute of a fourth-round cup-tie at Highbury in 1978, when the score was 1-1. As I remember it, he took a swing at Rix, who was trying to get the ball off him so that we could take a corner quickly; from said corner, Macdonald, freed of his disgraced marker for the first time in the game and thus completely unmarked, headed us into a winning lead. I also enjoyed, enormously, Tony Coton’s long and lonely march at Highbury in 1986—there is something special about seeing a goalkeeper go—and Massing’s murderous assault on Caniggia, followed by his valedictory wave to the crowd, during the opening game of the 1990 World Cup.
(7) Some kind of “disgraceful incident” (aka “silliness”, aka “nonsense”, aka “unpleasantness”): We are entering doubtful moral territory here—obviously players have a responsibility not to provoke a highly flammable crowd. A brawl between Coventry and Wimbledon on a wet November afternoon in front of a stupefied crowd of ten thousand is one thing, but a brawl between Celtic and Rangers players, given the barely controllable sectarian bitterness on the terraces, is quite another. Yet one has to conclude, regretfully and with a not inconsiderable degree of Corinthian sadness, that there is nothing like a punch-up to enliven an otherwise dull game. The side-effects are invariably beneficent—the players and the crowd become more committed, the plot thickens, the pulse quickens—and as long as the match doesn’t degenerate as a consequence into some kind of sour grudge-match, brawls strike me as being a pretty desirable feature, like a roof terrace or a fireplace. If I were a sportswriter or a representative of the football authorities, then no doubt I would purse my lips, make disapproving noises, insist that the transgressors be brought to justice—argy-bargy, like soft drugs, would be no fun if it were officially sanctioned. Luckily, however, I have no such responsibility: I am a fan, with no duty to toe the moral line whatsoever.
The Arsenal-Norwich game at the end of 1989 had seven goals, and Arsenal came back from 2-0 down and then 3-2 down to win 4-3. It had two penalties, one in the last minute with the score at 3-3 (both, incidentally, terrible decisions on the part of the referee) … and Norwich’s Gunn saved it, the ball rolled back to Dixon, who scuffed it, and it trickled, very gently, into the empty net. And then, all hell broke loose, with more or less everyone bar the Arsenal keeper involved in a bout of fisticuffs which seemed to last forever but which was probably over in a matter of seconds. Nobody was sent off, but never mind: how was it not possible to enjoy a game like that?
The two teams were fined heavily, which was only right, of course. In situations like this, the FA could hardly send them a letter thanking the players for giving the fans what they want. And given Arsenal’s later problems, discussed elsewhere, the fight has in retrospect lost some of its gloss. But it’s this centre of the world thing again: after the game we went home knowing that what we had seen, live, was the most significant sporting moment of the afternoon, a moment which would be talked about for weeks, months, which would make the news, which everyone would be asking you about at work on Monday morning. So, in the end, one has to conclude that it was a privilege to be there, to see all those grown men make fools of themselves in front of thirty-five thousand people; I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
Saddam Hussein and Warren Barton
ARSENAL v EVERTON
19.1.91
A little-known fact: football fans knew before anybody else that the Gulf War had started. We were sat in front of the TV, waiting for the highlights of the Chelsea-Tottenham Rumbelows Cup-tie just before midnight, when Nick Owen looked at his monitor, announced a newsflash, and expressed the hope that we would be able to go to Stamford Bridge shortly. (The report of the game in the Daily Mirror made peculiar reading the next morning, incidentally, given the circumstances: “Wave after wave of attacks left Tottenham hanging on for grim life”, that kind of thing.) ITV beat the BBC to the news by several minutes.
Like most people, I was frightened: by the possibility of nuclear and chemical weapons being used; of Israel’s involvement; of hundreds of thousands of people dying. By three o’clock on the Saturday afternoon, sixty-three hours after the start of the conflict, I was more discombobulated than I can recall being at the start of a football match: I’d watched too much late-night television, and dreamed too many strange dreams.
There was a different buzz in the crowd, too. The North Bank chanted “Saddam Hussein is a homosexual” and “Saddam run from Arsenal”. (The first message is scarcely in need of decoding; in the second, “Arsenal” refers to the fans rather than the players. Which makes the chant self-aggrandising, rather than ridiculing, and which paradoxically reveals a respect for the Iraqi leader absent in the speculation about his sexual preferences. A consistent ideology is probably too much to ask for.)