RB: Do you think there’s something integral to the identity of this country that couldn’t handle a victory, like it would be too monumental and contrary to the way we see ourselves? So like City fans only going when City are losing, so it’s like almost as if it’s in opposition to how they see themselves?
NG: We actually spoke seriously about this, what would we actually do if they do win the League? And we were like. ‘I’m not quite sure how I’d react to that.’ I’m more used to just celebrating coming fourth bottom so we live to fight another day. I’m not sure how I’d react to somebody picking up the trophy. I’d be shell-shocked – I wouldn’t know how to handle it.
It’s like when West Ham got to the cup final and we were saying to West Ham fans, ‘Oh, it’s going to be great, what are you going to do if you win?’ And they were like, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ You all accept before you go there you are going to get beaten by Liverpool, you must’ve accepted that before you went there. It’ll be a great day out, if we score first, brilliant.
RB: It’s really weird that you say that, because when we went 2–0 up and at that point I just sort of went, ‘Oh no. Oh, come on! Get one back.’ And when they scored and it levelled it out a bit it and went into extra time, they’re gonna score, they’re gonna score’, and then Stevie Gerrard scored.
NG: I guess because it’s always been this ‘thirty years of hurt’ and all this shit with the England team and the World Cup, if we actually won it, what would be the point of carrying on after that?
There’d be no point. We’d have won it, we’d have lived to see it, they’d repeat it endlessly on television, they’d all get a knighthood and it would be like right well, what now, we’d have to say England are officially pulling out of football, the quest is now complete.
RB: Right. That’s true you know, I see that makes sense. Because the legend of English football needs constant failure to carry on.
NG: Football fans wouldn’t know what to do if England were in Johannesburg at the 2010 World Cup Final and won on penalties. They’d be like, ‘Well, we’ll just get to smashing things up now. What should we do? Do the samba? We don’t know what to do here…honk a horn?’ You know the England psyche is to get beaten on penalties, preferably by the Germans, or any other country we’ve gone to war with, you can put Argentina in there. We were at war with those fuckers. I don’t think England fans would be able to deal with winning the trophy.
RB: This all makes sense. I realised then that I’ve probably never thought of it as an actual possibility when you see England go out to Portugal or Germany or in 96 as well, when that happens, that in itself is the fulfilment of your expectations, that is the trophy.
NG: If you close your eyes, it’s like with the City thing, if I close my eyes I cannot see that trophy being lifted by a guy in a sky-blue shirt, I cannot see John Terry holding that trophy up. I just don’t fucking see it. The amount of times I’ve switched off the TV if England have been knocked out and gone, ‘I can’t wait for the papers in the morning, that’s brilliant, like fucking fifty pages, fucking ‘kill ’em all’! Portuguese bastards! English bastards! And me missus going, ‘You love it and it’s better than going “Oh, we won…oh we’re in the semi-final, er…we’ve never been here before, oh, we don’t know what to do.”’ There’s the fall out of the game, there’s the referees address, there’s the violence of the city afterwards, ‘We were robbed.’
RB: Effigies burnt.
NG: I prefer all of that. I wouldn’t know how to deal with success for England.
RB: And I think that’s part of our whole national identity. I don’t think that’s just you and me, I think that’s a country that feels like that.
NG: Well, it’s that thing that I’ve never quite understood, England always likes a gallant loser. And they say that around the world, ‘Oh, fair play always does for the English.’ But I think somewhere down the line that must be right, that we’ve never really been able to deal with success.
RB: ’Cos if you’re Brazilian or German that’s sort of part of you – winning.
NG: Yeah, you know when you put eleven Italians or Germans on a pitch in a tournament, where there’s something just clicks that they’re gonna fucking win and that’s the end of it, unless they play each other, the winner of that is gonna go on and win the World Cup. That’s usually the way it works. But with the England team it’s like, ‘We’re gonna get as far as the quarter-finals and then we’re gonna get beaten,’ and everybody kind of goes, ‘England’s gonna get beaten, we’re gonna smash some stuff up and then we’re gonna go home,’ and we all know where we stand and we’ll all come back in four years and do it again. That’s England’s role in world football.
RB: That’s why I think if you’re a West Ham fan or a City fan that is then replicated at club level. You might get to the final, you might have a good cup run, you might avoid narrowly relegation or win the Championship, but you know you’re never gonna win the Premier League, that’s not gonna happen.
NG: No, of course not.
RB: So it must be weird to be a Man United fan or a Chelsea fan because then on club level you have that experience of victory and winning things and on a national level it’s a different thing.
NG: They take the winning of it all really seriously and my old fella said to me once when we were kids and Liverpool won the title eight times in a row or something, and I was saying, ‘Why doesn’t it happen to Man City?’ And he said, ‘What, would you rather be a Liverpool fan and knowing you were going to win every week?’ And I was like, ‘yes…I would actually, you know.’
And once you get older you think, well you’ve got more to lose really. The kind of the magical journey of the likes of West Ham and City fans of getting to the Cup Final, ‘Oh fucking hell, I’d wonder what we’d do if we won.’ Like on Saturday, we were watching the game and Robinho gets the free kick and he scores, and you’re just thinking, ‘Is he actually gonna get a hat-trick? Could that fucker…?’ I don’t know why, what to do if he has the best game of his life and he scores a hat-trick and we beat Chelsea 3–0 and the papers are all…I wouldn’t fucking be able to deal with it. I’m kind of glad we got fucking beat in a way, it’s like, yeah we’re still Man City.
RB: (Laughter) It’s like football’s representative of something in football fans, something as a person. And if their game changes too much – it don’t matter if there’s loads of money or loads of European players coming in, if you’re a City fan you’re always gonna lose, if you’re a West Ham fan you’ll have a little run, and then England are always going to disappoint you and you need those things to be consistent to provide stability.
NG: There is a stable law of have and have-nots in world football and in British football. I don’t think you can change the fact that England sit about fifth or sixth best team in the world always. But for some reason, whether it be the Italians going to that World Cup match fixing, it’s a fucking scandal or the fucking chairman getting put away, Juventus have been relegated, but they’re going to win the World Cup somehow. You knew they’d fucking win it somehow. The Germans always get to the final, somehow. The Argentinians are always there, and the Dutch play their role as the gallant fucking wizards who always go out just before they should have. Even in European football, no matter how shit Milan are perceived to be or Real Madrid or Barcelona, they are always there. Particularly in our lifetime, apart from Chelsea who’ve kind of bought it, there’s never been a club that’s muscled their way in and been a powerhouse in European football. I think it’s pre-ordained.
RB: (Laughter) It’s pre-ordained, it’s destiny, it’s in your blood.
NG: I never felt I was supporting the wrong club. I think the people that change when they’re like seventeen or something, ‘Oh you know we used to support Leicester and now we support Man United ’cos, er well…’, oh, fuck off. I was born to be in this situation, with this shower of idiots playing this fucking game.
RB: Like the colour of your eyes or y
our hair, and like at my school it was mostly West Ham fans, one or two Arsenal fans and it just feels right.
NG: I was born to be a City fan, I never chose City because, when my dad was taking me they just happened to be the best team in Europe at the time, they’d just won the UEFA Cup and the FA Cup and the League the year before. But…there it is, big floodlights, that’s my team. But I think you’ll find Arsenal fans have all got this kind of demeanour about them, they look slightly like they’re shit dancers.
Every time Tottenham get to the Cup Final you can’t get a taxi for love nor fucking money, seriously, and Chelsea fans some of them can be fucking nasty…the only time I’ve ever been seriously abused was at Chelsea, not in the ground, outside the ground by 50-year-old fucking fascists. West Ham fans, they range from, well there’s yourself, there seems to be a lot of musicians who like West Ham and artistic people who like West Ham, plus there are Ray Winstone types. But I think Arsenal fans are…
RB: You think they’d be shit dancers?
NG: I mean, if you look at them, no chance.
RB: That’s brilliant, nice one.
Who’s your favourite ever City player?
NG: I’ll probably say Colin Bell, but of the modern era I’ve gotta say Shaun Wright-Phillips or Ali Benarbia, go Shaun Wright-Phillips because he’s fucking little and he means it.
28
A lament for Gazza, whose gift became his curse
It all looks a bit barmy from here, let me tell you, your country, your customs and national sport. I’m in America making a film and keep up to date in the following ways:
1. The internet, especially the Guardian and BBC websites, which as well as providing information act as a kind of spiritual sorbet cleansing my soul after the inevitable porn trawl that occurs whenever a laptop is flipped open.
2. Photocopied English newspapers from a company called Newspaper Direct which, while excellent, do not carry, for reasons incomprehensible to me, my column; meaning I cannot use it as a platform to attack or praise people that enter my life in the most trivial of ways.
3. An invention called ‘slingbox’ which enables you to access your TV at home through your laptop so you can record Sunday Supplement and watch it, as I have just done, on Thursday.
The aforementioned lunacy of your country, England, is further exacerbated by hindsight. In last Sunday’s show when discussing Wednesday’s Champions League fixtures the assembled journalists – Brian Woolnough, Patrick Barclay, Oliver Holt and Ian Ridley – were still reeling from Liverpool’s defeat to Barnsley in the previous day’s FA Cup tie and deduced that Internazionale would annihilate the Reds.
‘It’s been a macabre descent, his ever-juvenile mind racing to keep up with his peculiarly evolved sporting ability’
I watched safe in the knowledge that Liverpool would triumph 2–0 and, might I say, that in spite of the fact I was regarding their predictions retrospectively, I allowed a superior smirk to play upon my lips. ‘You poor naive fools – Liverpool will bounce back. Also you might like to avoid the Newcastle Malmaison, I sense Gazza might have a turn in there.’
This was one of the stories that led me to conclude that the Isles had gone wild in my absence: Gazza has been sectioned after ‘playing up’ in a hotel. I hope both he and the hotel are OK – Gazza I adore and I seem to remember that the hotel in question is quite pleasant an’ all.
His descent has been macabre, his ever-juvenile mind racing to keep up with his peculiarly evolved sporting ability. When he was the world’s best footballer all the tics and gurning and outbursts were an interesting complement. Now, with his gift departed, he has just become an annoying hotel guest. How unfair that his talent could not be reallocated across the narrative of his life so that in times of distress and despair he could whip out a ball and juggle his way through the lobby to freedom – assuming all his transgressions occur in hotels.
Nani looked, for a moment, in Manchester United’s Cup match against Arsenal, that he might retain possession, ignore gravity and dash off into the streets. This Gazza-like display of brilliance, far from earning him plaudits, led to chastisement from Arsène Wenger who thought he was showing off and his own manager who also thought it unnecessary.
Well I thought it was terrific, at least the pixellated version of it I witnessed through my laptop was. I don’t know why he was scolded for that. The charge appears to be that he was showboating – good. He didn’t do it in a ward for terminally ill children, which would be a cruel venue for feats of physical prowess, he did it on a football pitch during a football match, many would say the ideal situation for such an absorbing display. I also enjoyed his scissor-kick, somersault celebration although I’d be the first to condemn him if he did it in a refuge for battered women.
Perhaps one day Nani will have cause to rue the imbalance brought into his life by his talent. In 20 years’ time he may find himself alone and broken in a Holiday Inn and have no magical resource with which to hypnotise a disgruntled night manager but I doubt it.
Gascoigne was ever a unique case belonging to a time before footballers became superstar athletes. He had a natural affinity with fans and was so iconic because he seemed like a normal bloke in possession of an unearthly gift. Only in hindsight is it apparent that it was also an unbearable curse.
29
Congratulations to Spurs for their lowly bauble
SPURS ARE RUBBISH!
When you watch a foreign game on TV in England, like Barcelona versus Real Madrid at Camp Nou, it looks a bit odd, there is a filter, a lens. It seems somehow alien and, well, foreign. The noise of the crowd is qualitatively different. The screech, while as loud as usual, through the speakers sounds further away and everything, to quote Coldplay, is all yellow; a contemporary sepia hue.
When we are shown a clip of American news on English telly it too looks abstracted and, again, all yellow. When I watched the Carling Cup Final (other beers are available) it had, perhaps due to my current exile, adopted the appearance of foreign football. Wembley rang out with a shrill San Siro tenor, the commentary was baffling and Jonathan Woodgate looked like he did when you’d see him play for Real – all far away in a headband.
‘A dinner lady needed to stroll over to Robbie and offer to hold his hand till his melancholy subsided’
It was confusing to regard the familiar through the eyes of a stranger, like when you come home off holiday and your house seems a bit different and the cat doesn’t love you any more. All the more confusing as my friend Nik had mistakenly scheduled our viewing based around east-coast times and when we settled down to watch the game it was already into extra-time.
I don’t really approve of Spurs winning anything; they are in fact the only Premier League side I feel innate dislike for. Well perhaps not innate. It is unlikely that the feelings of disdain are inborn and that if by way of some bizarre mix-up I’d been raised in Nepal I still would think, ‘Oh they’re so arrogant. They aren’t a big club. Bill Nic, Blanchflower and Greavsie are names so distantly glorious that they might as well be monikers of Snow White’s minions.’
The likely truth of my antipathy is that Tottenham are West Ham’s nearest rivals in the misunderstood terms of an ability-meets-geography Venn diagram. Arsenal are too good to get worked up about as, of late, are Chelsea. Fulham don’t have the support to appear truly threatening and most other London clubs are an inconsistent top-flight presence so, with the obvious exception of Millwall, the feuds aren’t perpetual.
I’m an only child myself but I gather that in large families the siblings that are closest in age are more likely to indulge in conflict – whenever I was frustrated as a lad I had to cook up some spurious quarrel with a spider-plant or an ironing board. It is in this spirit of fraternity towards botanic life and domestic appliances that I’d like to extend my heartfelt congratulations to fans of the Lilywhites. It’s been a long time coming but even the lowliest of baubles is preferable to famine.
What’s more I did feel chuffed
for those present – even through the prism of transatlantic telly their jubilation was evident. As was Robbie Keane’s – he did a bit of the ol’ crying, always a big plus for me to see a sobbing footballer as it brings them into the sphere of my experience, all teary and puffed out, though with me it was during matches at school playtime not after a cup victory. For the parallel to have been enhanced a dinner lady would’ve had to stroll over to Robbie and offer to hold his hand till his melancholy subsided.
While the Chelsea vs Spurs final may have lost something in translation, Eduardo da Silva’s heartbreaking injury tore through the screen with nauseating clarity. The twisted sock and bone, the anguished referee and Cesc Fàbregas’s hands cupped over mouth drinking in his own tender mortality. How do they ever come back from those injuries? Do they? Are they ever the same? At the very least their innocence is lost, and in most cases a yard of pace.
Articles of Faith Page 12
