Fever Pitch

by Nick Hornby

  We left a couple of minutes before the end of the Derby game, when Arsenal were winning 2–0 (Kelly and Radford, one in each half). A couple of black boys (black boys! Flipping heck!), maybe our age, but yards taller and from a different planet – the planet Real Life, the planet Secondary Modern, the planet Inner City – jostled us as we walked past; my heart skipped a couple of beats and I made for the exit. They followed. We moved a little faster, anxious to get through the maze of alleyways and turnstiles that led out of the ground. Out in the street, I knew the kids wouldn’t bother us in the middle of the crowd of grown-ups flooding away from the stadium.

  The crowd didn’t seem to perturb them in the slightest, however. We broke into a run towards the tube station; so did they. Rat made it, but they caught up with me, pushed me against the wall of the stadium, smacked me in the face a couple of times, stole my red-and-white scarf and left me in a crumpled, traumatised heap on the pavement. People – adults with a reassuring paternal demeanour – stepped over me or around me, just as I have walked around innumerable beatings outside grounds. I had been hit much harder at school (I was not only small but cheeky, a particularly unfortunate combination), but usually by people I knew, which made it somehow acceptable. This was different. This was much scarier: I didn’t understand what the limits were – had I been lucky or unlucky? – and though I knew I was obsessed enough with the team to go back and stand in the same place again, the prospect of getting thumped once a fortnight at twenty to five was bleak.

  I really don’t think that I was aware of class then. A few years later, when I discovered politics, I would have felt that I deserved a smack in the mouth for being a privileged middle-class white male – indeed, in my late teens, when the chief source of my ideological input was the first Clash album, I probably would have delivered it myself – but then I just felt a deep sense of disappointment and shame. Disappointment because I had finally begun to suspect that some people didn’t go to football for the Right Reasons (devotion to the Gunners, or at the least a yen for some sparkling wing play); shame because, despite my size and youth, I was still a male and there is something in males, something stupid and unreconstructed but powerful nonetheless, that simply refuses to tolerate anything that might be construed as weakness. (The above version of the afternoon’s events is archetypally masculine: there were two of them against one of me; I was tiny, they were huge, and so on. It could well have been that I was assaulted by a blind seven-year-old with one arm, but my memory has properly protected me from any suspicion that I might have been a wimp from the sticks.)

  Perhaps the worst of it was that I couldn’t unburden the experience on to my mum. If I told her, I’d be banned from going to football unaccompanied by my father for years to come; so I kept it to myself, confessed that I’d left the scarf – a present from my gran – on the tube, endured endless complaints about my carelessness and irresponsibility, and was denied my customary Saturday night trip to the chip shop. Any theories about the brutalising experience of urban deprivation would have been wasted on me that night; I was only interested in suburban deprivation, which seemed to me the cruellest deprivation of them all.

  Can You See Me On The Box?

  SOUTHAMPTON v ARSENAL

  10.4.71

  On holiday in Bournemouth, where both my grandmothers lived, and conveniently there is an away match at Southampton. So I book a coach ticket, travel along the coast and squirm through a packed Dell to the far edge of the terrace; and the next day, when Southern show the highlights of the game on TV, there I am on the bottom left of the screen every time a corner is taken (McLintock scored from one of them, the decider in a 2–1 win): a sober lad, seven days short of my fourteenth birthday, unmistakably pre-pubescent… but I’m not waving or leering or shoving the boy standing next to me, just standing there, a still point in the middle of all the juvenile hyperactivity around me.

  Why was I so serious? I was a child everywhere else: at home; at school, where chronic fits of the giggles seized me well into the sixth form; and out with my friends, one or two of whom now had girlfriends, the most side-splittingly, gut-bustingly, snot-dribblingly hilarious development the rest of us had ever seen. (Symbolically, a nickname was altered. Larry, so-called because of his physical and stylistic resemblances to Larry Lloyd, the Liverpool centre-half, became Caz, because of the interest he now shared with Casanova, the Italian striker. We were delighted with the witticism.) But when I was watching Arsenal, I don’t think I felt relaxed enough to laugh until I was well into my twenties; if I had been filmed by the corner flag at any time between 1968 and 1981 my expression would have been the same.

  The simple truth is that obsessions just aren’t funny, and that obsessives don’t laugh. But there’s a complicated truth here as well: I don’t think I was very happy, and the problem with being a thirteen-year-old depressive is that when the rest of life is so uproarious, which it invariably is, there is no suitable context for the gloom. How can you express misery when people keep making you snigger all the time? There was no sniggering at Arsenal games, however – not from me, anyway. And even though I had friends who would have been happy to accompany me to matches, significantly my support soon became a solitary activity: the following season I watched around twenty-five games, seventeen or eighteen of them on my own. I just didn’t want to have fun at football. I had fun everywhere else, and I was sick of it. What I needed more than anything was a place where unfocused unhappiness could thrive, where I could be still and worry and mope; I had the blues, and when I watched my team I could unwrap them and let them breathe a little.

  How I Won the Double

  ARSENAL v NEWCASTLE

  17.4.71

  In a little over a year, things had changed. The team was still short of stars and pretty low on verve, but they suddenly became very hard to beat. In 1970 the dismal seventeen-year hunt for a trophy finally ended when Arsenal won the European Fairs Cup – amazingly, in some style. After thrashing Ajax, Johann Cruyff and all, in the semi, they came from behind to beat Anderlecht of Belgium 4–3 in the final. They won 3–0 at Highbury in the second leg, and grown men danced on the pitch and wept with the relief of it all. I wasn’t there. I wasn’t allowed to go to a midweek match on a school night on my own.

  1971 was Arsenal’s annus mirabilis. They won the League Championship and the FA Cup in the same season, the famous Double that only three teams this century have managed. In fact, they won the trophies in the same week: on Monday night they won the Championship at Tottenham, and on the Saturday the Cup against Liverpool at Wembley. I wasn’t there. I wasn’t at Tottenham because I still wasn’t allowed to go to a midweek match on a school night on my own; I wasn’t at Wembley because Dad didn’t come through with a ticket, despite promises to the contrary and, yes, I’m still bitter twenty years on.

  So I wasn’t there for anything. (I wasn’t even there for the parade through Islington on the Sunday after the Cup Final. I had to go to see my Auntie Vi in Dulwich.) I missed it all. And as this book is about the consumption of football, rather than football itself, the Double year – Arsenal’s finest season of the century – doesn’t really have much place in my story, and how about that for impressionism? Sure, I threw a radio jubilantly against my bedroom wall when the final whistle blew at Tottenham; I literally went dizzy with joy when Charlie George scored the winner in the Cup Final and lay on his back with his arms outstretched; I strutted around school, trying to work out how I could humiliate my classmates in the same way they had humiliated me two years before, settling instead for a beatific smile which was understood by both teachers and boys. As far as they were concerned, I was Arsenal, and I was entitled to my triumphant bliss.

  But I didn’t think so, not really. I’d earned the pain against Swindon, but I hadn’t contributed to the Double triumph in the same way, unless you counted a dozen or so League games, a school blazer groaning with lapel badges and a bedroom covered in magazine pictures as a contribution. The others, thos
e who’d got hold of Final tickets and queued for five hours at Tottenham, they’ve got more to say about the Double than I.

  I try now to hang on to the fact that a couple of weeks earlier, before all this glory, I had managed to place myself at the centre of the Double narrative. On my birthday Dad and I went to Arsenal v Newcastle (a terrible game, again); I sat clutching a radio that he had given me (the very radio, in fact, that I smashed on 3rd May), pocket-sized for Saturday afternoons. Leeds were top of the First Division, and that afternoon they had a home game against West Brom, fifth from bottom and without an away win all season. There used to be a comic strip called ‘Billy’s Boots’, about a boy whose magic boots transformed their mediocre owner into a superstar; I suddenly seemed to be in possession of a radio which transformed the results of the most useless team into dramatic away victories. When I turned it on shortly after half-time, West Brom scored; when I did it again, they scored a second time. The tannoy at Highbury announced the news and the crowd went berserk; Charlie George scored the only goal and Arsenal went top of the League for the first time that season.

  The gift I got that afternoon was priceless, like world peace or an end to Third World poverty, something that couldn’t be bought for a million pounds – unless my dad had bought the referee at Leeds for a million pounds, the only possible explanation for some of his decisions that afternoon. One of West Brom’s goals was by general consensus hundreds of yards offside, provoking the crowd into invading the pitch, which in turn resulted in Leeds being banned from their ground for the first few games of the following season. ‘The crowd has gone mad and they have every right to do so,’ Barry Davies pronounced memorably on Match of the Day that night; those were the days, when TV commentators actively encouraged riots rather than argued pompously for the return of National Service. If you did slip the ref something, then thanks, Dad. Brilliant idea. Would Leeds have lost at home to West Brom if it hadn’t been my birthday? Would the game at Arsenal have finished nil-nil, as Arsenal v Newcastle games had always done before? Would we then have gone on to win the League? I doubt it.

  Another City

  CHELSEA v TOTTENHAM

  January 1972

  It is true to say that while I made a natural Arsenal supporter – I too was often dour, defensive, argumentative, repressed – my father belonged at Stamford Bridge. Chelsea were flamboyant, unpredictable and, it has to be said, not the most reliable of teams; my father had a taste for pink shirts and theatrical ties, and, stern moralist that I was, I think I felt that he could have done with a little more consistency. (Parenthood, George Graham would say, is a marathon, not a sprint.) Whatever the reason, Dad patently enjoyed going to Chelsea more than our trips to Highbury, and it was easy to see why. We once spotted Tommy Steele (or maybe it was John Alderton) coming out of the Gents in Chelsea’s North Stand, and before the games we ate in one of the Italian restaurants on the King’s Road. Once we went to look around the Chelsea Drugstore, where I bought the second Led Zeppelin album and sniffed the cigarette smoke in the air suspiciously. (I was as literal-minded as any Arsenal centre-half.)

  Chelsea had Osgood and Cooke and Hudson, all flash and flair, and their version of football was bewilderingly different from Arsenal’s (this League Cup semi-final, one of the best games I had ever seen, finished 2–2). But more importantly, the Bridge and its environs presented me with a different but still familiar version of London: familiar because the middle-class suburban boy has always been aware of it. It was not dissimilar to the London we already knew from trips to see pantomimes and films and museums, a busy, bright-lights-big-city London supremely aware that it was the centre of the world; and the people that I saw at Chelsea in those days were centre-of-the-world people. Football was a fashionable game, and Chelsea were a fashionable team; the models and actors and young executives who were cheering the Blues on were beautiful to look at and made the Bridge (the seats, anyway) an exquisitely exotic place.

  But this wasn’t what I came to football for. Arsenal and its neighbourhood was for me much more exotic than anything I would ever see around the King’s Road, which was full of an old-hat ho-hum glitz; football had gripped me because of its otherness. All those quiet terraced streets around Highbury and Finsbury Park, all those embittered but still peculiarly loyal used-car salesmen… now that was real exoticism; the London that a grammar school boy from the Thames Valley could never have seen for himself no matter how many times he went to the Casino cinema to see films in Cinerama. We wanted different things, my dad and I. Just as he was starting to want a part of what Chelsea was all about (and just as he was, for the first time in his life, able to afford it), I wanted to go tearing off in the other direction.

  Islington Boy

  READING v ARSENAL

  5.2.72

  The white south of England middle-class Englishman and woman is the most rootless creature on earth; we would rather belong to any other community in the world. Yorkshiremen, Lancastrians, Scots, the Irish, blacks, the rich, the poor, even Americans and Australians have something they can sit in pubs and bars and weep about, songs to sing, things they can grab for and squeeze hard when they feel like it, but we have nothing, or at least nothing we want. Hence the phenomenon of mock-belonging, whereby pasts and backgrounds are manufactured and massaged in order to provide some kind of acceptable cultural identity. Who was it that sang ‘I Wanna Be Black’? The title says it all, and everybody has met people who really do: in the mid-seventies, young, intelligent and otherwise self-aware white men and women in London began to adopt a Jamaican patois that frankly didn’t suit them at all. How we all wished we came from the Chicago Projects, or the Kingston ghettos, or the mean streets of north London or Glasgow! All those aitch-dropping, vowel-mangling punk rockers with a public school education! All those Hampshire girls with grandparents in Liverpool or Brum! All those Pogues fans from Hertfordshire singing Irish rebel songs! All those Europhiles who will tell you that though their mothers live in Reigate, their sensibilities reside in Rome!

  Ever since I have been old enough to understand what it means to be suburban I have wanted to come from somewhere else, preferably north London. I have already dropped as many aitches as I can – the only ones left in my diction have dug themselves too far into definite articles to be winkled out – and I use plural verb forms with singular subjects whenever possible. This was a process that began shortly after my first visits to Highbury, continued throughout my suburban grammar school career, and escalated alarmingly when I arrived at university. My sister, on the other hand, who also has problems with her suburban roots, went the other way when she went to college, and suddenly started to speak like the Duchess of Devonshire; when we introduced each other to our respective sets of friends they found the experience perplexing in the extreme. Which of us, they seemed to be wondering, had been adopted? Had she fallen on hard times or had I struck lucky? Our mother, born and bred in south-east London but a Home Counties resident for nearly forty years, cuts the accents neatly down the middle.

  In a way nobody can blame any of us, the Mockneys or the cod Irish, the black wannabees or the pseudo Sloanes. The 1944 Education Act, the first Labour Government, Elvis, beatniks, the Beatles and the Stones, the sixties… we never stood a chance. I blame the eleven-plus. Before the war, maybe, our parents could have scraped the money together to send us to minor public schools, and we would have received our pisspoor cheapskate third-hand classical educations and gone to work in a bank; the eleven-plus, designed to create a meritocracy, made state schools safe for nice families again. Post-war grammar school boys and girls stepped into a void; none of the available cultures seemed to belong to us, and we had to pinch one quick. And what is suburban post-war middle-class English culture anyway? Jeffrey Archer and Evita, Flanders and Swann and the Goons, Adrian Mole and Merchant-Ivory, Francis Durbridge Presents… and John Cleese’s silly walk? It’s no wonder we all wanted to be Muddy Waters or Charlie George.

  The Reading-Arsenal fourth-r
ound Cup-tie in 1972 was the first and most painful of the many exposures to come. Reading was my nearest League team, an unhappy geographical accident that I would have done anything to change; Highbury was thirty-odd miles away, Elm Park a mere eight. Reading fans had Berkshire accents, and incredibly they didn’t seem to mind; they didn’t even try to speak like Londoners. I stood with the home supporters – the match was all-ticket, and it was much easier to go to Reading than to north London to get one – and while I waited my still customary ninety minutes for the game to begin, a whole family (a family!), mother, father and son, all kitted up in blue-and-white scarves and rosettes (rosettes!), started talking to me.

  They asked me questions about my team and the stadium, made jokes – peasants! – about Charlie George’s hair, offered me biscuits, lent me their programmes and newspapers. I was beginning to enjoy the conversation. My assumed Cockney sounded to my ears flawless against their loathsome burr, and our relationship was beginning to take on a gratifying city-slicker-meets-hicks-from-the-sticks hue.

  It was when they asked me about schools that it all went terribly wrong: they had heard about London comprehensives, and wanted to know whether it was all true, and for what seemed like hours I weaved an elaborate fantasy based on the exploits of the half-dozen small-time thugs at the grammar. I can only presume that I had managed to convince myself, and that by this stage my town had, in my head, transmuted into a north London village somewhere between Holloway and Islington; because when the father asked where I lived, I told him the truth.