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Home Début
from FEVER PITCH
Nick Hornby
ARSENAL v STOKE CITY
14.9.68
I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love
with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically,
giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would
bring with it.
In May '68 (a date with connotations, of course,
but I am still more likely to think of Jeff Astle than of
Paris), just after my eleventh birthday, my father
asking me if I'd like to go with him to the FA Cup
Final between West Brom and Everton; a colleague
had offered him a couple of tickets. I told him that I
wasn't interested in football, not even in the Cup
Final - true, as far as I was aware, but perversely I
watched the whole match on television anyway. A 20
few weeks later I watched the Man Utd - Benfica
game, enthralled, with my mum, and at the end of
August I got up early to hear how United had got on
in the final of the World Club Championship. I loved
Bobby Charlton and George Best (I knew nothing
about Denis Law, the third of the Holy Trinity, who
had missed the Benfica match through injury) with a
passion that had taken me completely by surprise;
it lasted three weeks, until my dad took me to
Highbury for the first time.
My parents were separated by 1968. My father had
met someone else and moved out, and I lived with
my mother and my sister in a small detached house
in the Home Counties. This state of affairs was
unremarkable enough in itself (although I cannot
recall anyone else in my class with an absent
parent - the sixties took another seven or eight
years to travel the twenty-odd miles down the M4
from London), but the break-up had wounded all 40
four of us in various ways, as break-ups are wont to
do.
There were, inevitably, a number of difficulties
that arose from this new phase of family life,
although the most crucial in this context was
probably the most banal: the commonplace but
nevertheless intractable one-parent
Saturday-afternoon-at the zoo problem. Often Dad
was only able to visit us midweek; no one really
wanted to stay in and watch TV, for obvious
reasons, but on the other hand there wasn't really
anywhere else a man could take two children under
twelve. Usually the three of us drove to a
neighbouring town, or up to one of the airport hotels,
where we sat in a cold and early-evening deserted
restaurant, and where Gill and I ate steak or chicken,
one or the other, in more or less complete silence
(children are not great dinner conversationalists, as a
rule, and in any case we were used to eating with the
TV on), while Dad watched. He must have been 60
desperate to find something else to do with us, but the
options in a commuter-belt town between 6.30 and
9.00 on a Monday night were limited.
That summer, Dad and I went to a hotel near
Oxford for a week, where in the evenings we sat in a
deserted hotel dining room, and where I ate steak or
chicken, one or the other, in more or less complete
silence. After dinner we went to watch TV with the
other guests, and Dad drank too much. Things had to
change.
My father tried again with the football that September,
and he must have been amazed when I said yes. I
had never before said yes to any suggestion of his,
although I rarely said no either. I just smiled politely
and made a noise intended to express interest but no
commitment, a maddening trait I think I invented
especially for that time in my life but which has
somehow remained with me ever since. For two or
three years he had been trying to take me to the 80
theatre; every time he asked I simply shrugged and
grinned idiotically, with the result that eventually Dad
would get angry and tell me to forget it, which was
what I wanted him to say. And it wasn't just Shakespeare,
either: I was equally suspicious of rugby
matches and cricket matches and boat trips and days
out to Silverstone and Longleat. I didn't want to do
anything at all. None of this was intended to punish
my father for his absence: I really thought that I would
be happy to go anywhere with him, apart from every
single place he could think of.
1968 was, I suppose, the most traumatic year of
my life. After my parents' separation we moved into a
smaller house, but for a time, because of some sort of
chain, we were homeless and had to stay with our
neighbours; I became seriously ill with jaundice; and I
started at the local grammar school. I would have to
be extraordinarily literal to believe that the Arsenal
fever about to grip me had nothing to do with all this
mess. (And I wonder how many other fans, if they 100
were to examine the circumstances that led up to
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their obsession, could find some sort of equivalent
Freudian drama? After all, football's a great game
and everything, but what is it that separates those
who are happy to attend half a dozen games a
season - watch the big matches, stay away from the
rubbish, surely the sensible way - from those who
feel compelled to attend them all? Why travel from
London to Plymouth on a Wednesday, using up a
precious day's holiday, to see a game whose
outcome was effectively decided in the first leg at
Highbury? And, if this theory of fandom as therapy
is anywhere near the mark, what the hell is buried in
the subconscious of people who go to Leyland DAF
Trophy games? Perhaps it is best not to know.)
There is a short story by the American writer
Andre Dubus entitled 'The Winter Father', about a
man whose divorce has separated him from his two
children. In the winter his relationship with them is
tetchy and strained: they move from afternoon jazz 120
club to cinema to restaurant, and stare at each
other. But in the summer, when they can go to the
beach, they get on fine. 'The long beach and the
sea were their lawn; the blanket their home; the ice
chest and thermos their kitchen. They lived as a
family again.' Sitcoms and films have long
recognised this terrible tyranny of place, and depict
men traipsing round parks with fractious kids and a
frisbee. But 'The Winter Father' means a lot to me
because it goes further than that: it manages to
isolate what is valuable in the relationship between
parents and children, and explains simply and
precisely why the zoo trips are doomed.
In this country, as far as I know, Bridlington and
Minehead are unable to provide the same kind of
liberation as the New England beaches in Dubus's
story; but my father and I were about to come up
with the perfect English equivalent. Saturday
afternoons in north London gave us a context in
which we could be together. We could talk when we 140
wanted, the football gave us something to talk
about (and anyway the silences weren't
oppressive), and the days had a structure, a routine.
The Arsenal pitch was to be our lawn (and, being an
English lawn, we would usually peer at it mournfully
through driving rain); the Gunners' Fish Bar on
Blackstock Road our kitchen; and the West Stand
our home. It was a wonderful set-up, and changed
our lives just when they needed changing most, but
it was also exclusive: Dad and my sister never
really found anywhere to live at all. Maybe now that
wouldn't happen; maybe a nine-year-old girl in the
nineties would feel that she had just as much right to
go to a game as we did. But in 1969 in our town, this
was not an idea that had much currency, and my
sister had to stay at home with her mum and her dolls.
I don't recall much about the football that first
afternoon. One of those tricks of memory enables me
to see the only goal clearly: the referee awards a 160
penalty (he runs into the area, points a dramatic
finger, there's a roar); a hush as Terry Neill takes it,
and a groan as Gordon Banks dives and pushes the
ball out; it falls conveniently at Neill's feet and this
time he scores. But I am sure this picture has been
built up from what I have long known about similar
incidents, and actually I was aware of none of this. All
I really saw on the day was a bewildering chain of
incomprehensible incidents, at the end of which
everyone around me stood and shouted. If I did the
same, it must have been an embarrassing ten
seconds after the rest of the crowd.
But I do have other, more reliable, and probably
more meaningful memories. I remember the
overwhelming maleness of it all - cigar and pipe
smoke, foul language (words I had heard before, but
not from adults, not at that volume), and only years
later did it occur to me that this was bound to have an
effect on a boy who lived with his mother and his
sister; and I remember looking at the crowd more 180
than at the players. From where I was sitting I could
probably have counted twenty thousand heads; only
the sports fan (or Mick Jagger or Nelson Mandela)
can do that. My father told me that there were nearly
as many people in the stadium as lived in my town,
and I was suitably awed.
(We have forgotten that football crowds are still
astonishingly large, mostly because since the war
they have become progressively smaller. Managers
frequently complain about local apathy, particularly
when their mediocre First or Second Division team
has managed to avoid a good hiding for a few weeks;
but the fact that, say, Derby County managed to
attract an average crowd of nearly seventeen
thousand in 1990/91, the year they finished bottom of
the First Division, is a miracle. Let's say that three
thousand of these are away supporters; that means
that among the remaining fourteen thousand from
Derby, there were a number of people who went at
least eighteen times to see the worst football of last or 200
indeed most other seasons. Why, really, should
anyone have gone at all?)
It wasn't the size of the crowd that impressed me
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most, however, or the way that adults were allowed
to shout the word 'WANKER!' as loudly as they
wanted without attracting any attention. What
impressed me most was just how much most of the
men around me hated, really hated, being there. As
far as I could tell, nobody seemed to enjoy, in the
way that I understood the word, anything that
happened during the entire afternoon. Within
minutes of the kick-off there was real anger ('You're
a DISGRACE, Gould. He's a DISGRACE!' 'A hundred
quid a week? A HUNDRED QUID A WEEK!
They should give that to me for watching you.'); as
the game went on, the anger turned into outrage,
and then seemed to curdle into sullen, silent
discontent. Yes, yes, I know all the jokes. What else
could I have expected at Highbury? But I went to
Chelsea and to Tottenham and to Rangers, and 220
saw the same thing: that the natural state of the
football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what
the score.
I think we, Arsenal fans know, deep down, that
the football at Highbury has not often been pretty,
and that therefore our reputation as the most boring
team in the entire history of the universe is not as
mystifying as we pretend: yet when we have a
successful side much is forgiven. The Arsenal team
I saw on that afternoon had been spectacularly
unsuccessful for some time. Indeed they had won
nothing since the Coronation and this abject and
unambiguous failure was simply rubbing salt into
the fans' stigmata. Many of those around us had the
look of men who had seen every game of every
barren season. The fact that I was intruding on a
marriage that had gone disastrously sour lent my
afternoon a particularly thrilling prurience (if it had
been a real marriage, children would have been
barred from the ground): one partner was 240
lumbering around in a pathetic attempt to please,
while the other turned his face to the wall, too full of
loathing even to watch. Those fans who could not
remember the thirties (although at the end of ' the
sixties a good many of them could), when the club
won five Championships and two FA Cups, could
remember the Comptons and Joe Mercer from just
over a decade before; the stadium itself, with its
beautiful art deco stands and its Jacob Epstein
busts, seemed to disapprove of the current mob
even as much as my neighbours did.
I'd been to public entertainments before, of
course; I'd been to the cinema and the pantomime
and to see my mother sing in the chorus of the
White Horse Inn at the Town Hall. But that was
different. The audiences I had hitherto been a part of
had paid to have a good time and, though
occasionally one might spot a fidgety child or a
yawning adult, I hadn't ever noticed faces contorted
by rage or despair or frustration. Entertainment as 260
pain was an idea entirely new to me, and it seemed to
be something I'd been waiting for.
It might not be too fanciful to suggest that it was an
idea which shaped my life. I have always been
accused of taking the things I love - football, of course,
but also books and records - much too seriously, and
I do feel a kind of anger when I hear a bad record, or
when someone is lukewarm about a book that means
a lot to me. Perhaps it was these desperate, bitter
men in the West Stand at Arsenal who taught me how
to get angry in this way; and perhaps it is why I earn
some of my living as a critic - maybe it's those voices
lean hear when I write. 'You're a WANKER, X.' 'The
Booker Prize? THE BOOKER PRIZE? They should
give that to me for having to read you.'
Just this one afternoon started the whole thing off -
there was no prolonged courtship - and I can see now
that if I'd gone to White Hart Lane or Stamford Bridge
the same thing would have happened, so
overwhelming was the experience the first time. In a 280
desperate and percipient attempt to stop the inevitable,
Dad quickly took me to Spurs to see Jimmy
Greaves score four against Sunderland in a 5-1 win,
but the damage had been done, and the six goals and
all the great players left me cold: I'd already fallen for
the team that beat Stoke 1-0 from a penalty rebound.
A SPARE JIMMY HUSBAND
26.10.68
On this, my third visit to Highbury (a goalless draw -
I'd now seen my team score three times in four and a
half hours), all the kids were given a free Soccer Stars
album. Each page of the album was devoted to one
First Division team, and contained fourteen or fifteen
spaces in which to glue stickers of the players; we
were also given a little packet of the stickers to start
our collection off.
Promotional offers aren't often described- thus, I 300
know, but the album proved to be the last crucial step
in a socialisation process that had begun with the
Stoke game. The benefits of liking football at school
were simply incalculable (even though the games
master was a Welshman who once memorably tried
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to ban us from kicking a round ball even when we
got home): at least half my class, and probably a
quarter of the staff, loved the game.
Unsurprisingly, I was the only Arsenal supporter
in the first year. QPR, the nearest First Division
team, had Rodney Marsh; Chelsea had Peter
Osgood, Tottenham had Greaves, West Ham had
the three World Cup heroes, Hurst, Moore and
Peters. Arsenal's best-known player was probably
lan Ure, famous only for being hilariously useless
and for his contributions to the television series
Quiz Ball. But in that glorious first football-saturated
term, it didn't matter that I was on my own. In our
dormitory town no club had a monopoly on support
and, in any case, my new best friend, a Derby 320
County fan like his father and uncle, was similarly
isolated. The main thing was that you were a
believer. Before school, at break time and at
lunchtime, we played football on the tennis courts
with a tennis ball, and in between lessons we
swapped Soccer Star stickers - Ian Ure for Geoff
Hurst (extraordinarily, the stickers were of equal
value), Terry Venables for lan St John, Tony Hately
for Andy Lochhead.
And so transferring to secondary school was
rendered unimaginably easy. I was probably the
smallest boy in the first year, but my size didn't
matter, although my friendship with the Derby fan,
the tallest by several feet, was pretty handy; and
though my performance as a student was
undistinguished (I was bunged into the 'B' stream at
the end of the year and stayed there throughout my
entire grammar school career), the lessons were a
breeze. Even the fact that I was one of only three
boys wearing shorts wasn't as traumatic as it 340
should have been. As long as you knew the name
of the Burnley manager, nobody much cared that
you were an eleven-year-old dressed as a
six-year-old.
This pattern has repeated itself several times
since then. The first and easiest friends I made at
college were football fans; a studious examination
of a newspaper back p-age during the lunch hour of
the first day in a new job usually provokes some
kind of response. And yes, I am aware of the
downside of this wonderful facility that men have:
they become repressed, they fail in their
relationships with women, their conversation is
trivial and boorish, they find themselves unable to
express their emotional needs, they cannot relate
to their children, and they die lonely and miserable.
But, you know, what the hell? If you can walk into a
school full of eight hundred boys, most of them older,
all of them bigger, without feeling intimidated, simply
because you have a spare Jimmy Husband in your 360
blazer pocket, then it seems like a trade-off worth
making.
DON ROGERS
SWINDON TOWN v ARSENAL (at Wembley)
15.3.69
Dad and I went to Highbury another half a dozen
times that season, and by the middle of March 1969,
1 had gone way beyond fandom. On matchdays I
awoke with a nervous churning in the stomach, a
feeling that would continue to intensify until Arsenal
had taken a two-goal lead, when I would begin to
relax: I had only relaxed once, when we beat Everton
3-1 just before Christmas. Such was my Saturday
sickness that I insisted on being inside the stadium
shortly after one o'clock, some two hours before the
kick-off; this quirk my father bore with patience and 380
good humour, even though it was frequently cold and
from 2.15 onwards my distraction was such that all
communication was impossible.
My pre-match nerves were the same however
meaningless the game. That season Arsenal had
blown all chance of the Championship by about
November, a little later than usual; but this meant that
in the wider scheme of things it scarcely mattered
whether they won the games I went to see. It
mattered desperately to me, however. In these early
stages, my relationship with Arsenal was of an
entirely personal nature: the team only existed when I
was in the stadium (I can't remember feeling
especially devastated by their poor results away from
home). As far as I was concerned, if they won the
games I saw 5-0, and lost the rest 10-0, that would
have been a good season, probably to be
commemorated by the team travelling down the M4 to
see me on an open-topped bus.
I made an exception for the FA Cup-ties; these I 400
wanted Arsenal to win despite my absence, but we
got knocked out 1-0 at West Brom. (I had been forced
to go to bed before the result came through - the tie
was played on a Wednesday night - and my mother
wrote the score down on a piece of paper and
attached it to my bookcase ready for me to look at in
the morning. I looked long and hard: I felt betrayed by
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what she had written. If she loved me, then surely
she could have come up with a better result than
this. Just as hurtful as the score was the
exclamation mark she had placed after it, as if it
were. . . well, an exclamation. It seemed as
inappropriate as if it had been used to emphasise
the death of a relative: 'Gran died peacefully in her
sleep!' These disappointments were still entirely
new to me, of course, but like all fans, I've come to
expect them now. At the time of writing, I have felt
the pain of FA Cup defeat twenty-two times, but
never as keenly as that first one.)
The League Cup I'd never really heard of, mainly 420
because it was a midweek competition and I hadn't
yet been allowed to attend a midweek game. But
when Arsenal reached the final, I was prepared to
accept it as a consolation for what had seemed to
me to be a heartbreakingly poor season, although it
had in fact been pretty run-of-the-mill for the sixties.
So Dad paid a tout way over the odds for a pair of
tickets (I never found out exactly how much, but
later, with justified anger, he led me to understand
that they'd been very expensive) and on Saturday,
15th March ('BEWARE THE IDES OF MARCH' was
the headline in the Evening Standard's special
colour supplement), I went to Wembley for the first
time.
Arsenal were playing Swindon Town, a Third
Division team, and no one seemed to have any real
doubts that Arsenal would win the game, and
therefore their first cup for sixteen years. I wasn't so
sure. Silent in the car all the way there, I asked Dad
on the steps up to the stadium whether he was as 440
confident as everyone else. I tried to make the
question conversational sports chatter between two
men on a day out - but it wasn't like that at all: what
I really wanted was reassurance from an adult, a
parent, my father, that what I was about to witness
wasn't going to scar me for life. 'Look,' I should
have said to him, 'when they're playing at home, in
an ordinary League game, I'm so frightened they'll
lose that I can't think or speak or even breathe,
sometimes. If you think Swindon have any kind of
chance at all, even a chance in a million, it's best if
you take me home now, because I don't think I'd be
able to cope.'
If I had come out with that, then it would have
been unreasonable of my father to make me go
inside the stadium. But I simply asked him, in an
assumed spirit of idle curiosity, who he thought
would win the game, and he said he thought
Arsenal would, three or four nothing, the same as
everyone else did, and so I got the reassurance I was 460
looking for; but I was scarred for life anyway. Like my
mother's exclamation mark, my father's blithe
confidence later seemed like a betrayal.
I was so scared that the Wembley experience - a
crowd of a hundred thousand, the huge pitch, the
noise, the sense of anticipation - passed me by
completely. If I noticed anything about the place at all
it was that it wasn't Highbury, and my sense of
alienation simply added to my unease. I sat shivering
until Swindon scored shortly before half-time, and
then the fear turned to misery. The goal was one of
the most calamitously stupid ever given away by a
team of professionals: an inept back-pass (by lan Ure,
naturally), followed by a missed tackle, followed by a
goalkeeper (Bob Wilson) slipping over in the mud and
allowing the ball to trickle over the line just inside the
right-hand post. For the first time, suddenly, I became
aware of all the Swindon fans sitting around us, with
their awful West Country accents, their absurd
innocent glee, their delirious disbelief. I hadn't ever 480
come across opposing fans before, and I loathed
them in a way I had never before loathed strangers.
With one minute remaining in the game, Arsenal
equalised, unexpectedly and bizarrely, a diving
header from a rebound off the goalkeeper's knee. I
tried not to weep with relief, but the effort was beyond
me; I stood on the seat and yelled at my father, over
and over again, 'We'll be all right now, won't we? We'll
be all right now!' He patted me on the back, pleased
that something had been rescued from the dismal
and expensive afternoon, and told me that yes, now,
finally, everything would be OK.
It was his second betrayal of the day. Swindon
scored twice more in extra time, one a scrappy goal
from a corner, the other from Don Rogers after a
magnificent sixty-yard run, and it was all too much to
bear. When the final whistle went, my father betrayed
me for the third time in less than three hours: he rose
to his feet to applaud the extraordinary underdogs,
and I ran for the exit. 500
When my father caught up with me he was furious.
He delivered his ideas on sportsmanship with great
force (what did I care about sportsmanship?),
marched me to the car, and we drove home in silence.
Football may have provided us with a new medium
through which we could communicate, but that was
not to say that we used it, or that what we chose to
say was necessarily positive.
I don't remember Saturday evening, but I know that
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on the Sunday, Mother's Day, I elected to go to
church rather than stay at home, where there was a
danger that I would watch the highlights of the
game on The Big Match and push myself over the
edge into a permanent depressive insanity. And I
know that when we got to church, the vicar
expressed his pleasure in seeing such a large
congregation given the competing temptations of a
Cup Final on TV, and that friends and family
nudged me and smirked. All this, however, was
nothing compared to what I knew I would get at 520
school on Monday morning.
For twelve-year-old boys permanently on the
lookout for ways in which to humiliate their peers,
opportunities like this were too good to miss. When
I pushed open the door to the prefab, I heard
somebody shout 'Here he is!', and I was submerged
under a mob of screaming, jeering, giggling boys,
some of whom, I noted darkly before I was knocked
to the floor, didn't even like football.
It may not have mattered much in my first term
that I was an Arsenal fan, but in my second it had
become more significant. Football was still, in
essence, a unifying interest - nothing had changed
in that way. But as the months passed, our
allegiances had become much more defined, and
we were much quicker to tease. This was easily
anticipated, I suppose, but on that dreadful Monday
morning painful nonetheless. As I lay in the grammar
school dirt it occurred to me that I had made a
grotesque mistake; it was my fervent wish that I 540
could turn back the clock and insist that my father
took me, not to Arsenal v Stoke, but to a deserted
hotel dining room or the zoo. I didn't want to go
through this once a season. I wanted to be with the
rest of the class, trampling the hell out of some
other poor heartbroken kid - one of the swots or
weeds or Indians or Jews who were habitually and
horribly bullied. For the first time in my life I was
different and on my own, and I hated it.
I have a photograph from the game played on the
Saturday after the Swindon tragedy, away at QPR.
George Armstrong is just picking himself up, having
scored the winner in a 1-0 win; David Court is
running towards him, his arms triumphantly aloft. In
the background you can see Arsenal fans on the
edge of the stand, silhouetted against a block of
flats behind the ground, and they too are punching
the sky. I couldn't understand anything I saw in the
picture at all. How could the players care, after the 560
way they had humiliated themselves (and, of course,
me) seven days - seven days - before? Why would
any fan who had suffered at Wembley the way I had
suffered stand up to cheer a nothing goal in a nothing
match? I used to stare at this photo for minutes at a
time, trying to detect somewhere within it any
evidence of the trauma of the previous week, some
hint of grief or of mourning, but there was none:
apparently everyone had forgotten except me. In my
first season as an Arsenal fan I had been betrayed by
my mother, my father, the. players and my fellow
supporters.
© Nick Hornby
Extracts reprinted with the kind permission of the
author.
‘Fever Pitch’ is published by Penguin Books LtdText
1
Home Début
from FEVER PITCH
Nick Hornby
ARSENAL v STOKE CITY
14.9.68
I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love
with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically,
giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would
bring with it.
In May '68 (a date with connotations, of course,
but I am still more likely to think of Jeff Astle than of
Paris), just after my eleventh birthday, my father
asking me if I'd like to go with him to the FA Cup
Final between West Brom and Everton; a colleague
had offered him a couple of tickets. I told him that I
wasn't interested in football, not even in the Cup
Final - true, as far as I was aware, but perversely I
watched the whole match on television anyway. A 20
few weeks later I watched the Man Utd - Benfica
game, enthralled, with my mum, and at the end of
August I got up early to hear how United had got on
in the final of the World Club Championship. I loved
Bobby Charlton and George Best (I knew nothing
about Denis Law, the third of the Holy Trinity, who
had missed the Benfica match through injury) with a
passion that had taken me completely by surprise;
it lasted three weeks, until my dad took me to
Highbury for the first time.
My parents were separated by 1968. My father had
met someone else and moved out, and I lived with
my mother and my sister in a small detached house
in the Home Counties. This state of affairs was
unremarkable enough in itself (although I cannot
recall anyone else in my class with an absent
parent - the sixties took another seven or eight
years to travel the twenty-odd miles down the M4
from London), but the break-up had wounded all 40
four of us in various ways, as break-ups are wont to
do.
There were, inevitably, a number of difficulties
that arose from this new phase of family life,
although the most crucial in this context was
probably the most banal: the commonplace but
nevertheless intractable one-parent
Saturday-afternoon-at the zoo problem. Often Dad
was only able to visit us midweek; no one really
wanted to stay in and watch TV, for obvious
reasons, but on the other hand there wasn't really
anywhere else a man could take two children under
twelve. Usually the three of us drove to a
neighbouring town, or up to one of the airport hotels,
where we sat in a cold and early-evening deserted
restaurant, and where Gill and I ate steak or chicken,
one or the other, in more or less complete silence
(children are not great dinner conversationalists, as a
rule, and in any case we were used to eating with the
TV on), while Dad watched. He must have been 60
desperate to find something else to do with us, but the
options in a commuter-belt town between 6.30 and
9.00 on a Monday night were limited.
That summer, Dad and I went to a hotel near
Oxford for a week, where in the evenings we sat in a
deserted hotel dining room, and where I ate steak or
chicken, one or the other, in more or less complete
silence. After dinner we went to watch TV with the
other guests, and Dad drank too much. Things had to
change.
My father tried again with the football that September,
and he must have been amazed when I said yes. I
had never before said yes to any suggestion of his,
although I rarely said no either. I just smiled politely
and made a noise intended to express interest but no
commitment, a maddening trait I think I invented
especially for that time in my life but which has
somehow remained with me ever since. For two or
three years he had been trying to take me to the 80
theatre; every time he asked I simply shrugged and
grinned idiotically, with the result that eventually Dad
would get angry and tell me to forget it, which was
what I wanted him to say. And it wasn't just Shakespeare,
either: I was equally suspicious of rugby
matches and cricket matches and boat trips and days
out to Silverstone and Longleat. I didn't want to do
anything at all. None of this was intended to punish
my father for his absence: I really thought that I would
be happy to go anywhere with him, apart from every
single place he could think of.
1968 was, I suppose, the most traumatic year of
my life. After my parents' separation we moved into a
smaller house, but for a time, because of some sort of
chain, we were homeless and had to stay with our
neighbours; I became seriously ill with jaundice; and I
started at the local grammar school. I would have to
be extraordinarily literal to believe that the Arsenal
fever about to grip me had nothing to do with all this
mess. (And I wonder how many other fans, if they 100
were to examine the circumstances that led up to
Text
2
their obsession, could find some sort of equivalent
Freudian drama? After all, football's a great game
and everything, but what is it that separates those
who are happy to attend half a dozen games a
season - watch the big matches, stay away from the
rubbish, surely the sensible way - from those who
feel compelled to attend them all? Why travel from
London to Plymouth on a Wednesday, using up a
precious day's holiday, to see a game whose
outcome was effectively decided in the first leg at
Highbury? And, if this theory of fandom as therapy
is anywhere near the mark, what the hell is buried in
the subconscious of people who go to Leyland DAF
Trophy games? Perhaps it is best not to know.)
There is a short story by the American writer
Andre Dubus entitled 'The Winter Father', about a
man whose divorce has separated him from his two
children. In the winter his relationship with them is
tetchy and strained: they move from afternoon jazz 120
club to cinema to restaurant, and stare at each
other. But in the summer, when they can go to the
beach, they get on fine. 'The long beach and the
sea were their lawn; the blanket their home; the ice
chest and thermos their kitchen. They lived as a
family again.' Sitcoms and films have long
recognised this terrible tyranny of place, and depict
men traipsing round parks with fractious kids and a
frisbee. But 'The Winter Father' means a lot to me
because it goes further than that: it manages to
isolate what is valuable in the relationship between
parents and children, and explains simply and
precisely why the zoo trips are doomed.
In this country, as far as I know, Bridlington and
Minehead are unable to provide the same kind of
liberation as the New England beaches in Dubus's
story; but my father and I were about to come up
with the perfect English equivalent. Saturday
afternoons in north London gave us a context in
which we could be together. We could talk when we 140
wanted, the football gave us something to talk
about (and anyway the silences weren't
oppressive), and the days had a structure, a routine.
The Arsenal pitch was to be our lawn (and, being an
English lawn, we would usually peer at it mournfully
through driving rain); the Gunners' Fish Bar on
Blackstock Road our kitchen; and the West Stand
our home. It was a wonderful set-up, and changed
our lives just when they needed changing most, but
it was also exclusive: Dad and my sister never
really found anywhere to live at all. Maybe now that
wouldn't happen; maybe a nine-year-old girl in the
nineties would feel that she had just as much right to
go to a game as we did. But in 1969 in our town, this
was not an idea that had much currency, and my
sister had to stay at home with her mum and her dolls.
I don't recall much about the football that first
afternoon. One of those tricks of memory enables me
to see the only goal clearly: the referee awards a 160
penalty (he runs into the area, points a dramatic
finger, there's a roar); a hush as Terry Neill takes it,
and a groan as Gordon Banks dives and pushes the
ball out; it falls conveniently at Neill's feet and this
time he scores. But I am sure this picture has been
built up from what I have long known about similar
incidents, and actually I was aware of none of this. All
I really saw on the day was a bewildering chain of
incomprehensible incidents, at the end of which
everyone around me stood and shouted. If I did the
same, it must have been an embarrassing ten
seconds after the rest of the crowd.
But I do have other, more reliable, and probably
more meaningful memories. I remember the
overwhelming maleness of it all - cigar and pipe
smoke, foul language (words I had heard before, but
not from adults, not at that volume), and only years
later did it occur to me that this was bound to have an
effect on a boy who lived with his mother and his
sister; and I remember looking at the crowd more 180
than at the players. From where I was sitting I could
probably have counted twenty thousand heads; only
the sports fan (or Mick Jagger or Nelson Mandela)
can do that. My father told me that there were nearly
as many people in the stadium as lived in my town,
and I was suitably awed.
(We have forgotten that football crowds are still
astonishingly large, mostly because since the war
they have become progressively smaller. Managers
frequently complain about local apathy, particularly
when their mediocre First or Second Division team
has managed to avoid a good hiding for a few weeks;
but the fact that, say, Derby County managed to
attract an average crowd of nearly seventeen
thousand in 1990/91, the year they finished bottom of
the First Division, is a miracle. Let's say that three
thousand of these are away supporters; that means
that among the remaining fourteen thousand from
Derby, there were a number of people who went at
least eighteen times to see the worst football of last or 200
indeed most other seasons. Why, really, should
anyone have gone at all?)
It wasn't the size of the crowd that impressed me
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3
most, however, or the way that adults were allowed
to shout the word 'WANKER!' as loudly as they
wanted without attracting any attention. What
impressed me most was just how much most of the
men around me hated, really hated, being there. As
far as I could tell, nobody seemed to enjoy, in the
way that I understood the word, anything that
happened during the entire afternoon. Within
minutes of the kick-off there was real anger ('You're
a DISGRACE, Gould. He's a DISGRACE!' 'A hundred
quid a week? A HUNDRED QUID A WEEK!
They should give that to me for watching you.'); as
the game went on, the anger turned into outrage,
and then seemed to curdle into sullen, silent
discontent. Yes, yes, I know all the jokes. What else
could I have expected at Highbury? But I went to
Chelsea and to Tottenham and to Rangers, and 220
saw the same thing: that the natural state of the
football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what
the score.
I think we, Arsenal fans know, deep down, that
the football at Highbury has not often been pretty,
and that therefore our reputation as the most boring
team in the entire history of the universe is not as
mystifying as we pretend: yet when we have a
successful side much is forgiven. The Arsenal team
I saw on that afternoon had been spectacularly
unsuccessful for some time. Indeed they had won
nothing since the Coronation and this abject and
unambiguous failure was simply rubbing salt into
the fans' stigmata. Many of those around us had the
look of men who had seen every game of every
barren season. The fact that I was intruding on a
marriage that had gone disastrously sour lent my
afternoon a particularly thrilling prurience (if it had
been a real marriage, children would have been
barred from the ground): one partner was 240
lumbering around in a pathetic attempt to please,
while the other turned his face to the wall, too full of
loathing even to watch. Those fans who could not
remember the thirties (although at the end of ' the
sixties a good many of them could), when the club
won five Championships and two FA Cups, could
remember the Comptons and Joe Mercer from just
over a decade before; the stadium itself, with its
beautiful art deco stands and its Jacob Epstein
busts, seemed to disapprove of the current mob
even as much as my neighbours did.
I'd been to public entertainments before, of
course; I'd been to the cinema and the pantomime
and to see my mother sing in the chorus of the
White Horse Inn at the Town Hall. But that was
different. The audiences I had hitherto been a part of
had paid to have a good time and, though
occasionally one might spot a fidgety child or a
yawning adult, I hadn't ever noticed faces contorted
by rage or despair or frustration. Entertainment as 260
pain was an idea entirely new to me, and it seemed to
be something I'd been waiting for.
It might not be too fanciful to suggest that it was an
idea which shaped my life. I have always been
accused of taking the things I love - football, of course,
but also books and records - much too seriously, and
I do feel a kind of anger when I hear a bad record, or
when someone is lukewarm about a book that means
a lot to me. Perhaps it was these desperate, bitter
men in the West Stand at Arsenal who taught me how
to get angry in this way; and perhaps it is why I earn
some of my living as a critic - maybe it's those voices
lean hear when I write. 'You're a WANKER, X.' 'The
Booker Prize? THE BOOKER PRIZE? They should
give that to me for having to read you.'
Just this one afternoon started the whole thing off -
there was no prolonged courtship - and I can see now
that if I'd gone to White Hart Lane or Stamford Bridge
the same thing would have happened, so
overwhelming was the experience the first time. In a 280
desperate and percipient attempt to stop the inevitable,
Dad quickly took me to Spurs to see Jimmy
Greaves score four against Sunderland in a 5-1 win,
but the damage had been done, and the six goals and
all the great players left me cold: I'd already fallen for
the team that beat Stoke 1-0 from a penalty rebound.
A SPARE JIMMY HUSBAND
26.10.68
On this, my third visit to Highbury (a goalless draw -
I'd now seen my team score three times in four and a
half hours), all the kids were given a free Soccer Stars
album. Each page of the album was devoted to one
First Division team, and contained fourteen or fifteen
spaces in which to glue stickers of the players; we
were also given a little packet of the stickers to start
our collection off.
Promotional offers aren't often described- thus, I 300
know, but the album proved to be the last crucial step
in a socialisation process that had begun with the
Stoke game. The benefits of liking football at school
were simply incalculable (even though the games
master was a Welshman who once memorably tried
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4
to ban us from kicking a round ball even when we
got home): at least half my class, and probably a
quarter of the staff, loved the game.
Unsurprisingly, I was the only Arsenal supporter
in the first year. QPR, the nearest First Division
team, had Rodney Marsh; Chelsea had Peter
Osgood, Tottenham had Greaves, West Ham had
the three World Cup heroes, Hurst, Moore and
Peters. Arsenal's best-known player was probably
lan Ure, famous only for being hilariously useless
and for his contributions to the television series
Quiz Ball. But in that glorious first football-saturated
term, it didn't matter that I was on my own. In our
dormitory town no club had a monopoly on support
and, in any case, my new best friend, a Derby 320
County fan like his father and uncle, was similarly
isolated. The main thing was that you were a
believer. Before school, at break time and at
lunchtime, we played football on the tennis courts
with a tennis ball, and in between lessons we
swapped Soccer Star stickers - Ian Ure for Geoff
Hurst (extraordinarily, the stickers were of equal
value), Terry Venables for lan St John, Tony Hately
for Andy Lochhead.
And so transferring to secondary school was
rendered unimaginably easy. I was probably the
smallest boy in the first year, but my size didn't
matter, although my friendship with the Derby fan,
the tallest by several feet, was pretty handy; and
though my performance as a student was
undistinguished (I was bunged into the 'B' stream at
the end of the year and stayed there throughout my
entire grammar school career), the lessons were a
breeze. Even the fact that I was one of only three
boys wearing shorts wasn't as traumatic as it 340
should have been. As long as you knew the name
of the Burnley manager, nobody much cared that
you were an eleven-year-old dressed as a
six-year-old.
This pattern has repeated itself several times
since then. The first and easiest friends I made at
college were football fans; a studious examination
of a newspaper back p-age during the lunch hour of
the first day in a new job usually provokes some
kind of response. And yes, I am aware of the
downside of this wonderful facility that men have:
they become repressed, they fail in their
relationships with women, their conversation is
trivial and boorish, they find themselves unable to
express their emotional needs, they cannot relate
to their children, and they die lonely and miserable.
But, you know, what the hell? If you can walk into a
school full of eight hundred boys, most of them older,
all of them bigger, without feeling intimidated, simply
because you have a spare Jimmy Husband in your 360
blazer pocket, then it seems like a trade-off worth
making.
DON ROGERS
SWINDON TOWN v ARSENAL (at Wembley)
15.3.69
Dad and I went to Highbury another half a dozen
times that season, and by the middle of March 1969,
1 had gone way beyond fandom. On matchdays I
awoke with a nervous churning in the stomach, a
feeling that would continue to intensify until Arsenal
had taken a two-goal lead, when I would begin to
relax: I had only relaxed once, when we beat Everton
3-1 just before Christmas. Such was my Saturday
sickness that I insisted on being inside the stadium
shortly after one o'clock, some two hours before the
kick-off; this quirk my father bore with patience and 380
good humour, even though it was frequently cold and
from 2.15 onwards my distraction was such that all
communication was impossible.
My pre-match nerves were the same however
meaningless the game. That season Arsenal had
blown all chance of the Championship by about
November, a little later than usual; but this meant that
in the wider scheme of things it scarcely mattered
whether they won the games I went to see. It
mattered desperately to me, however. In these early
stages, my relationship with Arsenal was of an
entirely personal nature: the team only existed when I
was in the stadium (I can't remember feeling
especially devastated by their poor results away from
home). As far as I was concerned, if they won the
games I saw 5-0, and lost the rest 10-0, that would
have been a good season, probably to be
commemorated by the team travelling down the M4 to
see me on an open-topped bus.
I made an exception for the FA Cup-ties; these I 400
wanted Arsenal to win despite my absence, but we
got knocked out 1-0 at West Brom. (I had been forced
to go to bed before the result came through - the tie
was played on a Wednesday night - and my mother
wrote the score down on a piece of paper and
attached it to my bookcase ready for me to look at in
the morning. I looked long and hard: I felt betrayed by
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5
what she had written. If she loved me, then surely
she could have come up with a better result than
this. Just as hurtful as the score was the
exclamation mark she had placed after it, as if it
were. . . well, an exclamation. It seemed as
inappropriate as if it had been used to emphasise
the death of a relative: 'Gran died peacefully in her
sleep!' These disappointments were still entirely
new to me, of course, but like all fans, I've come to
expect them now. At the time of writing, I have felt
the pain of FA Cup defeat twenty-two times, but
never as keenly as that first one.)
The League Cup I'd never really heard of, mainly 420
because it was a midweek competition and I hadn't
yet been allowed to attend a midweek game. But
when Arsenal reached the final, I was prepared to
accept it as a consolation for what had seemed to
me to be a heartbreakingly poor season, although it
had in fact been pretty run-of-the-mill for the sixties.
So Dad paid a tout way over the odds for a pair of
tickets (I never found out exactly how much, but
later, with justified anger, he led me to understand
that they'd been very expensive) and on Saturday,
15th March ('BEWARE THE IDES OF MARCH' was
the headline in the Evening Standard's special
colour supplement), I went to Wembley for the first
time.
Arsenal were playing Swindon Town, a Third
Division team, and no one seemed to have any real
doubts that Arsenal would win the game, and
therefore their first cup for sixteen years. I wasn't so
sure. Silent in the car all the way there, I asked Dad
on the steps up to the stadium whether he was as 440
confident as everyone else. I tried to make the
question conversational sports chatter between two
men on a day out - but it wasn't like that at all: what
I really wanted was reassurance from an adult, a
parent, my father, that what I was about to witness
wasn't going to scar me for life. 'Look,' I should
have said to him, 'when they're playing at home, in
an ordinary League game, I'm so frightened they'll
lose that I can't think or speak or even breathe,
sometimes. If you think Swindon have any kind of
chance at all, even a chance in a million, it's best if
you take me home now, because I don't think I'd be
able to cope.'
If I had come out with that, then it would have
been unreasonable of my father to make me go
inside the stadium. But I simply asked him, in an
assumed spirit of idle curiosity, who he thought
would win the game, and he said he thought
Arsenal would, three or four nothing, the same as
everyone else did, and so I got the reassurance I was 460
looking for; but I was scarred for life anyway. Like my
mother's exclamation mark, my father's blithe
confidence later seemed like a betrayal.
I was so scared that the Wembley experience - a
crowd of a hundred thousand, the huge pitch, the
noise, the sense of anticipation - passed me by
completely. If I noticed anything about the place at all
it was that it wasn't Highbury, and my sense of
alienation simply added to my unease. I sat shivering
until Swindon scored shortly before half-time, and
then the fear turned to misery. The goal was one of
the most calamitously stupid ever given away by a
team of professionals: an inept back-pass (by lan Ure,
naturally), followed by a missed tackle, followed by a
goalkeeper (Bob Wilson) slipping over in the mud and
allowing the ball to trickle over the line just inside the
right-hand post. For the first time, suddenly, I became
aware of all the Swindon fans sitting around us, with
their awful West Country accents, their absurd
innocent glee, their delirious disbelief. I hadn't ever 480
come across opposing fans before, and I loathed
them in a way I had never before loathed strangers.
With one minute remaining in the game, Arsenal
equalised, unexpectedly and bizarrely, a diving
header from a rebound off the goalkeeper's knee. I
tried not to weep with relief, but the effort was beyond
me; I stood on the seat and yelled at my father, over
and over again, 'We'll be all right now, won't we? We'll
be all right now!' He patted me on the back, pleased
that something had been rescued from the dismal
and expensive afternoon, and told me that yes, now,
finally, everything would be OK.
It was his second betrayal of the day. Swindon
scored twice more in extra time, one a scrappy goal
from a corner, the other from Don Rogers after a
magnificent sixty-yard run, and it was all too much to
bear. When the final whistle went, my father betrayed
me for the third time in less than three hours: he rose
to his feet to applaud the extraordinary underdogs,
and I ran for the exit. 500
When my father caught up with me he was furious.
He delivered his ideas on sportsmanship with great
force (what did I care about sportsmanship?),
marched me to the car, and we drove home in silence.
Football may have provided us with a new medium
through which we could communicate, but that was
not to say that we used it, or that what we chose to
say was necessarily positive.
I don't remember Saturday evening, but I know that
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6
on the Sunday, Mother's Day, I elected to go to
church rather than stay at home, where there was a
danger that I would watch the highlights of the
game on The Big Match and push myself over the
edge into a permanent depressive insanity. And I
know that when we got to church, the vicar
expressed his pleasure in seeing such a large
congregation given the competing temptations of a
Cup Final on TV, and that friends and family
nudged me and smirked. All this, however, was
nothing compared to what I knew I would get at 520
school on Monday morning.
For twelve-year-old boys permanently on the
lookout for ways in which to humiliate their peers,
opportunities like this were too good to miss. When
I pushed open the door to the prefab, I heard
somebody shout 'Here he is!', and I was submerged
under a mob of screaming, jeering, giggling boys,
some of whom, I noted darkly before I was knocked
to the floor, didn't even like football.
It may not have mattered much in my first term
that I was an Arsenal fan, but in my second it had
become more significant. Football was still, in
essence, a unifying interest - nothing had changed
in that way. But as the months passed, our
allegiances had become much more defined, and
we were much quicker to tease. This was easily
anticipated, I suppose, but on that dreadful Monday
morning painful nonetheless. As I lay in the grammar
school dirt it occurred to me that I had made a
grotesque mistake; it was my fervent wish that I 540
could turn back the clock and insist that my father
took me, not to Arsenal v Stoke, but to a deserted
hotel dining room or the zoo. I didn't want to go
through this once a season. I wanted to be with the
rest of the class, trampling the hell out of some
other poor heartbroken kid - one of the swots or
weeds or Indians or Jews who were habitually and
horribly bullied. For the first time in my life I was
different and on my own, and I hated it.
I have a photograph from the game played on the
Saturday after the Swindon tragedy, away at QPR.
George Armstrong is just picking himself up, having
scored the winner in a 1-0 win; David Court is
running towards him, his arms triumphantly aloft. In
the background you can see Arsenal fans on the
edge of the stand, silhouetted against a block of
flats behind the ground, and they too are punching
the sky. I couldn't understand anything I saw in the
picture at all. How could the players care, after the 560
way they had humiliated themselves (and, of course,
me) seven days - seven days - before? Why would
any fan who had suffered at Wembley the way I had
suffered stand up to cheer a nothing goal in a nothing
match? I used to stare at this photo for minutes at a
time, trying to detect somewhere within it any
evidence of the trauma of the previous week, some
hint of grief or of mourning, but there was none:
apparently everyone had forgotten except me. In my
first season as an Arsenal fan I had been betrayed by
my mother, my father, the. players and my fellow
supporters.
© Nick Hornby
Extracts reprinted with the kind permission of the
author.
‘Fever Pitch’ is published by Penguin Books Ltd
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