Step Across This Line

by Salman Rushdie

  Spurs did the Double in the 1960–61 season, narrowly missed repeating the feat in 1961–62, and in the following thirty-seven years they have often been “a good Cup side,” winning many British and European knockout trophies, but they have never won a League Championship again. This is what it means to be a fan: to wait for a miracle, enduring decades of disillusion, and yet to have no choice in the matter of allegiance. Each weekend, I turn to the sports pages, and my eye automatically seeks out the Spurs’ result. If they have won, the weekend feels richer. If they have lost, a black cloud settles. It’s pathetic. It’s an addiction. It’s monogamous, till-death-us-do-part love.

  In that glorious 1960–61 season, however, Blanchflower’s Tottenham did, just that once, take the First Division championship by storm. Then, on the first Saturday in May, they went down the road to Wembley for the Cup Final, the Double’s second leg. They won the game 2–0, even though they didn’t play well on the day, as even their manager, Bill Nicholson, later admitted. They were, in fact, lucky to win.

  The team they beat was Leicester City.

  3. GOALKEEPERS

  The 1999 Worthington Cup Final would turn out to be a tale of two opposing goalkeepers. The Spurs goalie, Ian Walker, had only recently regained his first-team place after a slump in form, and many of us still worried about his vulnerability. Leicester, on the other hand, had the U.S. international keeper, Kasey Keller, in goal. Walker and Keller would make one bad mistake apiece at crucial moments of the match. One of them got away with it. The other’s fumble decided the game.

  Goalkeepers aren’t like other players, perhaps because they are allowed to handle the ball within the delineated confines of the “penalty area,” perhaps because they are the last line of their team’s defense, but mainly because, for goalkeepers, there is no middle register of performance; each time they play, they know they will come off the field either as heroes or as clowns.

  A good goalkeeper must be brave enough to dive at the feet of an opponent arriving at speed. He must command the area around his goal and exude an air of swift decisiveness. He must know when to catch the ball and when to punch it, and whenever high crosses are aimed into the penalty area from the wings, he must, if he can, rise above the throng of players and make the ball his own.

  In spite of (or because of) the goalie’s vital importance, English soccer has goalkeeper jokes the way rock ’n’ roll has drummer jokes. There was once a goalie nicknamed Dracula, because he was afraid of crosses. Also a goalie nicknamed Cinderella, because he was always late for the ball.

  The keeper in the “Super Spurs” Double side was the Scottish international, Bill Brown. He was gaunt and unsmiling and brilliant and had an old-fashioned short-back-and-sides haircut, and nobody ever cracked a joke about him.

  One day in the mid-1960s, however, Billy Nick splashed out 30,000 pounds, then a world-record transfer fee for a goalkeeper, to bring a huge raw Irish kid the short distance from the little Watford Football Club to mighty Spurs. His name was Pat Jennings, and he wore his hair fashionably long and wavy, with sideburns. The Spurs faithful distrusted him at once.

  He did his time in the reserve side but soon enough got his turn in goal. The home fans gave him a hard time that day until, at a crucial moment, he flew across his goalmouth to save a shot that was heading at high velocity for the far top corner, and not only made the save but caught the flying ball cleanly in a single outstretched hand.

  We looked at one another, aghast, with the same question in all our eyes: exactly how big are this guy’s paws? After that save, Jennings had no more trouble with the Spurs crowd, who took him to their hearts until, many seasons later, the management did an unthinkable thing. Deciding that Pat—our by now beloved Pat, Ireland’s international keeper as well as ours, Pat who was regularly rated as the finest in the world!—was over the hill, they transferred him to Arsenal. To Arsenal, of all clubs, where he went on to enjoy year after year of triumph! Even now, it’s hard to put into words the outrage I felt. The outrage I still feel. I can only say what Spurs fans said to each other in those days, furiously, mirthlessly, often adding, as intensifiers, a series of unrepeatable expletives: “It’s a joke.” *12

  4. THE SOUNDTRACK

  Ossie’s going to Wembley

  His knees have gone all trembly

  Come on, you Spurs.

  Come on, you Spurs.

  Soccer is a sung game, lustily and thoroughly sung. Teams have their individual anthems—“Glory, Glory” for Spurs, “You’ll Never Walk Alone” for Liverpool—and a collection of other so to speak patriotic songs. Ossie was Osvaldo Ardiles, a member of Argentina’s 1978 world-champion team, who came to Spurs immediately after his World Cup victory and endeared himself to the supporters both by the neat brilliance of his play and by his inability to master the sound of the English language. (“Tottingham,” he called his chosen club or, alternatively, “the Spoors.”)

  Ossie went to Wembley to play for Spurs against Manchester City in the 1981 FA Cup Final, and he had, as a teammate, a fellow Argentinian, Ricardo “Ricky” Villa. The game was drawn, but in the replay Villa scored one of the most inspired goals of modern times, jinking and twisting past most of the opposing defense before he buried the ball in the net. Thus Ossie’s final became Villa’s triumph. Ricky won the Cup for “Tottingham,” but Ossie still has the song.

  Soccer has many other aural codes. There is, for example, the rhythm of the scores. Each Saturday we hear the results being read on radio and TV, and so formalized is the reading that you can divine the result simply from the announcer’s stresses and intonation. Then there’s the music of the roars. In the middle 1980s I lived for a time at one end of Highbury Hill, the long road at whose other end is the Arsenal stadium. Match days, when the crowd surged past our house, were often a little wild. (Once somebody stuck a flayed pig’s head on the iron railings of my front yard. Why? The pig didn’t say.) But I could always work out how the game was going without leaving my study, just by the way the crowd roared. One kind of roar—uninhibited, chest-beating, triumphant—invariably followed a goal by the home team. Another, groanier noise indicated a near miss, a shrieky third informed me of a near miss by the opposition, and a dull grunt, a flayed pig’s head of a grunt, would follow a goal by the visitors.

  There are also the chants, non–team specific formulae adapted by each set of supporters for local use. I once took Mario Vargas Llosa to White Hart Lane, and he was bewildered and delighted when he realized that the fans’ cry of “One team in Europe! There’s only one team in Europe!” was being chanted to, more or less, the tune of “Guantanamera.”

  That year, Spurs had a right-back called Gary Stevens. A rival soccer club, Everton, also had a right-back called Gary Stevens, and, to make matters worse, both players had at different times played right-back for England. Thus, to Vargas Llosa’s further mystification, another version of the “Guantanamera” chant went “Two Gary Stevens! There’s only two Gary Stevens!”

  All together now: “We all agree . . . Arsenal are rubbish!” Or, when your team is winning well: “Are you watching, are you watching, are you watching, Arsenal?” Or, in the same circumstances, but more ambitiously: “At last they’re gonna believe us, at last they’re gonna believe us, at last they’re gonna believe us! . . . We’re going to win the League.” (Or, if more appropriate, “Cup.”)

  Or, vindictively, after one’s team has taken the lead, and while pointing at the visiting team’s supporters in their corral: “You’re not singing, you’re not singing, you’re not singing anymore!”

  5. DAVID AND THE GENT

  One week before the Worthington Cup Final, Tottenham’s French superstar, the gifted left-winger David Ginola, had scored a solo goal in a league match that was almost a replay of Ricky Villa’s famous Cup-winning masterpiece. Ginola has movie-star good looks and Pat Jennings’s hair: tresses long and silky enough to win him a featured role—this is true—in a L’Oréal television commercial. (“Because I�
��m worth it” became, in Ginola’s heavily accented version, “Because I’m worse eat.”)

  There is no doubt that Ginola is worth it. His skills are even more lustrous than his locks. Ginola can shimmy like your sister Kate. His balance, his feinting, his tight ball control at high speed, his ability to score from thirty yards out, or by waltzing past defenders like the great matadors who work closest to the bulls, make him a defender’s nightmare. Two criticisms have been made of him, however. First, that he is lazy, a luxury player, uninterested in the hard graft of the game. Second, that he dives.

  Diving is a form of gamesmanship. A diver pretends to be fouled when he hasn’t been. A great diver is like a salmon leaping, twisting, falling. A great dive can last almost as long as the dying of the swan. And it can, of course, influence the referee, it can earn free kicks or penalty kicks, it can get an opponent cautioned or even sent off.

  The course of the 1999 Worthington Cup Final between Spurs and Leicester would be greatly altered by a dive.

  An earlier Spurs star, the great German goalscorer Jürgen Klinsmann, also used to be accused of diving. Spurs fans screamed “cheat” at Ginola when he was playing for Newcastle United. England fans booed and howled at Klinsmann when he plunged to the ground while playing for Germany. But when the two of them signed for Spurs, the fans understood that these noble spirits were in truth more sinned against than sinning. Oh, now we saw the subtle pushes with which cynical defenders knocked them off balance, the surreptitious little trips and ankle-taps in whose existence we had so vocally disbelieved. Now we understood the tragedy of genius, we saw how grievously Ginola and Klinsmann had been wronged. Was this just our self-serving fickleness? Certainly not. Reader, it was because the scales fell from our eyes.

  As for the other criticism leveled at Ginola, that he was lazy, that all changed when, during the course of the 1998–1999 season, Spurs acquired a new manager. His name is George Graham, and he was known, when he was an elegant player (one of the stars of the Scotland team), as “Gentleman George.” As a manager, he has acquired a less cultured image as the hardest of hard men, a man whose teams are built on the granite of an impregnable defense. In a few short months, he has transformed that well-known joke, the Tottenham defense, into a well-drilled, stingy unit. He has taught the back four to imagine they are joined by a rope, and now, instead of running in opposite directions like Mack Sennett’s Keystone Kops, they move as one.

  What would a grim fellow like George Graham make of the blessed butterfly, Ginola? It was widely believed that the L’Oréal model would be the first player Graham unloaded after taking charge at Spurs. Instead, the winger has blossomed toward greatness, and nowadays he and Graham sing each other’s praises almost daily. The manager has inspired the player to work hard, and the player has, well, inspired the manager the way he inspires us all. “Do something extraordinary,” Graham now tells Ginola before each game, and it’s astonishing how often Ginola obliges. *13

  Oh, there’s one more thing about George Graham. First as a player

  and then as a manager, he made his name, and won a shelf of trophies, at Highbury. Spurs have hired the former manager of their archenemies, Arsenal.

  6. DECLINE AND FALL

  How did such a thing come to pass? The answer lies in Spurs’ recent history. They last won a major trophy, the FA Cup, in 1991. After that the club’s fortunes started a long, depressing slide. Boardroom incompetence had landed Tottenham in serious financial trouble, and the team’s star player, England’s moron-genius, the child-man Paul Gascoigne, as famous for bursting into tears during a World Cup game as for his exceptional talent, had to be transferred to Lazio in Rome, Italy, to help pay off the club’s debts.

  The “sale” of Paul Gascoigne was a traumatic event for the fans. Gascoigne was what we thought of as a true Spurs player, fabulously gifted, a playmaker at least as influential as the late John White. Now Gascoigne, too, had been struck down, and was gone.

  As the club declined, the fans were left with their memories. Spurs have had more than their share of genuinely great players: the lethal goalscoring partnership of the “goal-poacher” Jimmy Greaves and Alan Gilzean (he of the “cultured forehead”); the stealthy beauty of the play of Martin Peters, a member of England’s 1966 World Champion team. Later Tottenham teams offered us the high-velocity skills of Gary Lineker, a Leicester City player many years before he joined Spurs, and the long-range passing accuracy of Ardiles and Villa’s English teammate Glenn Hoddle.

  (This same Hoddle was fired from his job as coach to the England national team because of a series of confused remarks he made about reincarnation. By jumbling together the languages of Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, and spiritualist mumbo-jumbo, he managed to give the impression that he believed disabled people were to blame for their disabilities; but in spite of the predictable tabloid uproar, I found it hard to condemn poor “Glenda” for what seemed more like stupidity than malice. I remembered the grandeur of his game in the old days, and the joy it had given me, and I hated to see him turn out to be such a doofus. “At the end of the day I never said them things,” he mumbled miserably as he shuffled off into the darkness, making one wish he could still leave the talking to his feet.) *14

  The low point of Spurs’ fortunes was reached in the 1997–98 season, when the team’s owner, the computer-industry millionaire Alan Sugar, appointed as manager a Swiss person called, alas, Christian Gross. He never managed to command the team’s respect or to attract first-rate players to the club, and under his regime Tottenham came close to losing their elite Premiership status.

  At the start of the present season, the team looked even worse, and Gross was duly sacked. Five days after his exit I saw them thrashed 3–0 at home by Middlesbrough, a team that the great Spurs sides of the past would have effortlessly demolished. The Tottenham players and supporters were utterly demoralized. Then Alan Sugar, to the consternation of many Spurs fans, turned to the ex-Gunner, Gentleman George.

  George Graham had taken some hard knocks of his own. In the last decade there has been much concern about the growth of corrupt practices in soccer. There have been allegations that Far Eastern betting syndicates have sought to influence senior players to throw matches. In France in 1997, Bernard Tapie, the multi-millionaire proprietor of the country’s then-champion side, Marseille, was found guilty and jailed on charges of match-fixing and corruption.

  As a player, George Graham was a member of the Arsenal team that did the Double in 1971, thus emulating the Spurs’ great achievement. (They’ve since done it again, damn it, just a year ago; and they played so brilliantly, so much like a classic Spurs side, that I was forced to set aside a lifetime’s prejudices and cheer them on.) As a manager, Graham led the Gunners to two League Championships and four other major honors. But in the mid-nineties he, too, faced accusations of wrongdoing. He was found guilty by the Football Association of receiving “bungs,” under-the-counter cash payments worth approximately £425,000, made as “sweeteners” during the course of big-money transfer deals. In spite of all the success he had brought to Arsenal, Gentleman George lost his job.

  However, he’s a tenacious character, and he slowly fought his way back into the big time. By the time Sugar made his approach, Graham had become the manager of another Premiership club, Leeds United, where he had put together one of the most promising young sides in

  the league. But the lure of one of the country’s traditional “big five” clubs proved irresistible, and he came back to London.

  If some Spurs fans mistrusted him, the speed of the team’s improvement has shut them up. Tottenham still don’t have a great side; as I write this they’re stuck in the middle of the Premiership table. But getting to Wembley is the most glamorous event in a club player’s life. George Graham must take the credit for bringing a little of the old glamour back to depressed White Hart Lane.

  7. A RESULT TEAM

  A man on his way to the big game passes a pub near the stadium and gr
imaces at the sidewalk, which is ankle-deep in used plastic beer glasses and empty cans. “That’s why the game will never catch on in the States, right there,” he says, a little shamefacedly. A second man chimes in. “That, and the food,” he says. “The meat pies, the fucking burgers.” The first man is still shaking his head at the garbage. “Americans would never leave this mess.” He sighs. “They wouldn’t stand for it.”

  A third man, passing, recognizes the first and greets him gaily: “You’re like bleeding dogshit, mate—you’re everywhere, you are.”

  The three men go off happily toward Wembley.

  Inside the stadium, the field of play is covered in two giant shirts and a pair of giant soccer balls. There is much razzamatazz—great flocks of blue and white balloons are released, and giant flares begin to burn as the teams arrive—and this has plainly been learned from studying American sporting occasions. But as ever, the point of being there is not this sort of thing but the crowd. You’d have to be made of stone not to be affected by the communal release of shared excitement, by the simple sense of standing together against the world, or the opposing team, anyhow. The chanting swells and surges from one end of the grand old stadium to the other. Next year Wembley is to be demolished and a new third-millennium super-stadium built in its place. This is almost the old lady’s last hurrah. *15

  The game begins. I quickly see that it isn’t going to be a classic. Leicester look distinctly second-rate, and although Spurs settle first into a rhythm, they don’t inspire full confidence. In the twenty-first minute Sol Campbell, an England international player, completely misses a crucial tackle, and Leicester are kept at bay only by a fine covering tackle by Spurs Swiss defender Ramon Vega, another player whose form has improved dramatically since Graham arrived.