Fever Pitch

by Nick Hornby

  I want to stop smoking and, like many people who wish to do the same, I firmly believe that abstinence is just around the corner. I won’t buy a carton of duty-frees, or a lighter, or even a household-sized box of matches because, given the imminence of my cessation, it would be a waste of money. What stops me from doing so now, today, this minute, are the things that have always stopped me: a difficult period of work up ahead, requiring the kind of concentration that only a Silk Cut can facilitate; the fear of the overwhelming domestic tension that would doubtless accompany screaming desperation; and, inevitably and pathetically, the Arsenal.

  They do give me some leeway. There’s the first half of the season, before the FA Cup begins, and before the Championship has warmed up. And there are times like now, when with my team out of everything by the end of January I am looking at almost five months of dull but tension-free afternoons. (But I’ve got this book to write, and deadlines, and…) And yet some seasons – the 88/89 Championship year, for example, or the chase for the Double in 90/91 where every game between January and May was crucial – I cannot contemplate what it would be like to sit there without a smoke. Two down against Tottenham in a Cup semi-final at Wembley with eleven minutes gone and no fag? Inconceivable.

  Am I going to hide behind Arsenal forever? Will they always serve as an excuse for smoking, and never having to go away at weekends, and not taking on work that might clash with a home fixture? The Liverpool game was, I think, their way of telling me that it’s not their fault, that it is I who control my actions, and not they; and though actually I do remember that I survived the evening without running on to the pitch and shaking the players silly, I have forgotten it all when the forthcoming fixtures convince me that now is not the right time to tackle my nicotine addiction. I have argued before that having Arsenal on my back, like a hump, year after year after year, is a real disability. But I use that disability too, I milk it for all it is worth.

  Seven Goals and a Punch-Up

  ARSENAL v NORWICH

  4.11.89

  For a match to be really, truly memorable, the kind of game that sends you home buzzing inside with the fulfilment of it all, you require as many of the following features as possible:

  (1) Goals: As many as possible. There is an argument which says that goals begin to lose their value in particularly easy victories, but I have never found this to be a problem. (I enjoyed the last goal in Arsenal’s 7–1 win over Sheffield Wednesday as much as I enjoyed the first.) If the goals are to be shared, then it is best if the other team get theirs first: I have a particular penchant for the 3–2 home victory, with a late winner after losing 2–0 at half-time.

  (2) Outrageously bad refereeing decisions: I prefer Arsenal to be the victim, rather than the recipient, of these, as long as they don’t cost us the match. Indignation is a crucial ingredient of the perfect footballing experience; I cannot therefore agree with match commentators who argue that a referee has had a good game if he isn’t noticed (although like everybody else, I don’t like the game stopped every few seconds). I prefer to notice them, and howl at them, and feel cheated by them.

  (3) A noisy crowd: In my experience, crowds are at their best when their team is losing but playing well, which is one of the reasons why coming back for a 3–2 win is my favourite kind of score.

  (4) Rain, a greasy surface, etc: Football in August, on a perfect grassy-green pitch, is aesthetically more appealing, although I do like a bit of slithery chaos in the goalmouth. Too much mud and the teams can’t play at all, but you can’t beat the sight of players sliding ten or fifteen yards for a tackle or in an attempt to get a touch to a cross. There’s something intensifying about peering through driving rain, too.

  (5) Opposition misses a penalty: Arsenal’s goalkeeper John Lukic was the penalty king, so I have seen a fair few of these; Brian McClair’s last-minute horror in the fifth-round FA Cup-tie in 1988 – so wild that it nearly cleared the North Bank roof – remains my favourite. However, I retain a residual fondness for Nigel Clough’s efforts, also in the last minute, during a League game in 1990, when he missed; the referee ordered the kick to be retaken, and he missed again.

  (6) Member of opposition team receives a red card: ‘It’s disappointing to hear the reaction of the crowd,’ remarked Barry Davies during the Portsmouth-Forest FA Cup quarter-final in 1992, when Forest’s Brian Laws was sent off and the Portsmouth supporters went mad; but what does he expect? For fans, a sending-off is always a magic moment, although it is crucial that this doesn’t happen too early. First-half dismissals frequently result either in boringly easy victories for the team with eleven men (c.f., Forest v West Ham, FA Cup semi-final, 1991), or in an impenetrable defensive reorganisation which kills the game dead; second-half sendings-off in a tight game are impossibly gratifying. If I had to plump for just one dismissal to take on to a desert island with me, it would have to be Bob Hazell of Wolves, sent off in the last minute of a fourth-round cup-tie at Highbury in 1978, when the score was 1–1. As I remember it, he took a swing at Rix, who was trying to get the ball off him so that we could take a corner quickly; from said corner, Macdonald, freed of his disgraced marker for the first time in the game and thus completely unmarked, headed us into a winning lead. I also enjoyed, enormously, Tony Coton’s long and lonely march at Highbury in 1986 – there is something special about seeing a goalkeeper go – and Massing’s murderous assault on Caniggia, followed by his valedictory wave to the crowd, during the opening game of the 1990 World Cup.

  (7) Some kind of ‘disgraceful incident’ (aka ‘silliness’, aka ‘nonsense’, aka ‘unpleasantness’): We are entering doubtful moral territory here – obviously players have a responsibility not to provoke a highly flammable crowd. A brawl between Coventry and Wimbledon on a wet November afternoon in front of a stupefied crowd of ten thousand is one thing, but a brawl between Celtic and Rangers players, given the barely controllable sectarian bitterness on the terraces, is quite another. Yet one has to conclude, regretfully and with a not inconsiderable degree of Corinthian sadness, that there is nothing like a punch-up to enliven an otherwise dull game. The side-effects are invariably beneficent – the players and the crowd become more committed, the plot thickens, the pulse quickens – and as long as the match doesn’t degenerate as a consequence into some kind of sour grudge-match, brawls strike me as being a pretty desirable feature, like a roof terrace or a fireplace. If I were a sportswriter or a representative of the football authorities, then no doubt I would purse my lips, make disapproving noises, insist that the transgressors be brought to justice – argy-bargy, like soft drugs, would be no fun if it were officially sanctioned. Luckily, however, I have no such responsibility: I am a fan, with no duty to toe the moral line whatsoever.

  The Arsenal-Norwich game at the end of 1989 had seven goals, and Arsenal came back from 2–0 down and then 3–2 down to win 4–3. It had two penalties, one in the last minute with the score at 3–3 (both, incidentally, terrible decisions on the part of the referee)… and Norwich’s Gunn saved it, the ball rolled back to Dixon, who scuffed it, and it trickled, very gently, into the empty net. And then, all hell broke loose, with more or less everyone bar the Arsenal keeper involved in a bout of fisticuffs which seemed to last forever but which was probably over in a matter of seconds. Nobody was sent off, but never mind: how was it not possible to enjoy a game like that?

  The two teams were fined heavily, which was only right, of course. In situations like this, the FA could hardly send them a letter thanking the players for giving the fans what they want. And given Arsenal’s later problems, discussed elsewhere, the fight has in retrospect lost some of its gloss. But it’s this centre of the world thing again: after the game we went home knowing that what we had seen, live, was the most significant sporting moment of the afternoon, a moment which would be talked about for weeks, months, which would make the news, which everyone would be asking you about at work on Monday morning. So, in the end, one has to conclude that it was a privilege to be
there, to see all those grown men make fools of themselves in front of thirty-five thousand people; I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

  Saddam Hussein and Warren Barton

  ARSENAL v EVERTON

  19.1.91

  A little-known fact: football fans knew before anybody else that the Gulf War had started. We were sat in front of the TV, waiting for the highlights of the Chelsea-Tottenham Rumbelows Cup-tie just before midnight, when Nick Owen looked at his monitor, announced a newsflash, and expressed the hope that we would be able to go to Stamford Bridge shortly. (The report of the game in the Daily Mirror made peculiar reading the next morning, incidentally, given the circumstances: ‘Wave after wave of attacks left Tottenham hanging on for grim life’, that kind of thing.) ITV beat the BBC to the news by several minutes.

  Like most people, I was frightened: by the possibility of nuclear and chemical weapons being used; of Israel’s involvement; of hundreds of thousands of people dying. By three o’clock on the Saturday afternoon, sixty-three hours after the start of the conflict, I was more discombobulated than I can recall being at the start of a football match: I’d watched too much late-night television, and dreamed too many strange dreams.

  There was a different buzz in the crowd, too. The North Bank chanted ‘Saddam Hussein is a homosexual’ and ‘Saddam run from Arsenal’. (The first message is scarcely in need of decoding; in the second, ‘Arsenal’ refers to the fans rather than the players. Which makes the chant self-aggrandising, rather than ridiculing, and which paradoxically reveals a respect for the Iraqi leader absent in the speculation about his sexual preferences. A consistent ideology is probably too much to ask for.)

  It was an interesting experience, watching a football match with the world at war; one I had never had before. How was Highbury to become the centre of the universe, with a million men preparing to kill each other a thousand miles away? Easy. Merse’s goal just after half-time earned us a 1–0 win, which would not in itself have been enough to distract attention away from Baghdad; but when Warren Barton’s free-kick got Wimbledon a result up at Anfield, and we went top of the League for the first time that season, everything became focused again. Eight points behind in December and one point clear in January… By a quarter to five, Saddam was forgotten, and Highbury was humming.

  Typical Arsenal

  ARSENAL v MANCHESTER UNITED

  6.5.91

  In May 1991 we won the League again, for the second time in three years and the third time in my whole life. In the end there was none of the drama of 1989: Liverpool collapsed ignominiously, and we were allowed to run away with it. On the evening of the 6th May, Liverpool lost at Forest before our home game against Manchester United, and the United game was thus transformed into a riotous, raucous celebration.

  If ever a season has exemplified Arsenal, it was that one. It wasn’t just that we lost only one League game all season, and conceded an astonishingly miserly eighteen goals, although these statistics are in themselves indicative of the team’s traditional tenacity. It was that the Championship was achieved despite almost comical antagonism and adversity. We had two points deducted after becoming involved, in retrospect unwisely, in another brawl, less than a year after the exciting Norwich fracas; soon afterwards, our captain was imprisoned after a stupendously idiotic piece of drunken driving. And these incidents came on top of heaps of others, on and off the pitch – fights, tabloid reports of obnoxious drunken behaviour, mass displays of petulance and indiscipline (most notably at Aston Villa at the end of 1989, when most of the team surrounded an unhelpful linesman long after the final whistle, gesturing and shouting to the extent that those of us who had travelled to support them couldn’t help but feel embarrassed), and so on and on and on. Each of these transgressions isolated the club and its devotees further and further from the lip-pursing, right-thinking, Arsenal-hating mainland; Highbury became a Devil’s Island in the middle of north London, the home of no-goods and miscreants.

  ‘You can stick your fucking two points up your arse,’ the crowd sang gleefully, over and over again, throughout the Manchester United game, and it began to seem like the quintessential Arsenal song: take our points, imprison our captain, hate our football, sod the lot of you. It was our night, a show of solidarity and defiance that had no grey areas of vicarious pleasure for anyone else, an acclamation of the virtues of all things unvirtuous. Arsenal aren’t a Nottingham Forest or a West Ham or even a Liverpool, a team that inspires affection or admiration in other football fans; we share our pleasures with nobody but ourselves.

  I don’t like the fact that for the last couple of years Arsenal have brawled and bitched their way through their seasons, of course I don’t. And I would rather that Tony Adams hadn’t skidded his way down a residential street after a bucketful of lager, that the club hadn’t paid all of his wages while he was inside, that Ian Wright hadn’t spat at Oldham fans, that Nigel Winterburn hadn’t involved himself in a bizarre row with a supporter on the touchline at Highbury. These are, on the whole, Bad Things. But in a sense my feelings are beside the point. It is part of the essential Arsenal experience that they are loathed, and in an era in which more or less everybody plays with an offside trap and an extra defender, perhaps these distasteful incidents are the Arsenal way of upping the ante in order to stake sole claim to the territory.

  So in the end, the question of why Arsenal behave like this is not a very interesting one. I suspect that the answer is that they behave like this because they are Arsenal, and they understand their allotted role in the football scheme of things. A more interesting question is this: what does it do to the fans? How is your psyche affected, when you commit yourself for a lifetime to the team that everybody loves to hate? Are football fans like the dogs that come to resemble their masters?

  Emphatically, yes. The West Ham fans I know have an innate sense of underdog moral authority, the Tottenham fans give off an air of smug, ersatz sophistication, the Manchester United fans are imbued with a frustrated grandeur, Liverpool fans are simply grand. And as for Arsenal fans… It is impossible to believe that we have remained unaffected by loving what the rest of the world regards as fundamentally unlovable. Ever since 15th March 1969, I have been aware of the isolation my team induces, maybe even demands. My partner believes that my tendency to adopt an attitude of beleaguered defiance at each minor setback or perceived act of disloyalty has been learned from Arsenal, and she may be right. Like the club, I am not equipped with a particularly thick skin; my oversensitivity to criticism means that I am more likely to pull up the drawbridge and bitterly bemoan my lot than I am to offer a quick handshake and get on with the game. In true Arsenal style, I can dish it out but I can’t take it.

  So that second Championship win, though less enthralling than the first, was far more satisfying, and more truly indicative of the Arsenal way: the club and the fans closed ranks and overcame, with a magnificently single-minded sense of purpose, almost insurmountable difficulties all of their own making. It was a triumph not only for the team, but for what the team has come to represent, and by extension for what all Arsenal fans have become. The 6th May was our night, and everybody else could go hang.

  Playing

  FRIENDS v OTHER FRIENDS

  every Wednesday night

  I started playing football seriously – that is to say, I started to care about what I was doing, rather than simply going through the motions to appease a schoolteacher – at the same time as I started watching. There were the games at school with the tennis ball, and the games in the street with a punctured plastic ball, two- or three-a-side; there were the games with my sister in the back garden, games up to ten in which she received a nine-goal start and threatened to go indoors if I scored; there were games with the local aspirant goalkeeper in the nearby playing fields after The Big Match on a Sunday afternoon, where we would re-enact high-scoring League games and I would provide live commentary at the same time. I played five-a-side in the local sports centre before I went
to university, and second- or third-team football at college. I played for the staff team when I was teaching in Cambridge, and a mixed game twice a week with friends during the summer, and for the last six or seven years, all the football enthusiasts I know have been gathering on a five-a-side court in West London once a week. So I have been playing for two-thirds of my life, and I would like to play throughout as many of the three or four decades remaining to me as possible.

  I’m a striker; or rather, I am not a goalkeeper, defender or midfield player, and not only can I remember without difficulty some of the goals I scored five or ten or fifteen years ago, I still, privately, take great pleasure in doing so, although I am sure that this sort of indulgence will result in my eventual blindness. I’m no good at football, needless to say, although happily that is also true of the friends I play with. We are just good enough to make it worthwhile: every week one of us scores a blinding goal, a scorching right-foot volley or a side-foot into a corner that caps a mazy run through a bewildered opposition defence, and we think about it secretly and guiltily (this is not what grown men should dream about) until the next time. Some of us have no hair on the tops of our heads, although this, we remind each other, has never been a handicap to Ray Wilkins, or that brilliant Sampdoria winger whose name escapes me; many of us are a few pounds overweight; most of us are in our mid-thirties. And even though there is an unspoken agreement that we don’t tackle very hard, a relief for those of us who never could, I have noticed in the last couple of years that I wake up on Thursday mornings almost paralysed by stiffening joints, pulled hamstrings and sore Achilles tendons; my knee is swollen and puffy for the next two days, a legacy of the medial ligament torn in a game ten years ago (the subsequent exploratory operation was the closest I ever got to being a real footballer); whatever pace I had has been eroded by my advancing years and my self-abusive lifestyle. By the end of our sixty minutes I am bright red with exertion, and my Arsenal replica away shirt (old model) and shorts are sopping wet.