This has not been the best of weeks, and you can tell it’s bad because money isn’t, for once, the thing making me feel sick. I’d rather not go into details. But things have become more bearable since 9.25pm last Tuesday, when the final whistle blew on a 1-1 draw between AFC Bournemouth and Manchester City, meaning that Arsenal had won the Premier League for the first time in 22 years.
My poor editor. Last week it was cats, this week it’s football. Normally I do not write about football, but the absurd thing is how much the result of a match – 22 wildly overpaid people running around a pitch kicking a ball, and occasionally each other – can affect one’s mood for better or worse. One can be on the bones of one’s arse but still feel like a champion when your team becomes one.
And the thing is, I am by no means a football superfan, or an Arsenal superfan. I could name most of the current Arsenal squad but it would be a bit of a struggle. There have been years when my fandom has been so tenuous, so watered down, that I would have struggled to name three or four team members; in those years I felt a bit of a fraud. Maybe they should have won more. I also find the game tactically baffling. You could plonk me into the middle of a four- or five-day cricket match and within a couple of minutes’ looking around I could tell you why X was standing there, why Y was bowling and what Z was going to try to do to neutralise Y’s threat. But with football? It’s incredibly fluid and complex. How do you plan for that, in the battlefield conditions of an actual match? And as for the skills involved: well, let’s just say they are beyond me, even in fantasy. I can play a gorgeous cover drive in my head against the most fearsome bowling attack in history, with the possible exception of the West Indies during their pomp. But I know that if I ever found myself confronted by a football, I’d hoof it in a direction that is at least 90 degrees away from where I wanted it to go.
But for some reason I have become more and more interested in the game as I get older. Perhaps it is because my friends who live in Brighton, almost all of whom are or were music journalists, are all football supporters (unlike snooty literary types like me). Although I was pretty much the first person to review Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, which I loved, and which kick started the middle class’s love of the game.
I have not approached my childhood obsession with football, when I had a big booklet that filled up with stickers portraying the players of the First Division (as was) in the 1971-72 season, and could name the entire Arsenal squad standing on my head, and the squads of a few other teams as well. I had been persuaded to give my support to the Gunners a couple of years earlier, when I became conscious of football, and also aware that it was necessary for there to be a geographical aspect to one’s support. Growing up in north London, this meant either Arsenal or Spurs, but Z—, the school tough guy, made the choice easy for me by putting my head in the bowl of a toilet and assuring me that if I didn’t promise to support Arsenal for the rest of my life, he’d flush. As I was six years old at the time and didn’t know much about plumbing, I feared that this would actually result in my being flushed right down the toilet, to go wherever poos went. So it was an easy choice, and Z— never bothered me again. In fact, he would look out for me now and then, even at big school where he became its first punk, dying his hair pink and making a belt out of a bicycle chain that he called Gladys. This was against school uniform policy but he was about six and a half feet tall by then and the masters, who wanted a quiet life above all else, were terrified of him. Also, the next season Arsenal won the double – both the league and the FA Cup – and I’ve never regretted my decision.
But 22 years since the last Premiership victory. That’s a long time. That’s even longer than this column has been going. Heck, 22 years ago, I was married and living in the family home. Arsène Wenger’s team then were known as the Invincibles, unbeaten for an entire season, and I thought they’d never lose a match again. But they did – oh they did. Though you can’t regret your decision when your team loses; you just have to suck it up and go all Kipling on yourself. Which I suppose means I should treat this season’s triumph as though it’s as much of an imposter as another season’s disaster. But I think I’ll wait a bit before I start dialling down the happiness.
And I am happy, as long as I don’t think about the Other Thing. For a while, I am six or seven years old again, with all the zeal of the newly converted. As my friend, the writer Joseph S Furey, put it the morning after the result: “It’s never just about football. It’s about time. About the person you were when the game first got its hooks in you.”
[Further reading: Money, a motorhome and the fall of Peter Murrell]
