It was the second of three or four lifetime football moments where my delirium was such that I had no idea what I was doing, where everything went blank for a few moments. I know that an old man behind me grabbed me around the neck and wouldn’t let go, and that when I returned to a state approaching normal consciousness the rest of the stadium was empty save for a few Tottenham fans who stood watching us, too stunned and sick to move (in my mind I see white faces, but we were too far away to be able to detect shock-induced pallor), and the Arsenal players were cavorting beneath us, as overjoyed and probably as baffled by their win as we were.

We were all still in the stadium twenty minutes after the final whistle, and then we roared out on to the street, and Pete and I drove back to the Arsenal Tavern, where we were locked in after closing time so that we could watch the highlights of the game on their big TV screen, and so that I could drink much too much.

The depression that I had been living with for the best part of the 1980s packed up and started to leave that night, and within a month I was better. Inevitably part of me wishes that it had been something else that effected the cure—the love of a good woman, or a minor literary triumph, or a transcendent realisation during something like Live Aid that my life was blessed and worth living—something worthy and real and meaningful. It embarrasses me to confess that a decade-long downer lifted because Arsenal won at Spurs in the Littlewoods Cup (I would be slightly less embarrassed if it had been an FA Cup win, but the Littlewoods?), and I have often tried to work out why it happened like this. The win meant a lot to all Arsenal fans, of course: for seven years our team hadn’t even come very close to winning a semi-final, and the decline had begun to look terminal. And there might even be a medical explanation. It could be that the monstrous surge of adrenalin released by a last-minute winner at Tottenham in a semi-final when you were one down with seven minutes left, all hope abandoned, maybe this surge corrects some kind of chemical imbalance in the brain or something.

The only convincing explanation I can come up with, however, is that I stopped feeling unlucky that night, and that the log-jam that had provoked such despair just over a year before had been sorted, not by me, predictably, but by Arsenal; and so I jumped on to the shoulders of the team and they carried me into the light that had suddenly shone down on all of us. And the lift they gave me enabled me to part company from them, in some ways: though I am still one of Arsenal’s most devoted fans, and though I still go to every home game, and feel the same tensions and elations and glooms that I have always felt, I now understand them to have an entirely separate identity whose success and failure has no relationship with my own. That night, I stopped being an Arsenal lunatic and relearnt how to be a fan, still cranky, and still dangerously obsessive, but only a fan nonetheless.

CHELSEA v ARSENAL

7.3.87

Everyone went to Chelsea on the Saturday to continue the party, and it lasted for about another fifteen minutes, until something—a Hayes miss, or a Caesar back-pass, I can’t remember now—provoked the howls of frustration and irritation that you could have heard on any Saturday of the previous few years. The average football fan is notoriously, almost savagely unsentimental. It has to be said, however, that Stamford Bridge is not a place where moist-eyed affection or indulgent forgiveness will ever thrive. Games at Chelsea are inevitably dismal—it is no coincidence that the only league fixture Arsenal lost during their otherwise all-conquering ’91 Championship season was this one. The track around the outside of the pitch distances the fans from the players, and affects the atmosphere; and as most supporters on the terraces at both ends are completely in the open (and thus liable for a good soaking if there’s one in the offing) there is no noise anyway. In my experience the home fans’ reputation for vicious thuggery and for witless and ugly racism, although there has been a little less of both over the last couple of years, is well deserved, and everyone knows that you’re safer standing, thus receiving the benefit of well-organised and thorough police protection, than you are sitting, and leaving yourself prone to isolation, recognition and ultimately demolition, the very process that did for a friend a few years back.

And the game went on, and the sky darkened, and Arsenal got worse, eventually conceding a goal, which in their hangover listlessness was one goal too many. And you stand there on the huge crumbling terrace, your feet stiffening and then actually burning in the cold, with the Chelsea fans jeering and gesturing at you, and you wonder why you bothered, when you knew, not only in your heart of hearts but with your head as well, that the game would be dull, and the players would be inept, that the feelings engendered on the Wednesday would have dribbled away to a flat nothingness before twenty minutes of the Saturday game had passed when, if you had stayed at home or gone record shopping, you could have kept the embers glowing for another week longer. But then, these are the games, the 1-0 defeats at Chelsea on a miserable March afternoon, that give meaning to the rest, and it is precisely because you have seen so many of them that there is real joy to be had from those others that come once every six, seven, ten years.

At the end of the game the away fans managed a respectful and muted gratitude for their team, a recognition of recent past achievements, but it had been a dismal afternoon, a piece of dues-paying, spadework, absolutely nothing more than that. And yet as we were waiting to be let out (another thing about Chelsea: you are kept behind for a good thirty minutes while the streets outside are cleared of their menace) the sheer awfulness of it all deepened and thus the experience was lent a perverse kind of glory, so that those of us there became entitled to award themselves a campaign medal.

Two things happened. First, it began to snow and the discomfort was such that you wanted to laugh at yourself for tolerating this fan’s life any longer; and secondly, a man came out with a rolling machine and proceeded to drive up and down the pitch with it. He was not the irascible old git of football club legend, but an enormous young man with a monstrous skinhead haircut, and he obviously hated Arsenal with all the passion of his employers’ followers. As he drove towards us on his machine, he gave us the finger, a delighted and maniacal smile on his face; and on his return visit he gave us the finger again, and so it went on—up, back, and the finger. Up, back and the finger. And we had to stand and watch him do it, over and over again, in the dark and the freezing cold, while the snow fell on us in our concrete compound. It was a proper, thorough restoration of normal service.