by Amy Lawrence
STEVE BOULD:
George changed Arsenal Football Club, for sure. We hadn’t won the league for 18 years. The club really wasn’t one of those that was included amongst those with a chance to win the league, and George changed that. He changed the mindset. He changed players who were hungry and he got us believing. He got everybody behaving with class. He moved the club forward massively. Everybody who comes to the club develops an affection that lasts a lifetime.
JOHN LUKIC:
We were one of the last British-based teams to win the league. So that in itself tells a story. Football from there has evolved to a very cosmopolitan sport, people from all nations. Back then the only foreigner on the team sheet from outside Britain and Ireland was Bruce Grobbelaar. The core of that game itself was a British game. From then on football seemed to develop, to gain more attention, to where we are today with the Premier League watched across the world. You’d like to think that we had a part to play in that.
NIGEL WINTERBURN:
Maybe we’ve changed the way that people look at football.
PAUL MERSON:
I really think it put football back where it belongs. Football just lifted and I don’t think it’s ever looked back. I go up and down the country and you talk to people and everybody knows where they were that night. They’ll say, oh, I was sitting in a bar in Spain with a lorry-load of Everton fans. They were going mad when you won. Or, I was in a pub with a load of Man United fans. If you live in Exeter or Accrington or Rochdale, if you’re old enough you remember that game. We talk about it as the goal that changed everything. It’s the game that changed football, believe me. This changed football and I’ll tell you the reasons why. This was on a Friday night. Football was going nowhere. We’d just had the biggest disaster in football. There was fighting on the terraces. Football was leaving a bad taste in people’s mouths. People weren’t liking football. People were scared to go to football matches. You wouldn’t take your kids to football matches. Then this game comes on a Friday night. When was there ever a game on a Friday night live? Millions of people are watching. I think it changed football. I really do. Then after that, the following year, England go to the World Cup, they have a massive success and football starts flying again.
MICHAEL THOMAS:
A lot of people when they meet me always remember that goal. They remember what they were doing at that time. They still tell me now. You’ve got the Evertonians who love me because of that. You’ve got Mancs saying the same thing. I even got some Spurs supporters who say it. So it is unique in that case.
JANET ROCASTLE:
I come from a family of five boys and all of them supported different teams – one was Chelsea, one Tottenham, Man United – but since I met David everybody followed Arsenal after that. The whole family was so proud. We quite often watch Fever Pitch here. Ryan has the DVD. It really sparks a lot of memories of David and of that time. For the kids and I, we look at everyone from then as part of our family.
ALAN SMITH:
When you watch the coverage again from the game there is hardly anything after the match. Jim Rosenthal did the interview with Tony down on the pitch. Then back up to the studio, Elton Welsby with Bobby Robson, his one and only guest in a little poky studio. ‘Well, Bobby, what do you make of that?’ ‘Oh, fantastic performance from Arsenal. Absolutely wonderful.’ ‘Oh, thanks, Bobby. Goodnight.’ It was one of those. Time for News at Ten. The treatment we’d give it on Sky now. We’d be on air still dissecting every single minute of it!
At the time the only change you were envisaging was the all-seater stadia coming in. You could never forecast how the game itself would change. Italia 90 was a watershed. Obviously with the onset of the Premier League, names on the back of the shirts, players arriving from all over the world, you sensed something was happening. It was all getting a bit more glitzy. Gradually you could see different innovations coming in, but that’s when it all began.
I was glowing in the aftermath that summer. Just thinking about the season. Playing the game over in your head. Looking at the video. It was a brilliant summer. We went to Las Vegas and did the old California road trip. At the Grand Canyon I came across some Arsenal fans who were obviously on a high still. ‘Oh, hi, Smudge!’ No selfies back then you know.
DAVID DEIN:
Football and television became very important to each other. Before that season it was a cartel. It was BBC and ITV and, between the two of them, football didn’t get anything for their product. They thought they were doing us a favour by promoting us. Football needed and wanted television and it was ITV who decided they were going to break the cartel. We finally completed a four-year deal in 1988. It was £44 million – £11 million per year for the 92 professional clubs. So they got the whole of the old Football League. Of course, the very first season of that television contract they hit the jackpot because who would ever think that it would be the final game between Liverpool against Arsenal and the league would be determined by the last kick of the season? They had around 14 million viewers. Of course, we did have to expand and it was only when all of a sudden you had the foreign players coming in that everybody suddenly said it’s the dawn of a new era. The average wage around the late 1980s would have been £200–£300 a week. They’re getting that a minute now I think. Ha ha.
Our guest that night at Anfield was Greg Dyke, who worked in television. It was Greg and I who were really at the sharp end of putting the television deal together. At the end of the game I said, Greg, you’ve got to come down to the dressing room and, of course, as soon as we went down to the dressing room the champagne was flowing and we both got drenched. Our suits were drenched and I put my arm round Greg and said, you see this, you got it cheaply. It really was the launching pad in many respects and, of course, nobody was to know at the time that in 1992 Rupert Murdoch would come along and launch Sky television and then, in Alan Sugar’s famous words, blow everybody out the water. That game in a way probably brought home the value and the relationship of football and television.
PADDY BARCLAY:
I do remember being numb with shock and excitement and the sense of privilege of actually being there. We all said once we had got our job done and our reports filed that we will never experience anything like this again. We could not conceive of football providing such a finish as that ever again. It was ten years to the day when Manchester United won the treble in Barcelona with a finish of comparable drama. All of our minds then went back to Anfield. What is it about this game that produces finishes like this? We now know that game was the beginning of football as ridiculous excitement. I don’t know why but football since 1989 has produced an awful lot more of those I-cannot-believe-this moments than it ever did before. If you look back at the iconic games like the Stanley Matthews Cup Final of 1953, it was just a football match, seven goals were scored, and good old Stanley Matthews won a trophy at the end. It wasn’t a match like Barcelona overturning a 4–0 deficit to beat Paris Saint-Germain 6–5 with a dramatic turnaround. That game at Anfield was the beginning of pinch-yourself drama in football.
AMY LAWRENCE:
If you are a person who is generally moved by sport then it doesn’t need to be your team for the thrill of a startling spectacle to make your spine tingle. Sport matters because it makes you feel things. It makes you care. Famous upsets, heart-warming comebacks, tales of the unexpected – it’s all part of what has gone on to make football so ubiquitous in our modern social landscape, so magnetic that billions are spent and foreign investors home in on this manically lucrative industry. But they were simpler times back then. It sounds silly and melodramatic but I felt I even learned a life lesson that night at Anfield that always stayed with me. People tell you things are never going to happen, that odds are weighted so strongly there is no point in even hoping, that outlandish dreams are impossible. But that’s not always true, is it?
NICK HORNBY:
I don’t think there will ever be another game like it. First against second an
d winner wins the league basically and that hasn’t happened in my memory. For me, the feeling of 26 May 1989 was so intense that I didn’t really notice the next season. I was still thinking about the last season. I just had this glow from that moment on.
I didn’t really want them to start winning again until 1991, which was good as that’s when they did start winning again, when winning became more of a part of the club’s culture. I think your relationship with leagues and trophies changes a little bit. Which is as it should be for a club the size of Arsenal. You should be expecting them to win things. I’d gone from being 14 in 1971 and I was 32 in 1989. It’s a big chunk of your life and you’re a different person but the one thing that’s stayed the same in that thread is the football. It was the one thing that connected my 32-year-old self to my 14-year-old self. There was nothing else really.
The reason Fever Pitch started in my head was I thought about how many games I had stories about. Some of them seemed to me to say something about Britain at certain points in its history. Some of them had something to say about being a certain kind of kid or teenage boy or young man. Some of them had something to say about football and none of them were just the scores, so I thought, maybe I can try and write it as if it were a match report but each match report is about actually about something else. The point was the feelings and the context. Writing about the Anfield game for Fever Pitch I knew that I had to bring out everything I had in terms of the writing for that piece. Because it was one of the emotional sensors of the book.
I’ve often been told about Fever Pitch being part of the shift in perceptions in English football. It’s hard for me to see. I think that the big thing was Sky, and Rupert Murdoch had much more influence on the game than my book. Italia 90 was important. Not least because it had been quite a while since any tournament had been played during the evenings in the UK. 86 was in Mexico. You had to stay up. You had to be a proper football fan to watch England play at midnight or whatever. 82 was horrible anyway and you know we hadn’t been there in 74 and 78 so 1990 was very important for the rebirth and the relaunching of football. The way it was shot as well. Do you remember all those slow-motion shots of the agony on people’s faces in the crowd when Italy went out on penalties? The game entered a new era media-wise with Italia 90. It’s interesting that Sky came in so shortly after 89 because it’s often struck me that sport is one of the few things that’s any use to cable broadcasters because we’ve got enough rubbish films and enough rubbish television programmes. What we need is something where we literally don’t know what’s going to happen next. We have to watch it at the time. It’s no good watching it on catch-up. It’s like a battering ram into people’s homes. That drama is so intense that it cannot really be repeated in any other art form.
When I wrote Fever Pitch I knew there were lots of people who read books and went to football matches. There is a sort of accusational myth since that I wrote Fever Pitch and then a load of middle-class people came to football. But in fact I was a middle-class kid who became interested when England won the World Cup in 66. I think that’s when the game’s roots changed because suddenly George Best and all of the mavericks became popular culture superstars. Anyone who was 10 or 11 then grew up with the game in a way that maybe their parents wouldn’t have done. My book was probably an expression of that partly. I wanted to represent fans who felt very, very connected to their team and who lived their lives in this way. Consumed by caring about something that they couldn’t control.
When Arsène Wenger came and Arsenal reached a different peak all the players lived in North London, in Hampstead and Regent’s Park, and after the game they would eat in a local restaurant and it was very hard to get a table there because the players went there. But there felt like a lot of connection between fans and players in ways that were not the same as the 1980s team but were certainly an adequate replacement. Arsène seemed to have signed players who wanted to play for the club and wanted to stay there for a reasonable period of time. I think now it feels like it has accelerated off into future football where you’re not sure whether any player will be there next season and how much would I care if all 11 of them left? Not that much. The club will find 11 good new footballers. There are a couple who you could base a team around but the idea of having first of all the home-grown players like David Rocastle and Michael Thomas and so on, but also the other players – the back four, Alan Smith – is something else. You got the sense that they were fantastic but you weren’t going to lose them to Juventus or Barcelona. I never felt like Alan Smith was going to go to Barcelona. I didn’t think that Steve Bould was going to go to Juventus. It felt like they were playing at the best place for them and that this was the top of their game and there was a sort of happy merging of the needs of players and the needs of fans.
For anyone who was old enough to live through some of the very dismal years preceding 1989 the shock and pleasure of the win is something that always locates you back in the time. We’ve had lots of pleasures since but they’re much more diffuse. If you think about the Invincibles season I don’t think there was even quite a moment like that in the entire season. You just think, well this is a good team. They’ve won again. They’ve won again. They’ve won again. Even in the good times it’s very hard to find that pinpoint intensity of Anfield. I don’t think many fans have ever experienced it.
GEORGE GRAHAM:
When I joined Arsenal as manager we did so much travelling that I began buying books and magazines on the club’s history. That’s how I started with my memorabilia and I used to go to programme and book fairs at a hotel in Russell Square on a Sunday to pick up rare things. I have quite a lot from the 30s and even before then. It’s quite fascinating how the club came over the borders into North London. How they built Highbury. Who the first chairman was. Some of the great managers. The philosophy. Herbert Chapman didn’t do any coaching. He just picked a team and it was down to the trainer and the physio. There was probably three staff and Chapman would just sit in his lovely oak-panelled office upstairs. Luckily I had that for a few years. To have those magical moments makes you feel nice but in time you’re forgotten about and then the world has got a new hero. But, of course, you enjoy the memories. You love it.
AFTERWORD
Oh Rocky Rocky
ALAN SMITH:
Rocky meant a lot to everybody really. He was my mate. The first time my wife Penny and I met him was at a dinner down in London at the Hilton. We were sat there with some other people and Rocky came across and he was only probably a teenager then and he said, ‘Oh hi, I’m David. Nice to meet you. Lovely to see you and lovely to have you here and if there’s anything you need just ask.’ He walked away and I turned to Penny and said, what a nice lad. What a lovely lad. That’s exactly what he was. We grew very close as families and we are still close to his wife Janet and the kids. And what a player, as well as being a big personality in the dressing room. He was as strong as an ox but with the skills of a Brazilian. Lightning quick foot-overs, so hard to knock off the ball. He was a wonderful player to have on my right. He had some great tussles with Stuart Pearce. I remember Pearcey used to try and intimidate him. Crash into him. Give him a bit of verbals but Rocky just thrived off it. There weren’t many about like him. I still miss him. It’s hard to talk about him.
He was one of those players that everybody loved. He could get on with anybody. Nobody had a bad word. I know we always say that about people who have passed away but it was true. We were family friends and we always kept in touch. I’ll never forget the day that George explained to him why he had to sell him, and he was sat in that BMW for about an hour and we all thought, God, what are they talking about? It was hard for the gaffer too because he loved Rocky. He didn’t feel he was up to the standard any more because of his knee and he didn’t have the mobility. He sold him to Leeds and it was a tough day to leave the club and I remember Ian Wright had only just joined and he said, ‘I’ve only joined the club to be with you, Rocky, and now th
ey’re selling you.’ He couldn’t believe it. Rocky went to Man City and Chelsea and then went across to Malaysia and that’s when he fell ill and came back. Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The survival rate is supposed to be about 80 per cent of people of that age. I remember Janet ringing us at 3 o’clock in the morning. When the phone goes at 3 o’clock in the morning you know it’s bad news. We played Spurs that day. I was in bits. We had a minute’s silence and I just went.
GEORGE GRAHAM:
David was a very talented player, not only in the Arsenal set-up but the England set-up. He picked up an injury and we tried to play him twice a week. He kept breaking down. We couldn’t train him too hard during the week because he swelled up. If we didn’t train him he started putting on weight. His knee was the major problem. He was an outstanding player and an outstanding person. But we got an offer from Leeds which was just acceptable. It was very sad.
NICK HORNBY:
He epitomised that team for a lot of us. Because he was so gifted we always had a joke with the people I watched with that he was going to score the greatest goal ever seen in football. He scored some cracking goals. But we always had this fantasy Rocastle goal where he picked the ball up where Lee Dixon had picked the ball up in 1989 but he’d run all around the pitch and then smash it in the corner and then everyone would agree afterwards that it is officially the greatest goal of all time. We all thought he was capable of scoring it and he had some fire about him and he was a London boy. I was terribly sad when he was sold because that really felt like something had gone from the team with him no longer there. It was terribly sad that somebody who had symbolised the resurgence and re-emergence of Arsenal was now no longer playing for them and then … Young players like that don’t die. A beautiful man, beautiful player. I love it that that chant has become part of the club now. It’s usually when there’s some kind of celebratory mood in the stadium, then people begin to sing his name and there doesn’t seem to be any reason why that will stop. My kids sing it.