by Nick Hornby
It is true to say that most of us were defined only by the number and extent of our interests. Some boys had more records than others, and some knew more about football; some were interested in cars, or rugby. We had passions instead of personalities, predictable and uninteresting passions at that, passions which could not reflect and illuminate us in the way that my girlfriend’s did… and this is one of the most inexplicable differences between men and women.
I have met women who have loved football, and go to watch a number of games a season, but I have not yet met one who would make that Wednesday night trip to Plymouth. And I have met women who love music, and can tell their Mavis Staples from their Shirley Browns, but I have never met a woman with a huge and ever-expanding and neurotically alphabeticised record collection. They always seem to have lost their records, or to have relied on somebody else in the house – a boyfriend, a brother, a flatmate, usually a male – to have provided the physical details of their interests. Men cannot allow that to happen. (I am aware, sometimes, in my group of Arsenal-supporting friends, of an understated but noticeable jockeying: none of us likes to be told something about the club that we didn’t know – an injury to one of the reserves, say, or an impending alteration to the shirt design, something crucial like that – by any of the others.) I am not saying that the anally retentive woman does not exist, but she is vastly outnumbered by her masculine equivalent; and while there are women with obsessions, they are usually, I think, obsessive about people, or the focus for their obsession changes frequently.
Remembering my late teens at college, when many of the boys were as colourless as tap water, it is tempting to believe that it all starts around that time, that men have had to develop their facility to store facts and records and football programmes to compensate for their lack of distinguishing wrinkles; but that doesn’t explain how it is that one ordinary, bright teenager has already become more interesting than another ordinary, bright teenager, simply by virtue of her sex.
It is perhaps no wonder that my girlfriend wanted to come to Highbury: there wasn’t really very much else of me (she’d listened to my Ramones album), or at least nothing that I had yet discovered and extracted. I did have things that were mine – my friends, my relationships with my mum and my dad and my sister, my music, my love for cinema, my sense of humour – but I couldn’t see that they amounted to very much that was individual, not in the way that her things were individual; but my solitary and intense devotion to Arsenal, and its attendant necessities (my vowel-mangling was by now at a point of almost inoperable crisis)… well, at least it had an edge to it, and gave me a couple of features other than a nose, two eyes and a mouth.
Just Like a Woman
CAMBRIDGE UNITED v EXETER CITY
29.4.78
My arrival in Cambridge provoked the two best seasons in United’s short history. In my first year they won the Fourth Division by a mile; in my second, they found life a bit tougher in the Third, and had to wait until the final week of the season before clinching promotion. They had two games in a week at the Abbey: one on the Tuesday night against Wrexham, the best team in the division, which they won 1–0, and one on the Saturday against Exeter, which they needed to win to be sure of going up.
With twenty minutes to go, Exeter went into the lead, and my girlfriend (who together with her girlfriend and her girlfriend’s boyfriend had wanted to experience at first hand the dizzy glory of promotion) promptly did what I had always presumed women were apt to do at moments of crisis: she fainted. Her girlfriend took her off to see the St John’s Ambulancemen; I, meanwhile, did nothing, apart from pray for an equaliser, which came, followed minutes later by a winner. It was only after the players had popped the last champagne cork at the jubilant crowd that I started to feel bad about my earlier indifference.
I had recently read The Female Eunuch, a book which made a deep and lasting impression on me. And yet how was I supposed to get excited about the oppression of females if they couldn’t be trusted to stay upright during the final minutes of a desperately close promotion campaign? And what was to be done about a male who was more concerned about being a goal down to Exeter City of the Third Division than he was about somebody he loved very much? It all looked hopeless.
Thirteen years later I am still ashamed of my unwillingness, my inability, to help, and the reason I feel ashamed is partly to do with the awareness that I haven’t changed a bit. I don’t want to look after anybody when I’m at a match; I am not capable of looking after anybody at a match. I am writing some nine hours before Arsenal play Benfica in the European Cup, the most important match at Highbury for years, and my partner will be with me: what happens if she keels over? Would I have the decency, the maturity, the common sense, to make sure that she was properly looked after? Or would I shove her limp body to one side, carry on screaming at the linesman, and hope that she is still breathing at the end of ninety minutes, always presuming, of course, that extra time and penalties are not required?
I know that these worries are prompted by the little boy in me, who is allowed to run riot when it comes to football: this little boy feels that women are always going to faint at football matches, that they are weak, that their presence at games will inevitably result in distraction and disaster, even though my present partner has been to Highbury probably forty or fifty times and has shown no signs of fainting whatsoever. (In fact it is I who have come closest to fainting on occasions, when the tension of the last five minutes of a cup-tie constricts my chest and forces all the blood out of my head, if that is biologically possible; and sometimes, when Arsenal score, I see stars, literally – well, little splodges of light, literally – which cannot be a sign of great physical robustness.) But then, that is what football has done to me. It has turned me into someone who would not help if my girlfriend went into labour at an impossible moment (I have often wondered about what would happen if I was due to become a father on an Arsenal Cup Final day); and for the duration of the games I am an eleven-year-old. When I described football as a retardant, I meant it.
Wembley III – the Horror Returns
ARSENAL v IPSWICH
(at Wembley) 6.5.78
It is a truth universally acknowledged that ticket distribution for Cup Finals is a farce: the two clubs involved, as all supporters know, get less than half the tickets, which means that thirty or forty thousand people with no direct interest in the game get the other half. The Football Association’s rationale is that the Cup Final is for everybody involved with football, not just the fans, and it’s not a bad one: it is, I think, quite reasonable to invite referees and linesmen and amateur players and local league secretaries to the biggest day in football’s year. There is more than one way to watch a game, after all, and on this sort of occasion enthusiastic neutrals have their place.
The only flaw in the system is that these enthusiastic neutrals, these unimpeachable servants of the game, invariably decide that their endeavours are best recompensed not by a trip to London to see the big game, but by a phone call to their local tout: a good 90 per cent of them just flog the tickets they are given, and these tickets eventually end up in the hands of the fans who were denied them in the first place. It is a ludicrous process, a typically scandalous slice of Football Association idiocy: everybody knows what is going to happen, and nobody does anything about it.
Dad got me a ticket for the Ipswich final via work contacts, but there were others available, even at university, because the Blues are customarily sent half a dozen. (The following year, when Arsenal were again in the Final, I ended up with two tickets. One was from my next-door-neighbour, who had associations with a very big club in the north-west of England, a club that has been in trouble before with the FA for its cavalier distribution of Cup Final tickets: he simply wrote to them and asked for one, and they sent it to him.) There were, no doubt, many more deserving recipients of a seat than I, people who had spent the season travelling the length of the country watching Arsenal rather than messin
g around at college, but I was a genuine fan of one of the Cup Final teams, at least, and as such more entitled than many who were there.
My companions for the afternoon were affable, welcoming middle-aged men in their late thirties and early forties who simply had no conception of the import of the afternoon for the rest of us. To them it was an afternoon out, a fun thing to do on a Saturday afternoon; if I were to meet them again, they would, I think, be unable to recall the score that afternoon, or the scorer (at half-time they talked office politics), and in a way I envied them their indifference. Perhaps there is an argument which says that Cup Final tickets are wasted on the fans, in the way that youth is wasted on the young; these men, who knew just enough about football to get them through the afternoon, actively enjoyed the occasion, its drama and its noise and its momentum, whereas I hated every minute of it, as I had hated every Cup Final involving Arsenal.
I had now been an Arsenal supporter for ten seasons – just under half my life. In only two of those ten seasons had Arsenal won trophies; they had reached finals, and failed horribly, in another two. But these triumphs and failures had all occurred in my first four years, and I had gone from the age of fifteen, when I was living one life, to the age of twenty-one, when I was living a completely different one. Like gas lamps and horse-drawn carriages – or perhaps like Spirographs and Sekidens – Wembley and championships were beginning to seem as though they belonged to a previous world.
When we reached, and then won, the FA Cup semi-final in 1978, it felt as though the sun had come out after several years of November afternoons. Arsenal-haters will have forgotten, or will simply refuse to believe, that this Arsenal team was capable of playing delightful, even enthralling football: Rix and Brady, Stapleton and Macdonald, Sunderland and, best of all, for one season only, Alan Hudson… for three or four months it looked as if this was a team that could make us happy in all the ways in which it is possible to be made happy at football.
If I were writing a novel, Arsenal would win the ‘78 Cup Final. A win makes more sense rhythmically and thematically; another Wembley defeat at this point would stretch the reader’s patience and sense of justice. The only excuses I can offer for my poor plotting are that Brady was patently unfit and should never have played, and Supermac, who had made some typical and unwise remarks in the press about what he was going to do to the Ipswich back four, was worse than useless. (He had made the same compound error, of boasting loudly and then failing to deliver, four years earlier, when he was playing for Newcastle; some time after the Ipswich fiasco the Guardian printed a Cup trivia question: ‘What is taken to the Cup Final every year but never used?’ The answer they wanted was the ribbons for the losing team, which are never tied on to the handle of the Cup, but some smartass wrote in and suggested Malcolm Macdonald.) It was an overwhelmingly one-sided final, even though Ipswich didn’t score until the second half; we never looked like getting the goal back, and lost 1–0.
So I had now lost three out of three at Wembley, and was convinced that I would never, ever see Arsenal running around Wembley with anything at all. Yet ‘78 is perhaps the least painful of the defeats, because I was with people who were not pained by it at all, not even the man with the red-and-white scarf (suspiciously clean, as if he had bought it outside the stadium). It is a strange paradox that while the grief of football fans (and it is real grief) is private – we each have an individual relationship with our clubs, and I think that we are secretly convinced that none of the other fans understands quite why we have been harder hit than anyone else – we are forced to mourn in public, surrounded by people whose hurt is expressed in forms different from our own.
Many fans express anger, against their own team or the supporters of the opponents – real, foul-mouthed fury that upsets and saddens me. I have never felt the desire to do that; I just want to be on my own to think, to wallow for a little while, and to recover the strength necessary to go back and start all over again. These men, the business types, were sympathetic but unconcerned. They offered me a drink and I declined, so they shook my hand and offered commiserations and I disappeared; to them, it really was only a game, and it probably did me good to spend time with people who behaved for all the world as if football were a diverting entertainment, like rugby or golf or cricket. It’s not like that at all, of course, but just for an afternoon it was interesting and instructive to meet people who believed that it was.
Sugar Mice and Buzzcocks Albums
CAMBRIDGE UNITED v ORIENT
4.11.78
What happened was, Chris Roberts bought a sugar mouse from Jack Reynolds (‘The Rock King’), bit its head off, dropped it in the Newmarket Road before he could get started on the body, and it got run over by a car. And that afternoon Cambridge United, who had hitherto been finding life difficult in the Second Division (two wins all season, one home, one away), beat Orient 3–1, and a ritual was born. Before each home game we all of us trooped into the sweet shop, purchased our mice, walked outside, bit the head off as though we were removing the pin from a grenade, and tossed the torsos under the wheels of oncoming cars; Jack Reynolds would stand in the doorway watching us, shaking his head sorrowfully. United, thus protected, remained unbeaten at the Abbey for months.
I know that I am particularly stupid about rituals, and have been ever since I started going to football matches, and I know also that I am not alone. I can remember when I was young having to take with me to Highbury a piece of putty, or blutack, or some stupid thing, which I pulled on nervously all afternoon (I was a smoker even before I was old enough to smoke); I can also remember having to buy a programme from the same programme seller, and having to enter the stadium through the same turnstile.
There have been hundreds of similar bits of nonsense, all designed to guarantee victories for one or other of my two teams. During Arsenal’s protracted and nerve-racking semifinal campaign against Liverpool in 1980, I turned the radio off half-way through the second half of the last game; Arsenal were winning 1–0, and as Liverpool had equalised in the last seconds of the previous game, I couldn’t bear to hear it through to the end. I played a Buzzcocks album instead (the Singles – Going Steady compilation album), knowing that side one would take me through to the final whistle. We won the match, and I insisted that my flatmate, who worked in a record store, should play the album at twenty past four on Cup Final afternoon, although it did no good. (I have my suspicions that he might have forgotten.)
I have tried ‘smoking’ goals in (Arsenal once scored as three of us were lighting cigarettes), and eating cheese-and-onion crisps at a certain point in the first half; I have tried not setting the video for live games (the team seems to have suffered badly in the past when I have taped the matches in order to study the performance when I get home); I have tried lucky socks, and lucky shirts, and lucky hats, and lucky friends, and have attempted to exclude others who I feel bring with them nothing but trouble for the team.
Nothing (apart from the sugar mice) has ever been any good. But what else can we do when we’re so weak? We invest hours each day, months each year, years each lifetime in something over which we have no control; is it any wonder then, that we are reduced to creating ingenious but bizarre liturgies designed to give us the illusion that we are powerful after all, just as every other primitive community has done when faced with a deep and apparently impenetrable mystery?
Wembley IV – The Catharsis
ARSENAL v MANCHESTER UNITED
(at Wembley) 12.5.79
I had no ambitions for myself whatsoever before I was twenty-six or twenty-seven, when I decided that I could and would write for a living, packed my job in and waited around for publishers and/or Hollywood producers to call me up and ask me to do something for them sight unseen. Friends at college must have asked me what I intended to do with my life, particularly because by now I was in my final term; but the future still seemed to me as unimaginable and as uninteresting as it had when I was four or five, so I have no idea what I might
have answered. I probably mumbled something about journalism or publishing (the aimless arts undergraduate’s exact equivalent of train driving or astronautics), but privately I was beginning to suspect that as I had spent my three years unwisely, these careers would not be possible. I knew people who had spent their entire undergraduate lives writing for university newspapers who were not being offered jobs, so what chance did I stand? I decided that it would be better not to know, and therefore applied for nothing at all.
I may have had no ideas for myself, but I had big ideas for my football teams. Two of these dreams – Cambridge United’s promotion from the Fourth to the Third, and then from the Third to the Second – had been realised already. But the third and most burning ambition, to see Arsenal win the FA Cup at Wembley (and maybe this was, after all, a personal ambition, in that my presence was an essential part of it), still remained unfulfilled.
The team had done remarkably well to return to the Cup Final for a second consecutive season. It took them five games to get past Third Division Sheffield Wednesday (the police have recently decided, in their community-serving way, that the beautiful and strange FA Cup tradition of the multi-game marathon should not be allowed to continue); they then had a tough away draw at Nottingham Forest, the European champions, and another tricky game at Southampton, won after a replay by two brilliant Alan Sunderland goals. The semi-final against Wolves was comparatively straightforward, despite Brady’s absence through injury: two second-half goals, from Sunderland and Stapleton, and they were back at Wembley.