The crowd didn’t seem to perturb them in the slightest, however. We broke into a run towards the tube station; so did they. Rat made it, but they caught up with me, pushed me against the wall of the stadium, smacked me in the face a couple of times, stole my red-and-white scarf and left me in a crumpled, traumatised heap on the pavement. People—adults with a reassuring paternal demeanour—stepped over me or around me, just as I have walked around innumerable beatings outside grounds. I had been hit much harder at school (I was not only small but cheeky, a particularly unfortunate combination), but usually by people I knew, which made it somehow acceptable. This was different. This was much scarier: I didn’t understand what the limits were—had I been lucky or unlucky?—and though I knew I was obsessed enough with the team to go back and stand in the same place again, the prospect of getting thumped once a fortnight at twenty to five was bleak.
I really don’t think that I was aware of class then. A few years later, when I discovered politics, I would have felt that I deserved a smack in the mouth for being a privileged middle-class white male—indeed, in my late teens, when the chief source of my ideological input was the first Clash album, I probably would have delivered it myself—but then I just felt a deep sense of disappointment and shame. Disappointment because I had finally begun to suspect that some people didn’t go to football for the Right Reasons (devotion to the Gunners, or at the least a yen for some sparkling wing play); shame because, despite my size and youth, I was still a male and there is something in males, something stupid and unreconstructed but powerful nonetheless, that simply refuses to tolerate anything that might be construed as weakness. (The above version of the afternoon’s events is archetypally masculine: there were two of them against one of me; I was tiny, they were huge, and so on. It could well have been that I was assaulted by a blind seven-year-old with one arm, but my memory has properly protected me from any suspicion that I might have been a wimp from the sticks.)
Perhaps the worst of it was that I couldn’t unburden the experience on to my mum. If I told her, I’d be banned from going to football unaccompanied by my father for years to come; so I kept it to myself, confessed that I’d left the scarf—a present from my gran—on the tube, endured endless complaints about my carelessness and irresponsibility, and was denied my customary Saturday night trip to the chip shop. Any theories about the brutalising experience of urban deprivation would have been wasted on me that night; I was only interested in suburban deprivation, which seemed to me the cruellest deprivation of them all.
Can You See Me on the Box?
SOUTHAMPTON v ARSENAL
10.4.71
On holiday in Bournemouth, where both my grandmothers lived, and conveniently there is an away match at Southampton. So I book a coach ticket, travel along the coast and squirm through a packed Dell to the far edge of the terrace; and the next day, when Southern show the highlights of the game on TV, there I am on the bottom left of the screen every time a corner is taken (McLintock scored from one of them, the decider in a 2-1 win): a sober lad, seven days short of my fourteenth birthday, unmistakably pre-pubescent … but I’m not waving or leering or shoving the boy standing next to me, just standing there, a still point in the middle of all the juvenile hyperactivity around me.
Why was I so serious? I was a child everywhere else: at home; at school, where chronic fits of the giggles seized me well into the sixth form; and out with my friends, one or two of whom now had girlfriends, the most side-splittingly, gut-bustingly, snot-dribblingly hilarious development the rest of us had ever seen. (Symbolically, a nickname was altered. Larry, so-called because of his physical and stylistic resemblances to Larry Lloyd, the Liverpool centre-half, became Caz, because of the interest he now shared with Casanova, the Italian striker. We were delighted with the witticism.) But when I was watching Arsenal, I don’t think I felt relaxed enough to laugh until I was well into my twenties; if I had been filmed by the corner flag at any time between 1968 and 1981 my expression would have been the same.
The simple truth is that obsessions just aren’t funny, and that obsessives don’t laugh. But there’s a complicated truth here as welclass="underline" I don’t think I was very happy, and the problem with being a thirteen-year-old depressive is that when the rest of life is so uproarious, which it invariably is, there is no suitable context for the gloom. How can you express misery when people keep making you snigger all the time? There was no sniggering at Arsenal games, however—not from me, anyway. And even though I had friends who would have been happy to accompany me to matches, significantly my support soon became a solitary activity: the following season I watched around twenty-five games, seventeen or eighteen of them on my own. I just didn’t want to have fun at football. I had fun everywhere else, and I was sick of it. What I needed more than anything was a place where unfocused unhappiness could thrive, where I could be still and worry and mope; I had the blues, and when I watched my team I could unwrap them and let them breathe a little.
How I Won the Double
ARSENAL v NEWCASTLE
17.4.71
In a little over a year, things had changed. The team was still short of stars and pretty low on verve, but they suddenly became very hard to beat. In 1970 the dismal seventeen-year hunt for a trophy finally ended when Arsenal won the European Fairs Cup—amazingly, in some style. After thrashing Ajax, Johann Cruyff and all, in the semi, they came from behind to beat Anderlecht of Belgium 4-3 in the final. They won 3-0 at Highbury in the second leg, and grown men danced on the pitch and wept with the relief of it all. I wasn’t there. I wasn’t allowed to go to a midweek match on a school night on my own.
1971 was Arsenal’s annus mirabilis. They won the League Championship and the FA Cup in the same season, the famous Double that only three teams this century have managed. In fact, they won the trophies in the same week: on Monday night they won the Championship at Tottenham, and on the Saturday the Cup against Liverpool at Wembley. I wasn’t there. I wasn’t at Tottenham because I still wasn’t allowed to go to a midweek match on a school night on my own; I wasn’t at Wembley because Dad didn’t come through with a ticket, despite promises to the contrary and, yes, I’m still bitter twenty years on.
So I wasn’t there for anything. (I wasn’t even there for the parade through Islington on the Sunday after the Cup Final. I had to go to see my Auntie Vi in Dulwich.) I missed it all. And as this book is about the consumption of football, rather than football itself, the Double year—Arsenal’s finest season of the century—doesn’t really have much place in my story, and how about that for impressionism? Sure, I threw a radio jubilantly against my bedroom wall when the final whistle blew at Tottenham; I literally went dizzy with joy when Charlie George scored the winner in the Cup Final and lay on his back with his arms outstretched; I strutted around school, trying to work out how I could humiliate my classmates in the same way they had humiliated me two years before, settling instead for a beatific smile which was understood by both teachers and boys. As far as they were concerned, I was Arsenal, and I was entitled to my triumphant bliss.