ARSENAL v LEICESTER

31.8.85

The season following Heysel was the worst I can remember—not just because of Arsenal’s poor form, although that didn’t help (and I regret to say that if we had won the League or the Cup, then I’m sure I would have been able to put all those deaths into some kind of perspective), but because everything seemed poisoned by what had gone on in May. Gates, which had been falling imperceptibly for years, were down even further, and the whacking great holes in the terraces were suddenly noticeable; the atmosphere at games was subdued; without the European competitions, second, third or fourth place in the League was useless (a high position had previously guaranteed a team a place in the UEFA Cup), and as a consequence, most First Division fixtures in the second half of the season were even more meaningless than usual.

One of my Italian students, a young woman with a Juventus season-ticket, found out that I was a football fan and asked if she could come with me to Highbury for the Leicester game. And though she was good company, and the chance of talking to a female European obsessive about the difference between her obsession and mine doesn’t come along too frequently, I was hesitant about it. It definitely wasn’t because I couldn’t take a young lady to stand on the North Bank among the thugs (even an Italian, a Juventus fan, three and a half months after Heysel): as we had seen in May, the people she spent her time with on Sunday afternoons were familiar with the symptoms of the English disease, and she had already waved away my clumsy and pious apologies on behalf of the Liverpool fans. It was more because I was ashamed of the whole thing—the desperate quality of Arsenal’s football, the half-empty stadium, the quiet, uninterested crowd. In the event, she said she enjoyed herself, and even claimed that Juventus were just as bad early-season (Arsenal scored after quarter of an hour and spent the rest of the match trying to keep out a dismal Leicester team). I didn’t bother to tell her that this was as good as we ever got.

In my previous seventeen years of fandom, going to football had always held something above and beyond its complicated and distorted personal meanings. Even if we weren’t winning, there had always been Charlie George or Liam Brady, big, noisy crowds or fascinating sociopathic disturbances, Cambridge United’s gripping losing runs or Arsenal’s endless cup replays. But looking at it all through the Italian girl’s eyes, I could see that post-Heysel there was simply nothing going on at all; for the first time, football seemed to have been stripped right down to its subtext, and without it I would surely have been able to give it all up, as thousands of others seemed to be doing.

ARSENAL v HEREFORD

8.10.85

There is, I think, a distinction to be made between the type of hooliganism that takes place in this country, and the type involving English fans that takes place abroad. Most fans I have talked to argue that drink hasn’t ever had a very large influence on the domestic violence (there has been trouble even at games with morning kick-offs, a scheme designed to stop people going to the pub before the match); travelling abroad, however, with the duty-free ferry crossings, the long, boring train journeys, the twelve hours to kill in a foreign city … this is a different problem altogether. There were eyewitness reports of widespread drunkenness among the Liverpool fans before Heysel (although one must bear in mind that the Yorkshire police tried, shamefully, to argue that drink had been a factor at Hillsborough), and there is a suspicion that many of the England riots of the early eighties, in Berne and Luxembourg and Italy, were alcohol-fuelled (although probably not alcohol-induced) too.

There was a lot of anguished and long overdue self-flagellation after Heysel; drink, inevitably, was the focus for a great deal of it, and before the start of the new season its sale was banned inside our stadia. This angered some fans, who argued that as drink had only a tenuous connection with hooliganism, the real purpose of this move was to obviate the need for any radical action. Everything was wrong, people said—the relationship between clubs and fans, the state of the grounds and the lack of facilities therein, the lack of fan representation in any decision-making process, the works—and banning the sale of alcohol when everybody did their drinking in pubs (it is, as many fans have pointed out, impossible to get drunk inside a stadium anyway, given the number of people waiting to be served) wasn’t going to help a bit.

I agree, as anybody would, with all of this, but it is still difficult to claim that, even with a few more toilets and a supporters’ representative on the board of directors at every club, Heysel wouldn’t have happened. The point was that banning the sale of alcohol didn’t, couldn’t possibly, do any harm: it wasn’t going to cause any violence, and may even have stopped one or two fights. And, if nothing else, it showed that we were serious about our repentance. The ban could have been taken as a small but felt token towards those in Italy who might have lost loved ones because a few silly boys had had too much to drink.

And what happened? The clubs whined because it affected their relationship with their more affluent fans, and the ban was lifted. On 8th October, seventeen weeks after Heysel, Pete and I and a couple of others decided to buy ourselves a seat in the Lower West Stand for a League Cup game on a miserable night, and to our astonishment were able to buy a round of shorts to keep the cold out: the rule had been changed from “No alcohol” to “No alcohol within sight of the pitch”, as if it were the heady combination of grass and whisky that enraged us all and turned us into lunatics. So where had all the hair-shirt penitence gone? What, practically, were the clubs doing to prove that we were capable of getting a grip on ourselves, and that one day we would be able to play other European teams without wiping out half their supporters? The police were doing things, and the fans were doing things (it was this post-Heysel climate of despair that produced the lifesaving When Saturday Comes and all the club fanzines, and the Football Supporters’ Association, whose Rogan Taylor was such an accomplished, impassioned and intelligent spokesman in the weeks after Hillsborough, four years later); but the clubs, I’m afraid to say, did nothing; this one poignant little gesture would have cost them a few bob, so they scrapped it.

ASTON VILLA v ARSENAL

22.1.86

ARSENAL v ASTON VILLA

4.2.86

Away at Villa in the quarter-final of the League Cup in January ’86 was one of the best nights I can remember: fantastic away support in a magnificent stadium I hadn’t visited since I was a kid, a good game and a reasonable result (1-1 after a first-half Charlie Nicholas goal and an early second-half period of domination when Rix and Quinn missed unmissable chances). There was also an interesting historical element to the evening: the freezing January air, near us at least, was thick with marijuana smoke, the first time I had really noticed that there was some sort of different terrace culture emerging.

Over Christmas there had been a mini-revival of sorts: we beat Liverpool at home and Manchester United away on consecutive Saturdays, just when things were beginning to look really bad. (In the run-up to the Liverpool game we lost 6-1 at Everton, and then went three consecutive Saturdays without even scoring. On the middle Saturday we drew nil-nil at home to Birmingham, who were relegated, in what must surely have been the worst game ever played in the history of First Division football.) We began to allow ourselves to hope a little—always a foolish thing to do—but from February through to the end of the season everything fell apart.