by Nick Hornby
And then there were the afternoon Cup replays and Charlie’s V-sign, and at Villa Park, in our semi-final against Stoke, our goalkeeper Bob Wilson was carried off in the middle of our 1–1 draw (John Radford had to take over) and I spoke to Bob McNab, the Arsenal left-back, a couple of hours before the kick-off.
I went up to Villa Park with Hislam, a wannabee hooligan from Maidenhead whom I ran into on trains every now and again. I was in awe of him. He wore a white butcher’s coat covered in crudely drawn red Arsenal slogans, de rigueur for anyone with any terrace pretensions; and on the way home from games he would sit down next to me on the 5.35 from Paddington and ask me the score, explaining that he had been detained in the police cells under the pitch and therefore had no idea of what had been going on above his head. Jenkins, the apparently legendary leader of the North Bank (I’d never heard of him, needless to say), was a personal friend of his.
I was soon to find out, predictably, that this was all rubbish, and that Hislam’s relationship with reality was tenuous even on a good day. If there was such a person as Jenkins (the Leader, a scheming hooligan-general responsible for military tactics, probably has its roots in urban, or even suburban, myth) Hislam didn’t know him; and even I, desperate to number among my acquaintances a real-life criminal, began to wonder how an ostensibly harmless-looking fourteen-year-old managed to get himself arrested every single Saturday for offences which remained frustratingly vague.
Football culture is so amorphous, so unwieldy, so big (when I listened to Hislam talk about incidents in King’s Cross and Euston and the back streets of Paddington, the whole of London seemed within the grasp of its tentacles) that it inevitably attracts more than its fair share of fantasists. If you wish to have taken part in a fearsome battle with Tottenham fans, it doesn’t have to have happened within the stadium where it could easily be verified. It could have taken place at a station, or on a route to the ground, or in an enemy pub: football rumours of this kind have always been as thick and as impenetrable as smog. Hislam knew this, and was as happy as Larry inventing his gruesome and improbable lies; football was perfectly equipped to feed his ravenous appetite for self-deception, just as it was able to feed mine. For a while, we had a satisfying symbiosis going. He wanted to believe he was a hooligan, and so did I, and for a while he could have told me anything.
Dad had obtained two terrace tickets for the game for me (I hadn’t explained to him the full extent of my football solitude) and Hislam had generously agreed to take the spare. When we arrived at Villa Park we had to find the box office to pick them up. It was one-thirty, and a few of the players were there, distributing tickets to wives and family and friends. Bob McNab, the left-back, was one of them; he hadn’t played in the first team since January, and I was surprised to see him. I couldn’t believe that Bertie Mee was going to give him his first run-out for three months in an FA Cup semi-final. In the end my curiosity overcame my shyness.
‘Are you playing, Bob?’
‘Yeah.’
Dialogue in works of autobiography is quite naturally viewed with some suspicion. How on earth can the writer remember verbatim conversations that happened fifteen, twenty, fifty years ago? But ‘Are you playing, Bob?’ is one of only four sentences I have ever uttered to any Arsenal player (for the record the others are ‘How’s the leg, Bob?’ to Bob Wilson, recovering from injury the following season; ‘Can I have your autograph, please?’ to Charlie George, Pat Rice, Alan Ball and Bertie Mee; and, well, ‘How’s the leg, Brian?’ to Brian Marwood outside the Arsenal club shop when I was old enough to know better) and I can therefore vouch for its absolute authenticity.
I have imagined conversations, of course. Even now I frequently take Alan Smith or David O’Leary to the pub, buy them a low-alcohol lager, sit them down and talk until last-orders and beyond about George Graham’s alleged parsimony, Charlie Nicholas’s fitness or John Lukic’s transfer. But the plain truth is that the club means more to us than it does to them. Where were they twenty years ago? Where will they be in twenty years’ time? Where will they be in two years’ time, a couple of them? (At Villa Park or Old Trafford, bearing down on the Arsenal goal with the ball at their feet, that’s where.)
No, I’m happy with things the way they are, thank you very much. They’re players and I’m a fan, and I don’t want to blur the boundaries. Men laugh at what they see as the grotesque inadequacy of groupies, but a one-night stand with a star is perfectly understandable, and has its own balance and logic. (If I were a nubile twenty-year-old, I’d probably be down at the training ground throwing my panties at David Rocastle, although this kind of confession from a man, however New he is, is regrettably still not acceptable.) Yet many of us have had opportunities to talk to the players, at boot launches or sports shop openings, in nightclubs or restaurants, and most of us have taken them. (‘How’s the leg, Bob?’ ‘Thought you were brilliant Saturday, Tony.’ ‘Hey, make sure you do Tottenham next week, yeah?’) And what are these clumsy, embarrassing, fumbling encounters if they are not passes, beery gropes in the dark? We’re not young and desirable nymphettes, we’re grown-ups with pot-bellies, and we have nothing to offer at all. Professional footballers are as beautiful and unattainable as models, and I don’t want to be a middle-aged bottom-pincher.
I hadn’t worked all this out then, when I saw Bob McNab in his pre-match suit. And when I got into the ground, and two blokes in front of me started talking about team changes, I told them that McNab was playing, because he’d told me himself, and they looked at me and then looked at each other and shook their heads (although when the changes were read out over the tannoy they looked at me again). Meanwhile Hislam had taken himself off up to the top of Villa’s massive Holte End, to be with The Lads, and was busy telling anyone who would listen how he’d bunked into the ground under the turnstiles (he made this claim to someone he may or may not have known as soon as we walked into the ground). Which of us was the fantasist here? I was, obviously. No one talks to the players before the game, but bunking in without paying… what would be the point of lying about that if you had a ticket stub in your pocket?
Wembley II – The Nightmare Continues
LEEDS v ARSENAL
5.5.72
A classic anxiety dream, banal in its obviousness. I am attempting to get to Wembley, and I have a ticket for the Final in my pocket I leave home in plenty of time for the game, but every attempt to travel towards the stadium takes me in the opposite direction. At first this is just an amusing irritation, but eventually it induces panic; at two minutes to three I am in central London, trying to hail a cab and beginning to realise that I’m not going to get to see the match. I like the dream though, in a funny sort of way. I have had it six times now, before every Cup Final that Arsenal have played in since 1972, and so it is a nightmare inextricably linked with success. I wake up sweating, but the sweat serves as the first anticipatory moment of the day.
My Cup Final ticket had come directly from the club, rather than via touts and my dad, and I was ludicrously proud of it. (Even more eccentric was the joy I took in the compliment slip that came with it, which I stored away for years afterwards.) Cup tickets were allocated on the basis of the numbered vouchers that appeared on the back of the programme. If you had all the programmes, as I did, you were more or less assured of a ticket; thus the system was supposed to reward loyal fans, although in effect it rewarded those with enough energy to track down the programmes they needed among the ad hoc programme stands outside the ground (a laborious process which constituted a kind of loyalty in itself). I had been to the vast majority of the home games and a few of the aways; I had as much right as any, and probably more right than most, to a spot on the terraces at Wembley, and so my pride came from the feeling of belonging I had lacked in the previous year.
(This sense of belonging is crucial to an understanding of why people travel to the meaningless game in Plymouth on a Wednesday night, and without it football would fail as a business. But where does it end?
Those fans who travel the length and breadth of the country every week; does the club ‘belong’ to them more than it does to me? And the old geezer who only gets along ten times a season, but has been going to Highbury since 1938… doesn’t the club belong to him too, and he to the club? Of course. But it took me another few years to discover that; in the meantime, it was no pain, no gain. Unless I had suffered and shivered, wept into my scarf and paid through the nose, it was simply not possible to take pleasure in or credit for the good times.)
The game itself was as dismal as all the other Arsenal-Leeds games had been: the two teams had developed something of a History, and their meetings were usually violent and low-scoring. My friend Bob McNab was booked in the first two minutes, and from that moment there was a procession of free kicks and squabbles, ankle taps and pointing fingers, and snarls. What made it worse was that this was the Centenary Cup Final; I am sure that if the top brass at the FA had had a free hand in choosing who the two finalists would be, Arsenal and Leeds would have come pretty low down on their list. The pre-match anniversary celebrations (I had found my spot on the terraces a good ninety minutes before the kick-off, as was my custom), which consisted of representatives of all the other Cup finalists marching round the pitch behind banners, suddenly appeared almost satirical in its intent. You remember the Matthews Final in ‘53? Bert Trautmann playing in goal with a broken neck in ‘56? Tottenham’s Double team in ‘61? Everton’s comeback in ‘66? Osgood’s diving header in ‘70? Now watch Storey and Bremner attempting to gouge lumps out of each other’s thighs. The sourness of the game simply exacerbated the tension in my stomach, every bit as debilitating as it had been during the Swindon game three years earlier. If no one was going to bother with any of the niceties of the game (and there were stretches when it appeared that no one was even going to bother with the ball) then winning the Cup became even more important: there wasn’t anything else to think about.
At the beginning of the second half, Mick Jones wriggled to the byline and crossed for Allan Clarke to score for Leeds with a ridiculously effortless nod of the head. Inevitably it was the only goal of the game. We hit the post or the bar or something, and had a shot kicked off the line, but these were token Cup Final moments, not to be taken seriously; you could see that the Arsenal players understood the pointlessness of their effort.
As the end of the game approached I braced myself for the grief that I knew would swallow me whole, as it had done after the Swindon match. I was fifteen, and the option of tears was not available as it had been in 1969; when the final whistle went I can recall my knees buckling slightly. I didn’t feel sorry for the team or for the rest of the fans, but for myself, although now I realise that all football sorrow takes this form. When our teams lose at Wembley we think of the colleagues and classmates we have to face on Monday morning, and of the delirium that has been denied us; it seems inconceivable that we will allow ourselves to be this vulnerable ever again. I felt that I didn’t have the courage to be a football fan. How could I contemplate going through this again? Was I going to come to Wembley every three or four years for the rest of my life and end up feeling like this?
I felt an arm around my shoulders and realised for the first time that I was standing next to three Leeds fans, an old man, his son, and his grandson. ‘Never mind, lad,’ said the old man. ‘They’ll be back.’ For a moment it felt as though he was holding me upright, until the first and most intense spasm of misery passed and I regained the strength in my legs. Almost immediately a couple of Arsenal suedeheads with an unmistakable and ominous fury in their eyes pushed their way through the crowd towards the four of us. I stepped back, and they removed the Leeds scarf that was around the little boy’s neck. ‘Give that back,’ his dad said, but only because he knew it would be a weak father who said nothing, not in any expectation of success. There was a brief windmilling of fists and the two older men staggered backwards; I didn’t stay around to find out what kind of beating they took. I ran for the gangway and went straight home, frightened and sick. It was the only manner, really, in which the Centenary Cup Final could have ended.
A New Family
ARSENAL v WOLVES
15.8.72
Over the summer of 1972, things changed. Arsenal, the most British (that is to say, the dourest and most aggressive) team you could imagine, went all continental on us, and for half a dozen games at the start of the 72/73 season decided to play Total Football. (This, for the benefit of those with only a sketchy grasp of football tactics, was a Dutch invention which necessitated flexibility from all the players on the pitch. Defenders were required to attack, attackers to play in mid-field; it was football’s version of post-modernism, and the intellectuals loved it.) That August at Highbury, gentle and appreciative applause was as familiar a sound as sixty thousand shuffling feet had been a couple of years earlier. Imagine Mrs Thatcher coming back from Brussels and lecturing us on the perils of jingoism, and you will have some idea of the improbability of the conversion.
A win at Leicester on the opening Saturday was followed by this destruction of Wolves (5–2, with goals from defenders McNab and Simpson). ‘I have never been so excited by an Arsenal performance,’ said the man in the Daily Mail the next morning. ‘They played more good football than in a dozen matches in their Double year.’ ‘Arsenal have genuinely changed their nature,’ said the Telegraph. ‘The old hardness and obsessive search for the heads of the strikers have disappeared. Instead, as hapless Wolves discovered, there is a new inventiveness and improvisation.’
For the first, but certainly not the last, time, I began to believe that Arsenal’s moods and fortunes somehow reflected my own. It wasn’t so much that we were both playing brilliantly and winning (although my two recent O-level passes were all the proof I needed that I was a genuine Championship of Life contender); more that during the summer of 1972 my life seemed to me to have become suddenly and bewilderingly exotic, and my team’s mysterious adoption of a flamboyant continental style was perfectly and inexplicably analogous. Everything about the Wolves game was disorienting – the five goals, the quality of the passing (Alan Ball was outstanding), the purr of the crowd, the genuine enthusiasm of a normally hostile press. And I watched all this from the Lower East Stand with my father and my stepmother, a woman I had met just a few weeks earlier and whom I had previously always thought of, when I had thought of her at all, simply as The Enemy.
In the four or five years since my parents’ separation, I had asked my father almost nothing about his personal life. Part of this was understandable: like most kids I possessed neither the vocabulary nor the nerve to talk about things like this. Another part of it was not quite as easy to explain, and had more to do with the fact that none of us ever referred to what had happened if we could possibly avoid doing so. Even though I was aware that there had been Another Woman when my father left, I never asked him about her; my picture of my father was therefore curiously incomplete. I knew that he worked, and that he lived abroad, but I never attempted to envision any sort of life for him: he took me to football, asked me about school and then disappeared for another couple of months into some sort of unimaginable limbo.
It was inevitable that sooner or later I would be made to confront the fact that Dad, like all of us, had another, fuller context. That confrontation eventually occurred in the early summer of 1972, when I discovered that my father and his second wife were the parents of two small children. In July, the amazing news still undigested, I went to visit the undreamed-of family at their home in France. The fact that this set-up had hitherto been concealed from me meant that there had been none of the gradual accumulation of detail that usually occurs in such cases: like Mia Farrow in The Purple Rose of Cairo, dragged from the audience through the screen into a film by one of its characters, I was propelled into a world that had been imagined and completed without my participation, entirely alien but still somehow recognisable. My half-brother was small and dark and looked up to and after his little sister, e
ighteen months younger, blonde and bright and self-confident… where had I seen these two before? In our home movies, that’s where. But if they were us, Gill and I, why were they speaking half in French and half in English? And what was I supposed to be to them, a brother, or some kind of third parent, or something in between, a trainee intermediary from the adult world? And how come there was a swimming pool and a permanent supply of Coke in the fridge? I loved it and I hated it and I wanted to go home on the next plane and I wanted to stay for the rest of the summer.
When I did get back, I had to invent a modus vivendi that would do me for the next few years, a task I thought best accomplished by ensuring that the new world was never ever mentioned in the old, although it wouldn’t have achieved much to complain about the absence of a swimming pool in our tiny back garden in any case; thus one huge and important part of my life was kept entirely and pacifically separate from another, an arrangement perfectly designed to produce mendacity, self-delusion and schizophrenia in an already confused teenager.
When my stepmother sat down next to me at Highbury for the Wolves game, it was as if Elsie Tanner had walked into the Crossroads Motel; the appearance of an inhabitant from one world at the centre of the other somehow drained the reality out of both. And then Arsenal started to bang inch-perfect passes along the ground all over the pitch, and our defenders popped up in the opposing penalty area to lob the opposing goalkeeper with Cruyff-like precision and delicacy, and my suspicion that this was a world gone mad was confirmed. I was sitting with the Enemy, Arsenal thought they were Holland, and if I had looked carefully, I would surely have seen pigs floating serenely over the Clock End.