by Nick Hornby
‘Maidenhead?’ the father repeated, incredulous. ‘Maidenhead? But that’s four miles down the road!’
‘Nearer ten,’ I replied, but he seemed unconvinced that the extra six miles made much difference, and I could see his point. I was blushing.
Then he finished me off. ‘You shouldn’t be supporting Arsenal this afternoon,’ he said. ‘You should be supporting your local team.’
It was the most humiliating moment of my teenage years. A complete, elaborate and perfectly imagined world came crashing down around me and fell in chunks at my feet. I wanted Arsenal to avenge me, to beat the Third Division team and their pedantic, dull-witted fans into a pulp; but we won 2–1 with a second-half Pat Rice deflection, and at the end of the game the Reading father ruffled my hair and told me that at least it wouldn’t take me long to get home.
It didn’t stop me, though, and it only took a couple of weeks to rebuild the London Borough of Maidenhead. But I made sure that the next time I went to an away game it was precisely that – far away, where people might believe that my Thames Valley hometown had its own tube station and West Indian community and terrible, insoluble social problems.
Happy
ARSENAL v DERBY
12.2.72
For a match to be really, truly memorable back then, the kind of game that sent me home buzzing inside with the fulfilment of it all, these conditions had to be met: I had to go with my dad; we had to eat lunch in the chip shop (sitting down, no sharing of tables); we had to have seats in the Upper West Stand (the West Stand because you can see down the players’ tunnel from there and so can greet the arrival of the team on the pitch before anyone in the ground), between the half-way line and the North Bank; Arsenal had to play well and win by two clear goals; the stadium had to be full, or nearly full, which usually implied an opposing team of some significance; the game had to be filmed, by ITV for The Big Match on Sunday afternoon rather than by the BBC for Match of the Day (I liked the anticipation, I guess); and Dad had to be wearing warm clothes. He often travelled over from France without an overcoat, forgetting that his Saturday afternoon was likely to be spent in sub-zero temperatures, and his discomfort was so violent that I felt guilty insisting that we stayed right until the final whistle. (I always did insist, however, and when we reached the car he was often so cold that he could hardly speak; I felt bad about it, but not bad enough to risk missing a goal.)
These were enormous demands, and it is hardly surprising that everything came together just the once, as far as I am aware, for this game against Derby in 1972, when an Alan Ball-inspired Arsenal beat the eventual League Champions 2–0 with two Charlie George goals, one a penalty and the other a superb diving header. And because there was a table for us in the chip shop, and because the referee pointed to the spot when Ball was brought down instead of waving play on, and because my dad remembered his coat, I have allowed this game to become something it wasn’t: it now represents for me the whole works, the entire fixation, but that’s wrong. Arsenal were too good, Charlie’s goal was too spectacular, the crowd was too big and too appreciative of the team’s performance… The 12th of February did happen, in just the way I have described it, but only its atypicality is important now. Life isn’t, and has never been, a 2–0 home victory against the League leaders after a fish-and-chip lunch.
My Mum and Charlie George
DERBY COUNTY v ARSENAL
26.2.72
I begged and pleaded and nagged, and eventually my mother gave in and allowed me to travel to away games. Back then I was jubilant; now I’m indignant. What did she think she was doing? Didn’t she ever read the papers or watch TV? Hadn’t she heard of hooligans? Was she really unaware of what Football Specials, the infamous trains that carried fans all over the country, were like? I could have been killed.
Now that I think about it, my mother’s part in all this was actually quite mysterious. She didn’t like me spending my money on Led Zeppelin records, understandably, or on cinema tickets, and she didn’t even seem that keen on me buying books. And yet somehow it was OK for me to travel to London or Derby or Southampton on an almost weekly basis and take my chances with any group of nutters that I happened upon. She has never discouraged my mania for football; in fact it was she who bought my ticket for the Reading Cup-tie, driving down a frozen, snow-covered A4 and queuing up while I was at school. And some eight years later I came home to find on our dining table an impossibly elusive ticket for the West Ham-Arsenal Cup Final that she had bought (for twenty quid, money she didn’t really have) from a man at work.
Well, yes, of course it was something to do with masculinity, but I don’t think that her usually tacit, occasionally active football support was supposed to be for my benefit; it was for hers. On Saturdays, it seems to me now, we enacted a weird little parody of a sitcom married couple: she would take me down to the station, I’d go on the train up to London, do my man’s stuff and ring her from the forecourt call-box when I got back for a lift home. She would then put my tea on the table and I ate while I talked about my day and, sweetly, she would ask questions about a subject that she didn’t know much about, but tried to take an interest in anyway, for my sake. If things had not gone well she would tiptoe around them; on a good day my satisfaction would fill the living room. In Maidenhead, this was exactly what happened from Monday to Friday, every single weekday evening. The only difference was that in our house we didn’t get around to it until the weekend.
There is, I know, an argument which says that acting out the role of one’s father with one’s mother isn’t necessarily the best way of ensuring psychic health in later years. But then, we all do it at some time or another, chaps, don’t we?
Away games were my equivalent of staying late at the office, and the fifth-round Cup-tie at Derby was the first time I had got to do it properly. In those days there were no restrictions on travelling in the way there are now (British Rail eventually abandoned the Football Specials, and the clubs make their own travel arrangements): we could roll up at St Paneras, buy a dirt-cheap train ticket, and pile on to a dilapidated train, the corridors of which were patrolled by police with guard dogs. Much of the journey took place in darkness – light bulbs were shattered at wearyingly brief intervals – which made reading difficult, although I always, always took a book with me and spent ages finding the carriages which contained middle-aged men who would have no interest in attracting the attention of the alsatians.
At our destination we were met by hundreds and hundreds of police, who then escorted us to the ground by a circuitous route away from the city centre; it was during these walks that my urban hooligan fantasies were given free rein. I was completely safe, protected not only by the law but by my fellow supporters, and I had therefore been liberated to bellow along in my still-unbroken voice with the chanted threats of the others. I didn’t look terribly hard, in truth: I was as yet nowhere near as big as I should have been, and wore black-framed Brains-style National Health reading glasses, although these I hid away for the duration of the route marches, presumably to make myself just that little bit more terrifying. But those who mumble about the loss of identity football fans must endure miss the point: this loss of identity can be a paradoxically enriching process. Who wants to be stuck with who they are the whole time? I for one wanted time out from being a jug-eared, bespectacled, suburban twerp once in a while; I loved being able to frighten the shoppers in Derby or Norwich or Southampton (and they were frightened – you could see it). My opportunities for intimidating people had been limited hitherto, though I knew it wasn’t me that made people hurry to the other side of the road, hauling their children after them; it was us, and I was a part of us, an organ in the hooligan body. The fact that I was the appendix – small, useless, hidden out of the way somewhere in the middle – didn’t matter in the slightest.
If going to the ground was all glory and raw power, standing inside it, and getting back to the station afterwards, was less invigorating. Violence inside the gro
unds has all but disappeared now, for a variety of reasons: fans are separated properly (back then, if you fancied your chances in the opposition end, you could just walk through the turnstiles), away fans are usually kept back after games until the stadium has cleared, the policing is a lot more sophisticated, and so on. For the first half of the seventies, however, there was a fight at every single Arsenal game I attended. At Highbury they mostly took place on the Clock End, where the opposition’s fans stood; usually they were brief flurries, Arsenal fans charging into the enemy, the enemy scattering, the police taking control. These were ritualistic charges, the violence usually contained in the movement itself rather than in fists and boots (it was this ‘running’ that caused the Heysel tragedy, rather than any real physical attack). But occasionally, particularly against West Ham, Tottenham, Chelsea or Manchester United, the trouble was just as likely to be at the North Bank end of the ground where the noise comes from: when away fans could amass sufficient numbers they would attempt to seize the home fans’ territory as if it were an island of strategic military importance.
Consequently it was very difficult to watch football safely at away grounds. Standing in the section ‘reserved’ for visitors didn’t ensure any protection; in fact, it merely informed the opposition of your identity. Standing at the other end was either dangerous (if the Arsenal fans were intending to invade the home end) or pointless – why bother to travel half the length of the country if you then had to pretend to support the opponents? I settled for a place along the side, if possible, where it was quiet; if not, then in the ‘away’ end, but towards a corner, as far from the more gung-ho, members of the Arsenal touring party as possible. But I never enjoyed away games. I felt constantly nervous, often with good reason: at random points throughout the afternoon, fighting would break out, prefaced by the same kind of roar that greeted a goal; but the fact that the roar might occur when the play was nowhere near either end of the pitch was disorienting in the extreme. I have seen players look around, perplexed that their efforts at a throw-in should meet with such vocal enthusiasm.
The afternoon at Derby was worse than most. There had been trouble before the game and at sporadic intervals during it, and though I was way down the terraces, hidden among younger kids and their fathers, I was scared – so scared that in fact I was ambivalent about an Arsenal victory. A draw would have suited me fine, but I could live with defeat and an exit from the Cup if it meant I could get back to Derby station without anything untoward happening to my head. It is at times like this that the players have more responsibilities than they could ever perceive or understand; in any case, this sort of perception was not one of Charlie George’s most obvious qualities.
Charlie George is one of the few seventies icons who has so far managed to avoid being deconstructed, possibly because he appears at first glance to be one of the identikit George Best/Rodney Marsh/Stan Bowles long-haired, wayward wasters who were two a new pee twenty years ago. It is true that he was as outrageously gifted as the best of the breed, and that these gifts were appallingly underexploited throughout his career (he only played for England once, and towards the end of his time at Arsenal could not even gain a place in the first team); all this and more – his temper, his problems with managers, the fierce devotion he attracted from younger fans and women – was par for the course, commonplace at a time when football was beginning to resemble pop music in both its presentation and its consumption.
Charlie George differed slightly from the rebel norm on two counts. Firstly, he had actually spent his early teenage years on the terraces of the club for which he later played; and though this is not unusual in itself – plenty of Liverpool and Newcastle players supported these clubs when they were young – George is one of the few genius misfits to have jumped straight over the perimeter fence into a club shirt and shorts. Best was Irish, Bowles and Marsh were itinerant… not only was George Arsenal’s own, nurtured on the North Bank and in the youth team, but he looked and behaved as if running around on the pitch dressed as a player were the simplest way to avoid ejection from the stadium. Physically, he did not fit the mould: he was powerfully built and over six feet tall, too big to be George Best. On my birthday in 1971, shortly before his goal against Newcastle, one of the frequent red mists that plagued him had descended, and he had grabbed a rugged Newcastle defender by the throat and lifted him from the ground. This was not misfit petulance, this was hard-man menace, and the likely lads on the terraces have never had a more convincing representative.
And secondly, he was not a media rebel. He could not give interviews (his inarticulacy was legendary and genuine); his long, lank hair remained unfeathered and unlayered right up until the time he unwisely decided upon a bubble perm from hell some time in the mid-seventies, and when he first played in the team, at the beginning of the 69/70 season, it looked suspiciously as if he were trying to grow out a number one crop; and he seemed uninterested in womanising – Susan Farge, the fiancée whose name I still remember, is intimidatingly prominent in most of the off-the-pitch photographs. He was a big star, and the media were interested, but they didn’t know what to do with him. The Egg Marketing Board tried, but their slogan, ‘E for B and Charlie George’, was significantly incomprehensible. Somehow, he had made himself unpackageable, media-proof – possibly the very last star of any iconic stature to do so. (For some reason, however, he managed to remain in the otherwise colander-like consciousness of my grandmother for some years after his retirement. ‘Charlie George!’ she spat disapprovingly and opaquely circa 1983, when I told her that I was off to Highbury to watch a game. What he means to her will, I fear, never properly be understood.)
At Derby he was astonishing on a dreadful, muscle-jellifying winter pitch (Those pitches! The Baseball Ground at Derby, White Hart Lane, Wembley even… was winter grass really an eighties innovation, like the video machine or frozen yoghurt?). He scored twice, two screamers, and to the tune of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s then-recent hit, we sang ‘Charlie George! Superstar! How many goals have you scored so far?’ (to which the Derby fans, like others all over the country had done before them, replied ‘Charlie George! Superstar! Walks like a woman and he wears a bra!’ It is hard not to laugh when people remember the sixties and seventies as the golden age of terrace wit). Despite Charlie’s double, the game finished 2–2 after a late Derby equaliser, and I therefore got the draw I’d been cravenly hoping for, but not the aggro-free walk back to the station that was supposed to be mine as a consequence.
It was Charlie’s fault. A goal, for reasons that would require a book in itself to explain, is a provocative gesture, especially when the terraces are already bathed in a sort of half-light of violence, as they were on that afternoon. I understood that Charlie was a professional footballer, and that if an opportunity to score came his way then our tenuous safety should not in itself be a consideration. This much was clear. But whether it was absolutely essential to celebrate by running over to the Derby fans – in whose snarling, southern-poof hating, Cockney baiting, skinheaded, steel-toecapped company we were obliged to spend the remainder of the afternoon, and through whose hostile, alleywayed territory we were obliged to scuttle after the final whistle – and making an unambiguous take-that-you-provincial-fuckers V-sign… this was much more opaque. The way I saw it, Charlie’s sense of responsibility and duty had momentarily let him down.
He got booed off the pitch and fined by the FA; we got chased all the way on to our train, bottles and cans cascading around our ears. Cheers, Charlie.
Social History
ARSENAL v DERBY
29.2.72
The replay finished nil-nil, a game with no merit whatsoever. But it remains the only first-team game that has taken place at Highbury on a midweek afternoon during my Arsenal time: February 1972 was the time of the power workers’ strike. For all of us it meant sporadic electricity, candlelight, occasional cold suppers, but for third-year football fans it meant visits to the Electricity Board showroom, where the cut-o
ff rota was posted, in order to discover which of us were able to offer The Big Match on Sunday afternoons. For Arsenal, the power crisis meant no floodlights, hence the Tuesday afternoon replay.
I went to the game, despite school, and though I had imagined that the crowd might consist of me, a few other teenage truants, and a scattering of pensioners, in fact there were more than sixty-three thousand people there, the biggest crowd of the season. I was disgusted. No wonder the country was going to the dogs! My truancy prevented me from sharing my disquiet with my mother (an irony that escaped me at the time), but what was going on?
For this thirtysomething, the midweek afternoon Cup-tie (West Ham played giant-killers Hereford on a Tuesday afternoon as well, and got a forty-two-thousand-plus crowd) now has that wonderful early seventies sheen, like an episode of The Fenn Street Gang or a packet of Number Six cigarettes; maybe it was just that everyone at Upton Park and Highbury, all one hundred and six thousand of us, wanted to walk down one of the millions of tiny alleys of social history.
Me and Bob Mcnab
STOKE CITY v ARSENAL
(Villa Park) 15.4.72
The 71/72 FA Cup was a cracker, an apparently endless source of wonder and tricky trivia questions. Which two teams took eleven hours to settle their fourth qualifying round tie? Which player scored nine goals in his team’s first round 11–0 win over Margate? Who did he play for then? Where was he transferred to later? Who were the two Hereford players who scored in their Southern League side’s astonishing 2–1 victory against First Division Newcastle? (A clue: the surnames have special resonance for Arsenal fans.) Oxford City and Alvechurch; Ted Macdougall; Bournemouth; Manchester United; Ronnie Radford and Ricky George: one point for each, seven points and you’ve won a pair of Malcolm Macdonald sideboards.
