Arsenal in rare of old times

I have a confession to make. I’m an Arsenal fan. I make this confession because I’ve been in denial about this fact since 2005 (which coincidently was the last year Arsenal won a trophy). And yet I find that news about the club is the first thing I look for on the Internet.

 

I’ve started supporting the team in 1971 when Charlie George scored a magnificent goal to win us the FA Cup and to close out the league and cup double for that year. My memory of it suggests a forty yard screamer into the top corner, but Youtube shows me that it was more of a tap in. That’s the problem with memory. It makes everything in the past bigger and more impressive than it actually was, which by default makes us believe that the present is a little bit shit!

 

I do support other teams, such as Carlton in the AFL (who at least I get to watch regularly), Dundalk in the League of Ireland (at least when they are winning) and Louth in Gaelic Football. Louth are probably the only team that would prompt me to get on a plane and fly to the other side of the world at short notice, if they managed to make it to a final. I can make this statement however, comfortable in the knowledge that everything that has happened since 1957 makes this a remote possibility.

 

I have wavered in Arsenal support over the years, mainly coinciding with fallow periods at the club but also with significant changes in my life. I moved to Luxembourg in 1993 and found myself in Amsterdam on the weekend of the FA Cup Final. I was in a pub and somebody mentioned that Arsenal were playing in the match and it was on a TV screen down the back. I was more interested in the thrill of living in mainland Europe by then and Arsenal seemed part of my old and boring life in London.

 

I moved back to Ireland in 1996 at the beginning of the satellite TV revolution in Football. It coincided with Arsene Wenger becoming Arsenal manager and the start of their Golden era. It was impossible to live in Ireland and watch football without picking a team to follow in much the same way as anyone in Melbourne with even a vague interest in sport must pick an AFL team or banish themselves to internal conversational exile.

 

I kind of lost interest again when I moved to Melbourne, because the games are on at strange times of the night and the team were rubbish. But technology has dragged me back into the tent. For a start, I tend to listen to podcasts now rather than music on my way to and from work.

 

And the smartphone I bought at Christmas has lots of football related Aps that can be read everywhere. This is particularly useful in the toilet as it avoids having to hide a newspaper in your pocket.

 

For the past three months I’ve been following the soap opera of Arsenal’s summer transfer policy. This has taken up hours of time on podcasts and consumed gallons on digital ink on the web, despite the fact that Arsenal have not actually signed anyone.

 

The Internet has been a god send to the English Premier League. There is a hardly a news related site in the world that won’t have some reference to it. If you contrast that to one of my other sporting loves, Gaelic Football, you’ll see a startling difference. Soccer is statistics based and at the click of a few buttons you could find out who finished bottom of the West Cork under 12 league in 1993.

 

Gaelic Football treats its audience in the same way we were treated by our Irish teachers in secondary school. They assumed that after 8 years of primary school, you were fluent in the language and they could spend their time teaching us how to interpret 15^th Century poetry written by some blind harpist.

I’ve read match reports in the Irish Times for example headed “Tribesmen too strong for Saffrons” and not find the names of the teams anywhere in the article, any reference to the competition they were playing in, whether it was football or hurling or even whether it was men or women involved.

Gaelic games have a long way to go when it comes to harnessing the web. I just looked up my local clubs website, which in fairness seems mainly geared towards renting their all-weather pitch out as much as possible. Their “latest news” talks about an upcoming match on 26^th September 2012.

 

I do wonder if I’m being sucked into the English football hype. It’s so easy. They repeat all the games here at reasonable hours and there are plenty of people at work to discuss the sport with, including many Australians who have spent a year in London and now think they are experts.

 

So I’ll sit back and enjoy the new season. We lost our first game and still haven’t signed anyone but there is always hope. If I was Arsenal manager, I’d make the team sit down and watch the 1979 FA Cup Final, which is probably my favourite game of all time. Arsenal were leading 2-0 with only 5 minutes left to play when the hateful Man United scored two quick goals to equalise. Momentum plays a key role in Football and United had all that. But equally important is mental attitude.

 

After Man United’s second goal, Arsenal legend Liam Brady picked up the ball for the kick-off. The expression on his face said “I’m not having this” and he drove at the United defence before laying the ball off for a quick cross and a Sunderland tap in at the far post.

 

That’s how you win football matches. So come on Arsenal. Win something so that my time spent reading about you in the toilet won’t have been a waste of time.

Come on the Town

The 23^rd April 1995 is a day I’ll never forget, even if I did have to look up the Internet to find that date. There was no internet back then of course, at least not to the unwashed masses like me and smartphones were ones with push buttons rather than a dial.
 

So it was the lack of instant communication that made that day memorable. I was in the middle of my last year in Luxembourg, recovering from a breakup the previous year and living on my own in a lonely apartment on Rue De Vianden. I was starting to think about moving back to Ireland as I’d been living abroad for eight years at that point. There was a vibrant Irish community in Luxembourg in which I was immersed, playing football every Tuesday night and acting with the Round Tower Players. I also frequented “The Black Stuff” pub on more occasions than my liver would like. This probably explains how I came away from three years in Luxembourg with an inability to speak French or German but with a stronger Irish accent than the one I arrived with.

In the course of this interaction I discovered that it was possible to source “The Irish Times” every Monday for a modest fee (which was actually greater than the cost of the paper). I subscribed and suddenly found that I had access to all the weekend’s sports results. I now get these on Score.ie or numerous other websites, but back then you had to wait until Monday lunchtime and the arrival of that week’s papers. I can’t help feeling that kids today are missing out on that thrill. Anticipation is often better than gratification.

Throughout the winter of 1994/1995 I followed one story with particular interest. My hometown team of Dundalk were making a charge for the League of Ireland title. That in itself wasn’t unusual. We were regular visitors to the top table in the two decades before 1995 but I had been there for all those wins. I wouldn’t be able to make it in 1995 if we made it to the last day so I needed a way to stay in touch.

As it turned out we were rank outsiders. We sat in third place and needed to win and to see the two teams above us screw up. I contacted a mate in the lead up to the last game and arranged for him to call me from the phone box outside the ground after the game was over. That’s how we did things back in 1995. You had to be organised and plan ahead.

I waited silently by my phone in Luxembourg on that faithful Sunday. Unbeknownst to me, the last game of the season turned out to be more exciting than anyone could have predicted. My team accounted for their opposition early and the crowd turned their attention to the two games going on elsewhere in the country.

News came through that one of the challengers had lost and that meant that our league win depended on Derry City failing to win their match. Due to a long injury break, their match still had seven minutes to play when our game finished. My friends were part of a large crowd waiting in Oriel Park for the result. The club sensibly tuned the tannoy system into the national radio station so the crowd (who had gathered on the pitch) could listen to the commentary. The Derry match was tied going into extra time, which would mean that we would leap frog them to the league title. Then word came across the tannoy that Derry had been awarded a penalty. The crowd in Dundalk groaned and held their breath until “It’s saved” was shouted across the tannoy. People hugged strangers, kids were thrown in the air and a rousing chorus of “Come on you lilywhites’” was struck up. The final whistle in the Derry game followed shortly afterwards and the real celebration began.

And of course, I knew none of this, marooned as I was in a distant land where the result of a football match in Ireland was of insignificant importance.

I waited and waited for my phone call until I started to believe it would never come. Then a sharp ring woke me from my slumber. My mate was at the other end trying to shout at me through a cacophony of sound. The phone outside the ground had a massive queue he said. 1995 was pre Celtic Tiger Ireland and pretty much everyone at that game would have had a friend or relative living abroad who they would want to contact with the good news.

So my mates made it to the local pub where they imbibed several celebration beers before they remembered that they were supposed to call me. “We’ve only bloody won the league” he said before recounting the highlights of the day. I left him to a night of merriment and returned to my silent living room. I was determined to party, to find somebody in that God forsaken land in middle Europe who could share my joy.

I headed out to “The Black Stuff” which was quiet, it being a Sunday. “What brings you out tonight”, Joe the Belfast barman asked. “Dundalk won the League today” I said. “What League is that?” he replied.

I finished my beer and returned to my hermitic lifestyle. I moved back to Ireland the following year and lived there for twelve years, most of which Dundalk spent in the second division and were rubbish.

It’s now 18 years since that faithful day in 1995 and for the first time since, Dundalk have a chance of grabbing the title. These days I can listen to commentary live on the internet and text my friends during the game. I may even be able to stream live video. But if we win, I’ll still feel that emigrant’s pang that I’d not there to share the joy with my friends. That and many other things are the price you pay for starting a new life.

Come on the Town!