After Arsenal’s win over Burnley on Monday evening, I went back and forth on how to watch Bournemouth vs Manchester City. My friends who I go to games with had long since resolved that they would watch the game together in Islington. That’s the thing about going to lots of football games, you are always planning, scheming even. You always have your eye on the ramifications.
I resolved to watch it at home. I will be at Selhurst Park on Sunday and I will be in Budapest next week. My wife and my five-year-old daughter won’t be with me at those games. If the good thing was going to happen, I wanted to be at home with my family. And if the good thing didn’t happen, well, I could just go to bed and shrug it off and contemplate yet more grey hairs sprouting from my temples on the final day.
I met my wife through Arsenal but she had yet to experience a league title victory. A member of my immediate family has been at every coronation game since 1953. She was at my side at the 2015 and 2017 FA Cup finals. We watched the 2020 FA Cup final together while she was in labour. Our daughter was born 20 hours after the final whistle blew at Wembley.
Watching Arsenal this season has been an exercise in cardiovascular discipline. Arsenal have won 18 games by the odd goal this season. They have been behind by more than one goal for less than 30 minutes of the entire campaign. Nearly every game has been in the balance. Add to that, watching the team you are competing with for the league title and willing their opponents on. That is a lot of nervous energy to expend.
The instant the match kicked off, my heart rate climbed. I was at West Ham last weekend and if the heart really is a muscle, the four minute stoppage-time VAR check ought to have built supreme endurance levels. My wife and I watched this game and tutted and swore and kicked every ball. When Eli Junior Kroupi scored at the end of the first half, it’s incredible that our daughter remained asleep as we celebrated.
The second half was torture, just as Arsenal’s nervy second-half display against Burnley, which we were both at, had been 24 hours previously. Just at the point we had begun to relax and enjoy the inevitable, Erling Haaland scored with 90 seconds remaining. It was typical of Arsenal’s season that we simply could not be allowed to enjoy the run-up to the final whistle and the end of 22 years of hurt. We had to white knuckle it. Again.
The whistle finally blew and I just wept. I knew I would, there was no pretence. I had been in the press box 12 months ago when Arsenal Women won the Champions League in Lisbon. If I couldn’t keep it together in a place of work, there was simply no chance I would be able to keep a lid on it in my own home.
My wife and I met as a direct consequence of this football club. What’s more, she is from Brazil and only through the true globality of the Arsenal fan base and the immediacy of digital communication was that possible. The last time we watched Arsenal win a trophy together, she was undergoing induction and my breathing was probably just as laboured as hers.
Our daughter was asleep upstairs, so we could not scream and shout or run into the street. On this occasion, we did what most other Arsenal fans did. We sat on the sofa with a glass of wine in hand and watched footage roll in from all around the world. The Arsenal fanbase is a much more global phenomenon than it was in 2004 when I watched us win the league at White Hart Lane.
We looked on as the streets filled around Emirates Stadium, as fans desperate for company took trains, buses and hastily hired and discarded lime bikes to experience the moment with their fellow fan. 22 years of hurt expelled in an instant and the deep, primal instinct for companionship manifested itself on the streets of N5.
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But not just in London, we watched as videos rolled in from Africa, Asia and America. We watched as the Botswana government clarified there would be no public holiday for its citizens. We watched the whole world convulse under the weight of our collective happiness.
The last time Arsenal did this was a generation ago, I was 22 years old and several pounds lighter than I am now. I hadn’t met my wife, I didn’t have my daughter, I hadn’t begun to forge my career, I didn’t even have regular access to the internet. They say the past is a different country but 2004 feels like a different galaxy.
This feels so much bigger than it did then and that’s simply because it matters to more people and we all have access to one another on a daily basis. Football has taught me many lessons, chief among them is the power of perspective but also the power of memory. Because when you experience euphoria and you reflect on it in subsequent years, it’s more than just a memory. You feel that joy again.
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