Fever Pitch Read online

  Here’s a funny thing, though: Jonathan and I sit there, at Highbury, week after week, partly because of the distressing circumstances that led to his existence. My father left my mother in order to set up home with his mother, and my half-brother was born, and somehow all this turned me into an Arsenal fan; how odd, then, that my peculiar kink should have been transferred on to him, like a genetic flaw.

  Clowns

  ARSENAL v STOKE CITY

  13.9.80

  How many games like this did we watch, between Brady’s departure and George Graham’s arrival? The away team are struggling, unambitious also-rans; their manager (Ron Saunders, or Gordon Lee, or Graham Turner, or, in this case, Alan Durban) wants a draw at Highbury, and plays five defenders, four midfielders who used to be defenders, and a hopeless centre-forward standing on his own up front, ready to challenge for punts from the goalkeeper. Without Liam (and, after this season, without Frank Stapleton), Arsenal didn’t have the wit or the imagination to break the opposition down, and maybe we won (with a couple of goals from near-post corners, say, or a deflected long-shot and a penalty), or maybe we drew (nil-nil), or maybe we lost 1–0 to a goal on the break, but it didn’t really matter anyway. Arsenal were nowhere near good enough to win the League, yet were much too competent to go down; week after week, year after year, we turned up knowing full well that what we were about to witness would depress us profoundly.

  This game against Stoke was very much in the mould – a goalless first half, and then, amid rising discontent, two late goals (ironically, given the towering height of Stoke’s several centre-halves, headed in by the two smallest players on the pitch, Sansom and Hollins). Nobody, not even someone like me, would have been able to remember the game had it not been for the post-match press conference, when Alan Durban became angered by the hostility of the journalists towards his team and his tactics. ‘If you want entertainment,’ he snarled, ‘go and watch clowns.’

  It became one of the most famous football quotes of the decade. The quality papers in particular loved it for its effortless summary of modern football culture: here was conclusive proof that the game had gone to the dogs, that nobody cared about anything other than results any more, that the Corinthian spirit was dead, that hats were no longer thrown in the air. One could see their point. Why should football be different from every other branch of the leisure industry? You won’t find too many Hollywood producers and West End theatre impresarios sneering at the public’s desire to be diverted, so why should football managers get away with it?

  Over the last few years, however, I have come to believe that Alan Durban was right. It was not his job to provide entertainment. It was his job to look after the interests of the Stoke City fans, which means avoiding defeat away from home, keeping a struggling team in the First Division, and maybe winning a few cup games to alleviate the gloom. The Stoke fans would have been happy with a nil-nil draw, just as Arsenal fans are happy enough with nil-nil draws at Spurs or Liverpool or Manchester United; at home, we expect to beat more or less everyone, and we don’t particularly care how it is done.

  This commitment to results means, inevitably, that fans and journalists see games in a profoundly different way. In 1969 I saw George Best play, and score, for Manchester United at Highbury. The experience should have been profound, like seeing Nijinsky dance, or Maria Callas sing, and though I do talk about it in that way sometimes, to younger fans, or those who missed out on Best for other reasons, my fond account is essentially phoney: I hated that afternoon. Every time he got the ball he frightened me, and I wished then, as I suppose I wish now, that he had been injured. And I have seen Law and Charlton, Hoddle and Ardiles, Dalglish and Rush, Hurst and Peters, and the same thing happened: I have not enjoyed anything these players have ever done at Highbury (even though I have, on occasions, grudgingly admired things they have done against other teams). Gazza’s free kick against Arsenal in the FA Cup semi-final at Wembley was simply astonishing, one of the most remarkable goals I have ever seen… but I wish with all my heart that I had not seen it, and that he had not scored it. Indeed, for the previous month I had been praying that Gascoigne would not be playing, which emphasises the separateness of football: who would buy an expensive ticket for the theatre and hope that the star of the show was indisposed?

  Neutrals loved the glorious theatre of that Gascoigne moment, of course, but there were very few neutrals in the stadium. There were Arsenal fans, who were as horrified as I was, and Tottenham fans, who were just as thrilled with the second goal, a two-yard Gary Lineker tap-in after a scramble – in fact, they went even more berserk then, because at 2–0 after ten minutes Arsenal were dead and buried. So where is the relationship between the fan and entertainment, when the fan has such a problematic relationship with some of the game’s greatest moments?

  There is such a relationship, but it is far from straightforward. Tottenham, generally regarded as being the better footballing team, are not as well-supported as Arsenal, for example; and teams with a reputation for entertaining (West Ham, Chelsea, Norwich) don’t get queues around the block. The way our team plays is beside the point for most of us, just as winning cups and championships is beside the point. Few of us have chosen our clubs, they have simply been presented to us; and so as they slip from the Second Division to the Third, or sell their best players, or buy players who you know can’t play, or bash the ball for the seven hundredth time towards a nine foot centre-forward, we simply curse, go home, worry for a fortnight and then come back to suffer all over again.

  For my own part, I am an Arsenal fan first and a football fan second (and, yes, again, I know all the jokes). I will never be able to enjoy the Gazza goal, and there are countless other similar moments. But I know what entertaining football is, and have loved the relatively few occasions when Arsenal have managed to produce it; and when other teams who are not in competition with Arsenal in any way play with flair and verve, then I can appreciate that, too. Like everyone, I have lamented long and loud the deficiencies of the English game, and the permanently depressing ugliness of the football that our national team plays, but really, deep down, this is pub-speak, and not much more. Complaining about boring football is a little like complaining about the sad ending of King Lear: it misses the point somehow, and this is what Alan Durban understood: that football is an alternative universe, as serious and as stressful as work, with the same worries and hopes and disappointments and occasional dations. I go to football for loads of reasons, but I don’t go for entertainment, and when I look around me on a Saturday and see those panicky, glum faces, I see that others feel the same. For the committed fan, entertaining football exists in the same way as those trees that fall in the middle of the jungle: you presume it happens, but you’re not in a position to appreciate it. Sports journalists and armchair Corinthians are the Amazon Indians who know more than we do – but in another way they know much, much less.

  Same Old Arsenal

  ARSENAL v BRIGHTON

  1.11.80

  A nothing game, between two nothing teams; I doubt if anyone else who was there remembers anything about it at all, unless it was their first time, or their last time, and doubtless my two companions for the afternoon, my dad and my half-brother, had forgotten the occasion by the following day. I recall it only because (only because!) it was the last time I was at Highbury with my dad, and though we might well go again sometime (he has made a couple of very small noises recently) the game now has an end-of-an-era aura about it.

  The team were in much the same state as we had found them twelve years before, and I am sure that he must have complained about the cold, and Arsenal’s ineptitude, and I am sure that I felt responsible for both, and wanted to apologise. And I wasn’t much different in important ways, either. I was still as gloomy, somehow, as I had been when I was a boy, although because I was now aware of this gloom, understood what it was, it seemed darker and more threatening than it had ever done before. And, of course, the team were still in there,
mixed in with it all, leading these lows from the front or trailing them from behind, I don’t know which.

  But other things had changed, permanently and for the better, particularly in my dealings with my ‘other’ family. My stepmother had long ceased to be the Enemy – there was a real warmth in our relationship that neither of us could have anticipated years before – and there had never been any problem with the kids; but most important of all, my father and I, almost imperceptibly, had reached the stage where football was no longer the chief method of discourse between us. I lived with him and his family in London for the whole of the 80/81 season, my teacher training year; this was the first time we had had such an arrangement since I was a child, and it was fine. We had other stuff going on by now, as we have done ever since. The failure of his first marriage must still be mixed in there somehow, I suppose, but we have managed to fashion something that works well in its own way; and though there are still frustrations and difficulties, I don’t think that these are ruinous, or that the problems we have are any worse than my friends have with their fathers – indeed, we get along much better than most.

  I didn’t think all that at the time, of course, because as far as I knew, a 2–0 home victory over Brighton had no particular significance, and there would be another last game for us some other time – but then, our début together had been equally inauspicious. It’s best just to leave us there, the three of us – Dad topping up his tea with the contents of his hip flask and grumbling about still watching the same old bloody Arsenal, me shifting around uncomfortably in my seat, hoping that somehow things would get better, and Jonathan, still small and pale with cold and, for all I know, wishing that his brother and his father had found a different way to sort out their problems in 1968.

  A Trivial Pursuit

  ARSENAL v MANCHESTER CITY

  24.2.81

  I got lost around this time, and stayed lost for the next few years. Between one home game (against Coventry) and the next (a midweek game against Manchester City), I split up with my girlfriend, all the things that had been rotting away inside me for who knows how many years oozed out for the first time, I started my teaching practice in a difficult west London school, and Arsenal got a draw at Stoke and a beating at Forest. It was strange to see the same players trotting out that evening as they had trotted out three weeks before: I felt that they should have had the decency to reinvent themselves, accept that the faces and physiques and shortcomings they had had in the Coventry game belonged to another period entirely.

  If there had been a match every weekday evening and weekend afternoon I would have gone, because the games acted as punctuation marks (if only commas) between bleak periods, when I drank too much and smoked too much and weight fell off me gratifyingly quickly. I remember this one so clearly simply because it was the first of them – they all began to merge into each other a little after this; Lord knows nothing much happened on the pitch, apart from Talbot and Sunderland trundling in a couple of goals.

  But football had taken on yet another meaning now, connected with my new career. It had occurred to me – as I think it occurs to many young teachers of a similar ilk – that my interests (football and pop music in particular) would be an advantage in the classroom, that I would be able to ‘identify’ with ‘the kids’ because I understood the value of the Jam and Laurie Cunningham. It had not occurred to me that I was as childish as my interests; and that although, yes, I knew what my pupils were talking about most of the time, and that this gave me an entrée of sorts, it didn’t help me to teach them any better. In fact the chief problem I had – namely, that on a bad day there was uproarious mayhem in my classroom – was actually exacerbated by my partisanship. ‘I’m an Arsenal fan,’ I said in my best groovy teacher voice, as a way of introducing myself to some difficult second years. ‘Boo!’ they replied, noisily and at great length.

  On my second or third day, I asked a group of third years to write down on a piece of paper their favourite book, favourite song, favourite film and so on, and went around the class talking to them all in turn. This was how I discovered that the bad boy at the back, the one with the mod haircut and the permanent sneer (and the one, inevitably, with the biggest vocabulary and the best writing style), was completely consumed by all things Arsenal, and I pounced. But when I had made my confession, there was no meeting of minds, or fond, slow-motion embrace; instead, I received a look of utter contempt. ‘You?’ he said. ‘You? What do you know about it?’

  For a moment I saw myself through his eyes, a pillock in a tie with an ingratiating smile, desperately trying to worm my way into places I had no right to be, and understood. But then something else – a rage born out of thirteen years of Highbury hell, probably, and an unwillingness to abandon one of the most important elements of my self-identity to chalky, tweedy facelessness – took over, and I went mad.

  The madness took a strange form. I wanted to grab that kid by his lapels and bang him against the wall, and yell at him, over and over again, ‘I know more than you ever will, you snotty little fuckwit!’ but I knew that this was not advisable. So I spluttered for a few seconds, and then to my surprise (I watched them as they spewed forth) a torrent of quiz questions gushed out of me. ‘Who scored for us in the ‘69 League Cup Final? Who went in goal when Bob Wilson got carried off in ‘72 at Villa Park? Who did we get from Spurs in exchange for David Jenkins? Who…?’ On and on I went; the boy sat there, the questions bouncing off the top of his head like snowballs, while the rest of the class watched in bemused silence.

  It worked, in the end – or at least, I managed to convince the boy that I was not the man he had taken me for. The morning after the Manchester City game, the first home game following my trivia explosion, the two of us talked quietly and cordially about the desperate need for a new midfield player, and I never had any trouble with him for the remainder of my practice. But what worried me was that I hadn’t been able to let it go, that football, the great retardant, hadn’t let me act like a grown-up in the face of a young lad’s jibe. Teaching, it seemed to me, was by definition a job for grown-ups, and I appeared to have got stuck somewhere around my fourteenth birthday – stuck in the third year, in fact.

  Coach

  MY SCHOOL v THEIR SCHOOL

  January 1982

  I’d seen Kes, of course; I’d laughed at Brian Glover dribbling around kids and pushing them over, awarding himself penalties, doing the commentary. And my friend Ray, the deputy head of the school in Cambridge where I was now a Scale 1 English teacher (Cambridge because a job came up there, because I still had friends there, and because my teacher training year in London had taught me that I should avoid London schools if at all possible) had an endless fund of true stories about headmasters who appointed themselves referees for important matches, and sent the fifteen-year-old star striker of the opposing team off in the first two minutes of the match. I was well aware, therefore, of the way schools football encouraged teachers to behave in an astonishingly foolish manner.

  But what would you do, if your fifth years were 2–0 down at half-time in a local derby (although admittedly schools football does tend to throw up a number of local derbies), and you made an astute tactical switch at half-time, and the boys pulled one back, and then, bang on ninety minutes, when your voice is hoarse with frustration and impotence, they equalise? You would probably find yourself, as I did, two feet up in the air, fists punching the sky, letting rip with an undignified and certainly unteacherly howl… and just before your feet hit the touchline, you would remember who you were supposed to be, and how old these kids were, and you would start to feel daft.

  On the Pitch

  ARSENAL v WEST HAM

  1.5.82

  Looking back, it was quite clear that the stuff on the terraces was getting worse and that sooner or later something was going to happen that would change it all, somehow. In my experience there was more violence in the seventies – that is to say, there was fighting more or less every week – but in
the first half of the eighties, with Millwall’s F-Troop, West Ham’s Inter-City Firm (and the calling cards that these factions were reputed to leave on the battered bodies of their victims), the England fans and their alleged National Front agenda – it was less predictable and much nastier. Police confiscated knives and machetes and other weapons I did not recognise, things with spikes coming out of them; and there was that famous photograph of a fan with a dart sticking from his nose.

  One beautiful spring morning in 1982 I took Ray’s son Mark, then a teenager, down to Highbury to see the West Ham game, and explained to him in an insufferably old-hand way how and where the trouble, if any, would start. I pointed to the top right-hand corner of the North Bank and told him that there were probably West Ham fans up there, without colours, who would either find themselves surrounded by police, and thus rendered harmless, or who would attempt to force their way under the roof and drive out the Arsenal fans gathered there; which was why we were safe on the bottom left-hand side, where I had been standing for a few years now. He was duly grateful, I felt, for my guidance and protection.

  In the event I was able, by casting an expert eye over the area, to reassure him that there were no Hammers fans there, and we settled down to watch the game; and about three minutes after the kick-off, there was a huge roar immediately behind us and that terrible, eerily muffled sound of boot on denim. Those behind us pushed forward, and we found ourselves being forced towards the pitch – and then there was another roar, and we looked round and saw billowing clouds of thick yellow smoke. Tucking tear gas!’ somebody shouted, and, although thankfully it wasn’t, the alarm inevitably induced panic. There were now so many people pouring out of the North Bank that we were being driven right down against the low wall which separated us from the pitch, and in the end we had no option: Mark and I, and hundreds of others, jumped over it and on to the holy turf just as West Ham were about to take a corner. We stood there for a few moments, feeling rather self-conscious about standing in the penalty-area during a First Division match, and then the referee blew the whistle and took the players off. And that was more or less the end of our involvement in the incident. We were all escorted the length of the pitch down to the Clock End, from where we watched the rest of the game in fairly subdued silence.