Fever Pitch Part 1

Fever Pitch.

by Nick Hornby.

INTRODUCTION

SUNDAY, 14TH JULY 1991

It's in there all the time, looking for a way out.

I wake up around ten, make two cups of tea, take them into the bedroom, place one on each side of the bed. We both sip thoughtfully; so soon after waking there are long, dream-filled gaps between the occasional remark about the rain outside, about last night, about smoking in the bedroom when I have agreed not to. She asks what I'm doing this week, and I think: (1) I'm seeing Matthew on Wednesday. (2) Matthew's still got my Champions Champions video. (3) video. (3) [Remembering that Matthew, a purely nominal a.r.s.enal fan, has not been to Highbury for a couple of years, and so has had no opportunity to watch the more recent recruits in the flesh] [Remembering that Matthew, a purely nominal a.r.s.enal fan, has not been to Highbury for a couple of years, and so has had no opportunity to watch the more recent recruits in the flesh] I wonder what he thought of Anders Limpar. I wonder what he thought of Anders Limpar.

And in three easy stages, within fifteen, twenty minutes of waking, I'm on my way. I see Limpar running at Gillespie, swaying to his right, going down: PENALTY! DIXON SCORES! 2-0! ... Merson's back-heel flick and Smith's right-foot shot into the far corner in the same match ... Merson's little push past Grobbelaar up at Anfield ... Davis's swivel and smash against Villa ... (And this, remember, is a morning in July, our month off, when there is no club football of any kind.) Sometimes, when I let this dreamy state take me over completely, I go on and back, through Anfield '89, Wembley '87, Stamford Bridge '78, my whole footballing life flas.h.i.+ng before my eyes.

"What are you thinking about?" she asks.

At this point I lie. I wasn't thinking about Martin Amis or Gerard Depardieu or the Labour Party at all. But then, obsessives have no choice; they have to lie on occasions like this. If we told the truth every time, then we would be unable to maintain relations.h.i.+ps with anyone from the real world. We would be left to rot with our a.r.s.enal programmes or our collection of original blue-label Stax records or our King Charles spaniels, and our two-minute daydreams would become longer and longer and longer until we lost our jobs and stopped bathing and shaving and eating, and we would lie on the floor in our own filth rewinding the video again and again in an attempt to memorise by heart the whole whole of the commentary, including David Pleat's expert a.n.a.lysis, for the night of 26th of May 1989. (You think I had to look the date up? Ha!) The truth is this: of the commentary, including David Pleat's expert a.n.a.lysis, for the night of 26th of May 1989. (You think I had to look the date up? Ha!) The truth is this: for alarmingly large chunks of an average day, I am a moron for alarmingly large chunks of an average day, I am a moron.

I would not wish to suggest that the contemplation of football is in itself an improper use of the imagination. David Lacey, the chief football correspondent for the Guardian Guardian, is a fine writer and an obviously intelligent man, and presumably he must devote even more of his interior life than I do to the game. The difference between Lacey and me is that I rarely think think. I remember, I fantasise, I try to visualise every one of Alan Smith's goals, I tick off the number of First Division grounds I have visited; once or twice, when I have been unable to sleep, I have tried to count every single a.r.s.enal player I have ever seen. (When I was a kid I knew the names of the wives and girlfriends of the Double-winning team; now, I can only remember that Charlie George's fiancee was called Susan Farge, and that Bob Wilson's wife was called Megs, but even this partial recall is terrifyingly unnecessary.) None of this is thought thought, in the proper sense of the word. There is no a.n.a.lysis, or self-awareness, or mental rigour going on at all, because obsessives are denied any kind of perspective on their own pa.s.sion. This, in a sense, is what defines an obsessive (and serves to explain why so few of them recognise themselves as such. A fellow fan who last season went to watch Wimbledon reserves against Luton reserves on a freezing January afternoon on his own not in a spirit of one-upmans.h.i.+p or some kind of self-mocking, laddish wackiness, but because he was genuinely interested genuinely interested recently strenuously denied to me that he was eccentric in any way). recently strenuously denied to me that he was eccentric in any way).

Fever Pitch is an attempt to gain some kind of an angle on my obsession. Why has the relations.h.i.+p that began as a schoolboy crush endured for nearly a quarter of a century, longer than any other relations.h.i.+p I have made of my own free will? (I love my family dearly, but they were rather foisted on me, and I am no longer in touch with any of the friends I made before I was fourteen apart from the only other a.r.s.enal fan at school.) And why has this affinity managed to survive my periodic feelings of indifference, sorrow and very real hatred? is an attempt to gain some kind of an angle on my obsession. Why has the relations.h.i.+p that began as a schoolboy crush endured for nearly a quarter of a century, longer than any other relations.h.i.+p I have made of my own free will? (I love my family dearly, but they were rather foisted on me, and I am no longer in touch with any of the friends I made before I was fourteen apart from the only other a.r.s.enal fan at school.) And why has this affinity managed to survive my periodic feelings of indifference, sorrow and very real hatred?

The book is also, in part, an exploration of some of the meanings that football seems to contain for many of us. It has become quite clear to me that my devotion says things about my own character and personal history, but the way the game is consumed seems to offer all sorts of information about our society and culture. (I have friends who will regard this as pretentious, self-serving nonsense, the kind of desperate justification one might expect from a man who has spent a huge chunk of his leisure time fretting miserably in the cold. They are particularly resistant to the idea because I tend to overestimate the metaphorical value of football, and therefore introduce it into conversations where it simply does not belong. I now accept that football has no relevance to the Falklands conflict, the Rushdie affair, the Gulf War, childbirth, the ozone layer, the poll tax, etc., etc., and I would like to take this opportunity to apologise to anyone who has had to listen to my pathetically strained a.n.a.logies.) Finally, Fever Pitch Fever Pitch is about being a fan. I have read books written by people who obviously love is about being a fan. I have read books written by people who obviously love football football, but that's a different thing entirely; and I have read books written, for want of a better word, by hooligans, but at least 95 per cent of the millions who watch games every year have never hit anyone in their lives. So this is for the rest of us, and for anyone who has wondered what it might be like to be this way. While the details here are unique to me, I hope that they will strike a chord with anyone who has ever found themselves drifting off, in the middle of a working day or a film or a conversation, towards a left-foot volley into a top right-hand corner ten or fifteen or twenty-five years ago.

1968-1975

HOME DEBUT

a.r.s.eNAL v STOKE CITY

14.9.68

I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would bring with it.

In May '68 (a date with connotations, of course, but I am still more likely to think of Jeff Astle than of Paris), just after my eleventh birthday, my father asked me if I'd like to go with him to the FA Cup Final between West Brom and Everton; a colleague had offered him a couple of tickets. I told him that I wasn't interested in football, not even in the Cup Final true, as far as I was aware, but perversely I watched the whole match on television anyway. A few weeks later I watched the Man Utd-Benfica game, enthralled, with my mum, and at the end of August I got up early to hear how United had got on in the final of the World Club Champions.h.i.+p. I loved Bobby Charlton and George Best (I knew nothing about Denis Law, the third of the Holy Trinity, who had missed the Benfica match through injury) with a pa.s.sion that had taken me completely by surprise; it lasted three weeks, until my dad took me to Highbury for the first time.

My parents were separated by 1968. My father had met someone else and moved out, and I lived with my mother and my sister in a small detached house in the Home Counties. This state of affairs was unremarkable enough in itself (although I cannot recall anyone else in my cla.s.s with an absent parent the sixties took another seven or eight years to travel the twenty-odd miles down the M4 from London), but the break-up had wounded all four of us in various ways, as break-ups are wont to do.

There were, inevitably, a number of difficulties that arose from this new phase of family life, although the most crucial in this context was probably the most ba.n.a.l: the commonplace but nevertheless intractable one-parent Sat.u.r.day-afternoon-at-the-zoo problem. Often Dad was only able to visit us midweek; no one really wanted to stay in and watch TV, for obvious reasons, but on the other hand there wasn't really anywhere else a man could take two children under twelve. Usually the three of us drove to a neighbouring town, or up to one of the airport hotels, where we sat in a cold and early-evening deserted restaurant, and where Gill and I ate steak or chicken, one or the other, in more or less complete silence (children are not great dinner conversationalists, as a rule, and in any case we were used to eating with the TV on), while Dad watched. He must have been desperate to find something else to do with us, but the options in a commuter-belt town between 6.30 and 9.00 on a Monday night were limited.

That summer, Dad and I went to a hotel near Oxford for a week, where in the evenings we sat in a deserted hotel dining room, and where I ate steak or chicken, one or the other, in more or less complete silence. After dinner we went to watch TV with the other guests, and Dad drank too much. Things had to change.

My father tried again with the football that September, and he must have been amazed when I said yes. I had never before said yes to any suggestion of his, although I rarely said no either. I just smiled politely and made a noise intended to express interest but no commitment, a maddening trait I think I invented especially for that time in my life but which has somehow remained with me ever since. For two or three years he had been trying to take me to the theatre; every time he asked I simply shrugged and grinned idiotically, with the result that eventually Dad would get angry and tell me to forget it, which was what I wanted him to say. And it wasn't just Shakespeare, either: I was equally suspicious of rugby matches and cricket matches and boat trips and days out to Silverstone and Longleat. I didn't want to do anything at all. None of this was intended to punish my father for his absence: I really thought that I would be happy to go anywhere with him, apart from every single place he could think of.

1968 was, I suppose, the most traumatic year of my life. After my parents' separation we moved into a smaller house, but for a time, because of some sort of chain, we were homeless and had to stay with our neighbours; I became seriously ill with jaundice; and I started at the local grammar school. I would have to be extraordinarily literal to believe that the a.r.s.enal fever about to grip me had nothing to do with all this mess. (And I wonder how many other fans, if they were to examine the circ.u.mstances that led up to their obsession, could find some sort of equivalent Freudian drama? After all, football's a great game and everything, but what is it that separates those who are happy to attend half a dozen games a season watch the big matches, stay away from the rubbish, surely the sensible way from those who feel compelled to attend them all? Why travel from London to Plymouth on a Wednesday, using up a precious day's holiday, to see a game whose outcome was effectively decided in the first leg at Highbury? And, if this theory of fandom as therapy is anywhere near the mark, what the h.e.l.l is buried in the subconscious of people who go to Leyland DAF Trophy games what the h.e.l.l is buried in the subconscious of people who go to Leyland DAF Trophy games? Perhaps it is best not to know.) There is a short story by the American writer Andre Dubus ent.i.tled "The Winter Father", about a man whose divorce has separated him from his two children. In the winter his relations.h.i.+p with them is tetchy and strained: they move from afternoon jazz club to cinema to restaurant, and stare at each other. But in the summer, when they can go to the beach, they get on fine. "The long beach and the sea were their lawn; the blanket their home; the ice chest and thermos their kitchen. They lived as a family again." Sitcoms and films have long recognised this terrible tyranny of place, and depict men traipsing round parks with fractious kids and a frisbee. But "The Winter Father" means a lot to me because it goes further than that: it manages to isolate what is valuable in the relations.h.i.+p between parents and children, and explains simply and precisely why why the zoo trips are doomed. the zoo trips are doomed.

In this country, as far as I know, Bridlington and Minehead are unable to provide the same kind of liberation as the New England beaches in Dubus's story; but my father and I were about to come up with the perfect English equivalent. Sat.u.r.day afternoons in north London gave us a context in which we could be together. We could talk when we wanted, the football gave us something to talk about (and anyway the silences weren't oppressive), and the days had a structure, a routine. The a.r.s.enal pitch was to be our lawn (and, being an English lawn, we would usually peer at it mournfully through driving rain); the Gunners' Fish Bar on Blackstock Road our kitchen; and the West Stand our home. It was a wonderful set-up, and changed our lives just when they needed changing most, but it was also exclusive: Dad and my sister never really found anywhere to live at all. Maybe now that wouldn't happen; maybe a nine-year-old girl in the nineties would feel that she had just as much right to go to a game as we did. But in 1969 in our town, this was not an idea that had much currency, and my sister had to stay at home with her mum and her dolls.

I don't recall much about the football that first afternoon. One of those tricks of memory enables me to see the only goal clearly: the referee awards a penalty (he runs into the area, points a dramatic finger, there's a roar); a hush as Terry Neill takes it, and a groan as Gordon Banks dives and pushes the ball out; it falls conveniently at Neill's feet and this time he scores. But I am sure this picture has been built up from what I have long known about similar incidents, and actually I was aware of none of this. All I really saw on the day was a bewildering chain of incomprehensible incidents, at the end of which everyone around me stood and shouted. If I did the same, it must have been an embarra.s.sing ten seconds after the rest of the crowd.

But I do have other, more reliable, and probably more meaningful memories. I remember the overwhelming maleness maleness of it all cigar and pipe smoke, foul language (words I had heard before, but not from adults, not at that volume), and only years later did it occur to me that this was bound to have an effect on a boy who lived with his mother and his sister; and I remember looking at the crowd more than at the players. From where I was sitting I could probably have counted twenty thousand heads; only the sports fan (or Mick Jagger or Nelson Mandela) can do that. My father told me that there were nearly as many people in the stadium as lived in my town, and I was suitably awed. of it all cigar and pipe smoke, foul language (words I had heard before, but not from adults, not at that volume), and only years later did it occur to me that this was bound to have an effect on a boy who lived with his mother and his sister; and I remember looking at the crowd more than at the players. From where I was sitting I could probably have counted twenty thousand heads; only the sports fan (or Mick Jagger or Nelson Mandela) can do that. My father told me that there were nearly as many people in the stadium as lived in my town, and I was suitably awed.

(We have forgotten that football crowds are still astonis.h.i.+ngly large, mostly because since the war they have become progressively smaller. Managers frequently complain about local apathy, particularly when their mediocre First or Second Division team has managed to avoid a good hiding for a few weeks; but the fact that, say, Derby County managed to attract an average crowd of nearly seventeen thousand in 1990/91, the year they finished bottom of the First Division, is a miracle. Let's say that three thousand of these are away supporters; that means that among the remaining fourteen thousand from Derby, there were a number of people who went at least eighteen times eighteen times to see the worst football of last or indeed most other seasons. Why, really, should anyone have gone at all?) to see the worst football of last or indeed most other seasons. Why, really, should anyone have gone at all?) It wasn't the size of the crowd that impressed me most, however, or the way that adults were allowed to shout the word "w.a.n.kER!" as loudly as they wanted without attracting any attention. What impressed me most was just how much most of the men around me hated hated, really hated hated, being there. As far as I could tell, n.o.body seemed to enjoy, in the way that I understood the word, anything that happened during the entire afternoon. Within minutes of the kick-off there was real anger ("You're a DISGRACE, Gould. He's a DISGRACE!" "A hundred quid a week? A HUNDRED QUID A WEEK! They should give that to me for watching you."); as the game went on, the anger turned into outrage, and then seemed to curdle into sullen, silent discontent. Yes, yes, I know all the jokes. What else could I have expected at Highbury? But I went to Chelsea and to Tottenham and to Rangers, and saw the same thing: that the natural state of the football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score.

I think we a.r.s.enal fans know, deep down, that the football at Highbury has not often been pretty, and that therefore our reputation as the most boring team in the entire history of the universe is not as mystifying as we pretend: yet when we have a successful side much is forgiven. The a.r.s.enal team I saw on that afternoon had been spectacularly unsuccessful for some time. Indeed they had won nothing since the Coronation and this abject and unambiguous failure was simply rubbing salt into the fans' stigmata. Many of those around us had the look of men who had seen every game of every barren season. The fact that I was intruding on a marriage that had gone disastrously sour lent my afternoon a particularly thrilling prurience (if it had been a real marriage, children would have been barred from the ground): one partner was lumbering around in a pathetic attempt to please, while the other turned his face to the wall, too full of loathing even to watch. Those fans who could not remember the thirties (although at the end of the sixties a good many of them could), when the club won five Champions.h.i.+ps and two FA Cups, could remember the Comp-tons and Joe Mercer from just over a decade before; the stadium itself, with its beautiful art deco stands and its Jacob Epstein busts, seemed to disapprove of the current mob even as much as my neighbours did.

I'd been to public entertainments before, of course; I'd been to the cinema and the pantomime and to see my mother sing in the chorus of the White Horse Inn White Horse Inn at the Town Hall. But that was different. The audiences I had hitherto been a part of had paid to have a good time and, though occasionally one might spot a fidgety child or a yawning adult, I hadn't ever noticed faces contorted by rage or despair or frustration. Entertainment as pain was an idea entirely new to me, and it seemed to be something I'd been waiting for. at the Town Hall. But that was different. The audiences I had hitherto been a part of had paid to have a good time and, though occasionally one might spot a fidgety child or a yawning adult, I hadn't ever noticed faces contorted by rage or despair or frustration. Entertainment as pain was an idea entirely new to me, and it seemed to be something I'd been waiting for.

It might not be too fanciful to suggest that it was an idea which shaped my life. I have always been accused of taking the things I love football, of course, but also books and records much too seriously, and I do feel a kind of anger when I hear a bad record, or when someone is lukewarm about a book that means a lot to me. Perhaps it was these desperate, bitter men in the West Stand at a.r.s.enal who taught me how to get angry in this way; and perhaps it is why I earn some of my living as a critic maybe it's those voices I can hear when I write. "You're a w.a.n.kER, X." "The Booker Prize? THE BOOKER PRIZE? They should give that to me for having to read you."

Just this one afternoon started the whole thing off there was no prolonged courts.h.i.+p and I can see now that if I'd gone to White Hart Lane or Stamford Bridge the same thing would have happened, so overwhelming was the experience the first time. In a desperate and percipient attempt to stop the inevitable, Dad quickly took me to Spurs to see Jimmy Greaves score four against Sunderland in a 5-1 win, but the damage had been done, and the six goals and all the great players left me cold: I'd already fallen for the team that beat Stoke 1-0 from a penalty rebound.

A SPARE JIMMY HUSBAND

a.r.s.eNAL v WEST HAM

26.10.68

On this, my third visit to Highbury (a goalless draw I'd now seen my team score three times in four and a half hours), all the kids were given a free Soccer Stars alb.u.m. Each page of the alb.u.m was devoted to one First Division team, and contained fourteen or fifteen s.p.a.ces in which to glue stickers of the players; we were also given a little packet of the stickers to start our collection off.

Promotional offers aren't often described thus, I know, but the alb.u.m proved to be the last crucial step in a socialisation process that had begun with the Stoke game. The benefits of liking football at school were simply incalculable (even though the games master was a Welshman who once memorably tried to ban us from kicking a round ball even when we got home): at least half my cla.s.s, and probably a quarter of the staff, loved the game.

Unsurprisingly, I was the only a.r.s.enal supporter in the first year. QPR, the nearest First Division team, had Rodney Marsh; Chelsea had Peter Osgood, Tottenham had Greaves, West Ham had the three World Cup heroes, Hurst, Moore and Peters. a.r.s.enal's best-known player was probably Ian Ure, famous only for being hilariously useless and for his contributions to the television series Quiz Ball Quiz Ball. But in that glorious first football-saturated term, it didn't matter that I was on my own. In our dormitory town no club had a monopoly on support and, in any case, my new best friend, a Derby County fan like his father and uncle, was similarly isolated. The main thing was that you were a believer. Before school, at breaktime and at lunch time, we played football on the tennis courts with a tennis ball, and in between lessons we swapped Soccer Star stickers Ian Ure for Geoff Hurst (extraordinarily, the stickers were of equal value), Terry Venables for Ian St John, Tony Hately for Andy Loch-head.

And so transferring to secondary school was rendered unimaginably easy. I was probably the smallest boy in the first year, but my size didn't matter, although my friends.h.i.+p with the Derby fan, the tallest by several feet, was pretty handy; and though my performance as a student was undistinguished (I was bunged into the "B" stream at the end of the year and stayed there throughout my entire grammar school career), the lessons were a breeze. Even the fact that I was one of only three boys wearing shorts wasn't as traumatic as it should have been. As long as you knew the name of the Burnley manager, n.o.body much cared that you were an eleven-year-old dressed as a six-year-old.

This pattern has repeated itself several times since then. The first and easiest friends I made at college were football fans; a studious examination of a newspaper back page during the lunch hour of the first day in a new job usually provokes some kind of response. And yes, I am aware of the downside of this wonderful facility that men have: they become repressed, they fail in their relations.h.i.+ps with women, their conversation is trivial and boorish, they find themselves unable to express their emotional needs, they cannot relate to their children, and they die lonely and miserable. But, you know, what the h.e.l.l? If you can walk into a school full of eight hundred boys, most of them older, all of them bigger, without feeling intimidated, simply because you have a spare Jimmy Husband in your blazer pocket, then it seems like a trade-off worth making.

DON ROGERS

SWINDON TOWN v a.r.s.eNAL

(at Wembley) 15.3.69

Dad and I went to Highbury another half a dozen times that season, and by the middle of March 1969, I had gone way beyond fandom. On matchdays I awoke with a nervous churning in the stomach, a feeling that would continue to intensify until a.r.s.enal had taken a two-goal lead, when I would begin to relax: I had only relaxed once, when we beat Everton 3-1 just before Christmas. Such was my Sat.u.r.day sickness that I insisted on being inside the stadium shortly after one o'clock, some two hours before the kick-off; this quirk my father bore with patience and good humour, even though it was frequently cold and from 2.15 onwards my distraction was such that all communication was impossible.

My pre-match nerves were the same however meaningless the game. That season a.r.s.enal had blown all chance of the Champions.h.i.+p by about November, a little later than usual; but this meant that in the wider scheme of things it scarcely mattered whether they won the games I went to see. It mattered desperately to me, however. In these early stages, my relations.h.i.+p with a.r.s.enal was of an entirely personal nature: the team only existed when I was in the stadium (I can't remember feeling especially devastated by their poor results away from home). As far as I was concerned, if they won the games I saw 5-0, and lost the rest 10-0, that would have been a good season, probably to be commemorated by the team travelling down the M4 to see me on an open-topped bus.

I made an exception for the FA Cup-ties; these I wanted a.r.s.enal to win despite my absence, but we got knocked out 1-0 at West Brom. (I had been forced to go to bed before the result came through the tie was played on a Wednesday night and my mother wrote the score down on a piece of paper and attached it to my bookcase ready for me to look at in the morning. I looked long and hard: I felt betrayed by what she had written. If she loved me, then surely she could have come up with a better result than this. Just as hurtful as the score was the exclamation mark she had placed after it, as if it were ... well, an exclamation. It seemed as inappropriate as if it had been used to emphasise the death of a relative: "Gran died peacefully in her sleep!" These disappointments were still .entirely new to me, of course, but like all fans, I've come to expect them now. At the time of writing, I have felt the pain of FA Cup defeat twenty-two times, but never as keenly as that first one.) The League Cup I'd never really heard of, mainly because it was a midweek compet.i.tion and I hadn't yet been allowed to attend a midweek game. But when a.r.s.enal reached the final, I was prepared to accept it as a consolation for what had seemed to me to be a heartbreakingly poor season, although it had in fact been pretty run-of-the-mill for the sixties.

So Dad paid a tout way over the odds for a pair of tickets (I never found out exactly how much, but later, with justified anger, he led me to understand that they'd been very expensive) and on Sat.u.r.day, 15th March ("BEWARE THE IDES OF MARCH" was the headline in the Evening Standard's Evening Standard's special colour supplement), I went to Wembley for the first time. special colour supplement), I went to Wembley for the first time.

a.r.s.enal were playing Swindon Town, a Third Division team, and no one seemed to have any real doubts that a.r.s.enal would win the game, and therefore their first cup for sixteen years. I wasn't so sure. Silent in the car all the way there, I asked Dad on the steps up to the stadium whether he was as confident as everyone else. I tried to make the question conversational sports chatter between two men on a day out but it wasn't like that at all: what I really wanted was rea.s.surance from an adult, a parent, my father, that what I was about to witness wasn't going to scar me for life. "Look," I should have said to him, "when they're playing at home, in an ordinary League game, I'm so frightened they'll lose that I can't think or speak or even breathe, sometimes. If you think Swindon have any kind of chance at all, even a chance in a million, it's best if you take me home now, because I don't think I'd be able to cope."

If I had come out with that, then it would have been unreasonable of my father to make me go inside the stadium. But I simply asked him, in an a.s.sumed spirit of idle curiosity, who he thought would win the game, and he said he thought a.r.s.enal would, three or four nothing, the same as everyone else did, and so I got the rea.s.surance I was looking for; but I was scarred for life anyway. Like my mother's exclamation mark, my father's blithe confidence later seemed like a betrayal.

I was so scared that the Wembley experience a crowd of a hundred thousand, the huge pitch, the noise, the sense of antic.i.p.ation pa.s.sed me by completely. If I noticed anything about the place at all it was that it wasn't Highbury, and my sense of alienation simply added to my unease. I sat s.h.i.+vering until Swindon scored shortly before half-time, and then the fear turned to misery. The goal was one of the most calamitously stupid ever given away by a team of professionals: an inept back-pa.s.s (by Ian Ure, naturally), followed by a missed tackle, followed by a goalkeeper (Bob Wilson) slipping over in the mud and allowing the ball to trickle over the line just inside the right-hand post. For the first time, suddenly, I became aware of all the Swindon fans sitting around us, with their awful West Country accents, their absurd innocent glee, their delirious disbelief. I hadn't ever come across opposing fans before, and I loathed them in a way I had never before loathed strangers.

With one minute remaining in the game, a.r.s.enal equalised, unexpectedly and bizarrely, a diving header from a rebound off the goalkeeper's knee. I tried not to weep with relief, but the effort was beyond me; I stood on the seat and yelled at my father, over and over again, "We'll be all right now, won't we? We'll be all right now!" He patted me on the back, pleased that something had been rescued from the dismal and expensive afternoon, and told me that yes, now, finally, everything would be OK.

It was his second betrayal of the day. Swindon scored twice more in extra time, one a sc.r.a.ppy goal from a corner, the other from Don Rogers after a magnificent sixty-yard run, and it was all too much to bear. When the final whistle went, my father betrayed me for the third time in less than three hours: he rose to his feet to applaud the extraordinary underdogs, and I ran for the exit.

When my father caught up with me he was furious. He delivered his ideas on sportsmans.h.i.+p with great force (what did I care about sportsmans.h.i.+p?), marched me to the car, and we drove home in silence. Football may have provided us with a new medium through which we could communicate, but that was not to say that we used it, or that what we chose to say was necessarily positive.

I don't remember Sat.u.r.day evening, but I know that on the Sunday, Mother's Day, I elected to go to church rather than stay at home, where there was a danger that I would watch the highlights of the game on The Big Match and push myself over the edge into a permanent depressive insanity. And I know that when we got to church, the vicar expressed his pleasure in seeing such a large congregation given the competing temptations of a Cup Final on TV, and that friends and family nudged me and smirked. All this, however, was nothing compared to what I knew I would get at school on Monday morning.

For twelve-year-old boys permanently on the lookout for ways in which to humiliate their peers, opportunities like this were too good to miss. When I pushed open the door to the prefab, I heard somebody shout "Here he is!", and I was submerged under a mob of screaming, jeering, giggling boys, some of whom, I noted darkly before I was knocked to the floor, didn't even like football.

It may not have mattered much in my first term that I was an a.r.s.enal fan, but in my second it had become more significant. Football was still, in essence, a unifying interest nothing had changed in that way. But as the months pa.s.sed, our allegiances had become much more denned, and we were much quicker to tease. This was easily antic.i.p.ated, I suppose, but on that dreadful Monday morning painful nonetheless. As I lay in the grammar school dirt it occurred to me that I had made a grotesque mistake; it was my fervent wish that I could turn back the clock and insist that my father took me, not to a.r.s.enal v v Stoke, but to a deserted hotel dining room or the zoo. I didn't want to go through this once a season. I wanted to be with the rest of the cla.s.s, trampling the h.e.l.l out of some other poor heartbroken kid one of the swots or weeds or Indians or Jews who were habitually and horribly bullied. For the first time in my life I was different and on my own, and I hated it. Stoke, but to a deserted hotel dining room or the zoo. I didn't want to go through this once a season. I wanted to be with the rest of the cla.s.s, trampling the h.e.l.l out of some other poor heartbroken kid one of the swots or weeds or Indians or Jews who were habitually and horribly bullied. For the first time in my life I was different and on my own, and I hated it.

I have a photograph from the game played on the Sat.u.r.day after the Swindon tragedy, away at QPR. George Armstrong is just picking himself up, having scored the winner in a 1-0 win; David Court is running towards him, his arms triumphantly aloft. In the background you can see a.r.s.enal fans on the edge of the stand, silhouetted against a block of flats behind the ground, and they too are punching the sky. I couldn't understand anything I saw in the picture at all. How could the players care, after the way they had humiliated themselves (and, of course, me) seven days seven days seven days before? Why would any fan who had suffered at Wembley the way I had suffered stand up to cheer a nothing goal in a nothing match? I used to stare at this photo for minutes at a time, trying to detect somewhere within it any evidence of the trauma of the previous week, some hint of grief or of mourning, but there was none: apparently everyone had forgotten except me. In my first season as an a.r.s.enal fan I had been betrayed by my mother, my father, the players and my fellow supporters. before? Why would any fan who had suffered at Wembley the way I had suffered stand up to cheer a nothing goal in a nothing match? I used to stare at this photo for minutes at a time, trying to detect somewhere within it any evidence of the trauma of the previous week, some hint of grief or of mourning, but there was none: apparently everyone had forgotten except me. In my first season as an a.r.s.enal fan I had been betrayed by my mother, my father, the players and my fellow supporters.

ENGLAND!

ENGLAND v SCOTLAND

May 1969

Although the temptation to plunge into a warm bath containing dissolved essence of Kenneth Wolstenholme is always with me, I know in my heart that in the late sixties and early seventies, some things were better and some things were worse. The England team, of course, was better then: still the world champions, packed with great players, and looking as though they might be able to retain the World Cup in Mexico the following year.

I was proud of England, delighted that my father was taking me to see them play in a big game under floodlights at Wembley (and going back there so soon after the League Cup Final was therapeutic, a successful exorcism of demons that would otherwise have plagued me for years). And though there is no doubt that Colin Bell, Francis Lee and Bobby Moore were better than Geoff Thomas, Dennis Wise and Terry Butcher, it wasn't just the comparative quality that enabled me to feel unambiguous about that England side. The ambiguity came with age: by the time I was sixteen or seventeen, I knew better than the England manager.

A critical faculty is a terrible thing. When I was eleven there were no bad films, just films that I didn't want to see, there was no bad food, just Brussels sprouts and cabbage, and there were no bad books everything I read was great. Then suddenly, I woke up in the morning and all that had changed. How could my sister not hear that David Ca.s.sidy was not in the same cla.s.s cla.s.s as Black Sabbath? Why on as Black Sabbath? Why on earth earth would my English teacher think that would my English teacher think that The History of Mr Polly The History of Mr Polly was better than was better than Ten Little Indians Ten Little Indians by Agatha Christie? And from that moment on, enjoyment has been a much more elusive quality. by Agatha Christie? And from that moment on, enjoyment has been a much more elusive quality.

But in 1969, as far as I was concerned, there was no such thing as a bad England player. Why would Sir Alf pick someone who wasn't up to the job? What would be the point? I took it on trust that the eleven players who destroyed Scotland that night two goals each for Hurst and Peters, Colin Stein replying for the Scots were the best in the country. (Sir Alf had ignored everyone from a.r.s.enal, which simply confirmed that he knew what he was doing.) And anyway the absence of any live football on television meant that we often didn't know who was much good or not: the highlights merely showed good players scoring goals, rather than bad players missing them.

By the early seventies I had become an Englishman that is to say, I hated England just as much as half my compatriots seemed to do. I was alienated by the manager's ignorance, prejudice and fear, positive that my own choices would destroy any team in the world, and I had a deep antipathy towards players from Tottenham, Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester United. I began to squirm when watching England games on TV, and to feel, as many of us feel, that I had no connection whatsoever with what I saw; I might as well have been Welsh, or Scottish, or Dutch. Is it like this everywhere? I know that in the past the Italians have greeted their boys with rotten tomatoes at the airport when they return from overseas humiliations, but even that sort of commitment is beyond my comprehension. "I hope they get stuffed," I have heard Englishmen say on numerous occasions in reference to the England team. Is there an Italian or Brazilian or Spanish version of that sentence? It is difficult to imagine.

Part of this contempt may be related to the fact that we have too many players, all of indistinguishable dingy competence; the Welsh and the Irish have very little choice when it comes to putting out a team, and the fans know that their managers simply have to make do. In those circ.u.mstances, occasional poor performances are inevitable and victories are little miracles. Then of course there is the procession of England managers that has treated players of real skill and flair Waddle and Gascoigne, Hoddle and Marsh, Currie and Bowles, George and Hudson, footballers whose gifts are delicate and difficult to harness, but at the same time much more valuable than a pair of leather lungs with the kind of disdain the rest of us reserve for child molesters. (Which international squad in the world would be unable to find a place for Chris Waddle, the man who in 1991 ambled through the AC Milan back four whenever he chose?) And finally there are the England fans (discussed at greater length elsewhere), whose activities during the eighties hardly encouraged identification with the team in any of the rest of us.

It wasn't always thus with the fans at international matches. It is impossible not to feel a little ache when one sees replays of games in the 1966 World Cup that did not involve England, for example. In the now-famous game between North Korea and Portugal at Goodison Park (in which the unknown Asian team took a 3-0 lead over one of the best sides in the compet.i.tion before going out 5-3), you can see a thirty-thousand-plus crowd, the vast majority of whom are Scousers, applauding wildly after goals from each team. It is difficult to imagine the same interest now; more likely, you'd get a couple of thousand scallies making slanty eyes at the Asians in one team, and monkey noises at Eusebio in the other. So, yes, of course I feel nostalgic, even if I am longing for a time which never really belonged to us: like I said, some things were better, some were worse, and the only way one can ever learn to understand one's own youth is by accepting both halves of the proposition.

The crowd that night contained none of these Goodison saints, but they were no different from the crowds I had been a part of during the rest of the season, with the exception of an extravagantly emotional Scotsman in the row in front who swayed precariously on his seat for the first half and failed to reappear for the second. And most of us actively enjoyed enjoyed the game, as if for one night only football had become another branch of the entertainment industry. Perhaps, like me, they were enjoying the freedom from the relentless responsibility and pain of club football: I wanted England to win, but they weren't the game, as if for one night only football had become another branch of the entertainment industry. Perhaps, like me, they were enjoying the freedom from the relentless responsibility and pain of club football: I wanted England to win, but they weren't my my team. What, after all, did my country mean to me, a twelve-year-old from the Home Counties, compared to a north London side thirty miles from where I lived, a side I'd never heard of and never thought about nine months previously? team. What, after all, did my country mean to me, a twelve-year-old from the Home Counties, compared to a north London side thirty miles from where I lived, a side I'd never heard of and never thought about nine months previously?