"Money doesn't talk, it swears"...

You must leave now take what you need you think will last,
But whatever you wish to keep you'd better grab it fast...

Bob Dylan, 'It's all over now, Baby Blue'

We re-watch Don't Look Back, D.A. Pennebaker's film of Bob's Dylan's 1965 British tour. There's a scene in it where Bob finally gets to meet Donovan, the much-heralded 'British Dylan' as he's been touted by the media and pretty much everyone who's crossed the path of the American original, much to the latter's wry incredulity. "He's a great guitar player, mind", a well-intoxicated Alan Price tells Dylan; "better 'an you".

I'd always read the famous meeting between them as having been a humiliating one for Donovan. He'd sung and played for the visiting folk poet and done so nicely enough, only for Dylan to rub the cavernous gulf between their two talents right into the nose of the Scottish folkie; every syllable and strum of Bob's performance making his rival's fire appear punier, paler in comparison. But now I'm not so sure. I hadn't noticed before that it's Donovan himself who quietly requests the song. Dylan seems happy to acquiesce, performing 'It's All Over Now, Baby Blue' as the young pretender has asked him to. Listening, Donovan's cheeks don't appear to redden as they would if this were really some abasement. No, he's spellbound like the rest of the room, enraptured by the song, its singer unimpeachable. The little nods he gives are not those of resignation; no, empathy perhaps. It's the sheer power of the song that's slapped him in the face, not the egotistical toying of the man who is performing it.

And Dylan's face is not, as I'd previously inferred, gloating so much as disbelieving. He nods and grins as he sings with all the sagacity of someone telling a brand new joke, one that no one else has ever told before. His face has the hilarity of power, the smiling wisdom of the only man in the room who knows the punchline to the joke; the strange tingle returns, the one he must have felt when he wrote it, back then, when he was the only person in the world who knew what was going to happen next;

Yonder stands your orphan with his gun,
Crying like a fire in the sun...

That "awe-fan" bit still cracks him up; he can hardly keep a straight face as he sings. It's as if he cannot quite believe it himself and so he smirks, perhaps slightly ashamed that he's getting away with it; that such playfulness could be mistaken so readily for revelation.

No, any smugness isn't aimed at Donovan, whose repose is that of the trance-waker as the song concludes. "I had a girlfriend once, called Baby Blue", he mumbles sleepily to himself as the spell the song cast eventually breaks. And so did Bob Dylan. Her real name was Joan Baez and she's even now in this same room with them, was there when Dylan sang; sardonically mouthing along with his yonders, his crying, his orphans, his fires and his suns. Of those listening as Bob sings, she alone in the room, you feel, could fully understand the moment, hear the portent of the song. She must leave now. He already has. And pretty soon she did, not looking back. But that breakup is frozen now in time, in song, in film; for all to see, to hear that final brush off line; "strike another match, go start anew". Frozen apart for good, estranged for ever. Now that's humiliation.

There's another fabulous scene that captures Dylan's manager Albert Grossman (Wol from Winnie the Pooh) and a British theatrical agent (who looks exactly like Bruce Forsyth) as they run rings around the BBC and Granada TV performance bookers, playing them off against each other like two mischievous uncles, inflating the purse for exclusive broadcast rights to Bob's only television appearance well beyond what they know they'd originally have settled for. The only shame is that Pennebaker doesn't tie this in with Dylan's performance of 'It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding', segueing from their avuncular ruthlessness to the bit in the song where Dylan sings "while money doesn't talk, it swears".



Usmanov: "I won't keep you in suspense..."

"Money doesn't talk, it swears"...

And right now, former Arsenal vice-chairman David Dein has a cool £75 million in his pocket, every last tenner and twenty of it mouths a gleeful "fuck you" at the boardroom of the club he left in April of this year.

I'll try to keep this brief. David Dein (Mike from Mike and Bernie Winters) bought 14.85% of the club's shareholding for £292,000 in 1983. Dein proceeded to transform the club, modernising its structures and building the platform for a new era of championship winning sides to be developed at the club; first by George Graham, then even more spectacularly by Arsene Wenger. Wenger was Dein's surprise choice as long term replacement for the stopgap manager Bruce Rioch in 1996. As the man who sought out Wenger, regardless of what the markets might say, his stock will always be high at Arsenal. Not bad going for a man who, at the time he bought into the club, was described by Chairman Peter Hill-Wood as being barmy. "There's no money in football", he's supposed to have said. But fortunes can change. Dein now has one himself, and to the tune of 75 very, very big ones.

But how much consolation that fortune will be to a man who lost effective control of the club he so evidently loves, remains to be seen. Dein fell out with the rest of the Arsenal board over the move away from Highbury to the shiny new Emirates Stadium. The then vice-chairman was convinced that with his connections at the Football Association he could engineer the club's use of the new Wembley and thus be able to avoid hampering Arsene Wenger's activities in the transfer market by taking on the enormous debt building the new ground has necessitated. Whilst few would argue that there's no correlation between the financial straitjacket the club have imposed upon the manager and the slither down the league table, there are signs that the long term of the club is now rosier that any of its immediate domestic rivals. If that was the pain, it was relatively shortlived and we may be about to start experiencing some of the gain.

Nonetheless, without the benefit of such hindsight, Dein felt that Arsenal needed a big money backer if they were to be able to continue punching their weight in the face of big investments by foreign owners, first at Chelsea and Manchester United and now, it seems, pretty much everywhere else in the top flight game. There's big money in football. And there is a lot more still to come, once the clubs can negotiate their own rights and tap into the vast market of young Chinese who will soon be tuning in to Premier League football, watching it on their mobile phones in their billions.



Kroenke: "A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain."

That's why seemingly crazy sums are being bandied around by investors like Stan Kroenke (Mark Twain), who many thought best placed to buy the Gunners outright and ease Dein back into the Arsenal boardroom in return for his share in the club. Kroenke may still have a role to play, but as so much of this season, this story, is tending to do, Dein looked east, not west to find his route back in. Red and White Holdings, a company set up by Uzbek billionaire, Alisher Usmanov (Alfred Hitchcock), bought Dein's shares and now the pressure will be on the present board to shore up against these (or other) potentially hostile investors. Dein has seemingly ceded the power his stake in the club gave him, but he's a wily old bird. We have a saying at Arsenal that we trot out whenever there is talk of a crisis at the club; "Arsene knows", we say and Dein, don't forget, knew about Arsene before anyone else. Maybe David knows too. Perhaps Uncle Stan and Uncle Usmanov are just biding their time, waiting for the share price to go down before joining forces and cleaning up the club. Like Brucie and the Wol. Twain and Hitch.

"Events, dear boy, events..." The bane of Harold MacMillan's life, events aren't too popular with football supporters either. Contrary to popular belief, we don't like incident, excitement and all that. We like routine, stability, order and calm. Who needs all that goal match action, all those stirring fightbacks when surely it's preferable by far to turn up and see your side score three or four in the first five or six allowing you to relax and enjoy your players passing the ball amongst themselves, game comfortably over, for the remaining eighty-four minutes. Who needs action?

But writers are a different beast from fans. Born anglers, in both sense of the word, we can't get enough of events. We have to see all the angles, make our plays and sell our souls. We're devious anglers in that respect, scheming, plotting; every hook, every line. But we're patient anglers too; wading out into the stream of life, hoping for a disturbance, something trembling the other sort of line. We wait for things to happen, try to hook them, net them, weigh them, snap them and then we gently throw them back. So, sure enough, there's the writer in me, who feels the gentle tug and gently starts to play the reel, whose every impulse contradicts that of the fan. I worship the things, wish there were more if truth be told, my net bulging with them, all those wriggling, gasping, flapping events. And this is not only an event - well, I know it doesn't seem much, but it's probably the nearest we'll get to one on The Road to Moscow - but it's also that rare and mystical bird; an Event That Also Ties In.

The gods who script the season have been working overtime for me: the Moscow final, the Russian millions, the Belarussian star of the show. Then there's the draw for the Champions League; first one Prague, now another - and Sevilla, perhaps, still mourning their defender Puerta who we commemorated earlier. Steau Bucharest and Slavia Prague mean we'll have to make at least two trips to the former Soviet bloc before we go there for the final. You see, whatever else you might think, I really am a believer. Only now it might not just be the team who take The Road to Moscow; it might be the whole club.





L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

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© 2007 Swipe Enterprises

A Tone Poem...

Wednesday 29th August, 2007. Champions League Qualifier: Arsenal 3 (Rosicky, Fabregas, Eduardo), Sparta Prague 0 (Arsenal win 5-0 on agg.)

Glasses are clinked to the memory of Liz and Joe. Today would have been their 48th wedding anniversary. Then Coronation Street eats up the half hour remaining before the game kicks off. Roy (David Amess, MP) and Hayley (Gary Neville) have gone to the funeral of one of the latter's aunts and the former is, with typically pedantic (and solitary) rectitude, wearing a black armband. It looks exactly like the hastily applied and rather sad strip of black electrician's tape that former Arsenal skipper Tony Adams used to wear, in preference to the more elaborate, spelling-it-out mark of captaincy usually worn by the senior player in the side. It always seemed so unshowy; the forlorn, funereal stripe suggesting less that an honour had been conferred on him than that he bore a heavier burden of grief than all the others; as if he were the chief mourner of the side, and, like Roy, cared alone enough to show it.

And suddenly, there he is; Tony Adams with Jim Rosenthal (The Devil, incarnate) reluctantly observing that other painful ritual; the ITV pre-match bantering sesh. He squirms and shuffles in his seat, at one point almost lying horizontally, long legs twizzled tight like a corkscrew, his comfy chair become a table on which Rosenthal will inflict each hideous new torture upon him. It goes on and on, Rosenthal a sadistic Olivier to Tony's writhing Hoffman until the diabolic one finally puts us all out of our misery by asking Adams a question to which a series of tensed arm gyrations of unknowingness might seem an eloquent reply; how far can Arsenal go in the tournament this time, Tone? Rarely can a commercial break have been so warmly welcomed by studio and audience alike.

If there were a film of his life, I'm sure that Tony Adams' biopic would be called something corny like Addicted!! and they'd rope in all the great and good from what remains of the British film industry to make it; Eccleston as Adams, John Simms as Merson, Ian Hart as Dixon, John Hannah as a sexually ambiguous George Graham and so on. But Adams is one of the few British footballers of recent years whose story genuinely *is* worthy of dramatisation and, as such, perhaps deserves a little better than the standard cinematic fare. It's a tale worthy, in fact, of a great auteur. I can hear those tragic italianate strings already; see the camera arcing in on a scrubbed and grainy eighteen yard area. Inside its confines, a shadowy figure goes through his pre-match warming up routine, one hand on a hip, the other arm upstretched as the titles roll; 'A Robert Chartoff, Irwin Winkler production'... 'written by Paul Schrader' ... 'directed by Martin Scorcese... 'starring Robert de Niro'.The monochrome is wounded by the lettering as its title fades up, bold and red as blood: RAGING DONKEY.

We flash through the games: Michael Thomas pounds into the box to score the second goal that wins the league for Arsenal at Anfield in the season's final game; another title in 1991. De Niro rises high in slo-mo above an implausibly athletic faux-Spurs defence to head home the winner of the 1993 FA Cup semi final at Wembley. On some Hollywood lot, a ragtail of bogus gooners in historically inaccurate replica shirts yankily serenade him; "Donkey won the durr-by, donkey won the durr-by tra-la-la-la..." Two more Wembley finals, two more winner's medals. The Cup Winners' Cup held aloft the following year, the braying donkey taunts of the crowd replayed ironically on the soundtrack as Copenhagen weeps with joy. Then Marty turns his camera to the life lived off the pitch. The ceaseless boozing sessions with a hideously accurate CGI Martin Keown. The atonement of the training ground; the layer upon layer of bin liners, flagellating swathes that wrap the penitent flesh, sweating out the drink, expunging all the sins ahead of the game. Then the vivid car smash; sombre-lipped, Caprice applies despairing boo-boo kisses to a dark and brooding bruise. Finally imprisoned; the same opening warm up routine, this time paced out within the confines of an even smaller gaol. Succumbing to despair, de Niro moans, de Niro wails, de Niro weeps with every toe-destroying kick aimed at the cold, dank walls of his eternal cell. Moaning, weeping, lost.

Redemption, though, of a kind. 3-1 up at Highbury, Everton beaten, another title won, Mark Strong (Steve Bould) clips a probing ball behind the soon-to-be-losing side's back four. Adams takes a touch, steadies, and then with his left foot lashes home. Behold the man! He stands, legs astride, both arms now upraised, before the worshipful North Bank. A man reborn; donkey no more! Raging no more! One final, sweet coda: Wembley; another final won. Philip Seymour Hoffman (Ray Stubbs) aims a microphone his way. "You never knocked me down, Ray", he'll say. "You never knocked me down...."

But that's only half the story - if that. It skips so many other interesting parts; the piano playing, the poetry, the Thomas Hardy books, the degree in Sports Science he began. All those attempts to find another sort of life - 'part two', as he describes it to dark, satanic Jim - are just so many ways to fill up all the empty space; just as the boozing filled the gaps between the games. Drinking pushed Tony Adams to the brink, only for a love of the game to somehow drag him back. Similarly, the diligent and earnest undergraduate was lured back from the ivory towers of academe to the nervous rigours, the ritual of the dug out. Football's gain. Portsmouth's gain as - and even Paul Schrader could not have scripted this bit better - with them he'll return on Sunday to his spiritual home at Arsenal.

But you sense an Adams loss. As if all of this - the coaching, the media work, the keyboards and the quill - can never make up for having lost the only thing he loved. The only thing that counts; the playing, the thing you can't get back. Footballers have many blessings, but you don't envy them their curse. Who else has to live with being finished at thirty-five? Who else sees the glories of youth become a care home hell in the blinking of an eye as that final final whistle blows?

If there is a tragedy about Tony Adams - and I believe there is - it's that he hasn't been able to let go. Like the Brian Clough imagined by David Peace in his remarkable book The Damned United, you wonder if Tone's life too has perhaps been frozen within the confines of the eighteen yard box. In football Clough attacked that box, attacked life in much the same way, expecting it to budge in sheer awe at his outrageous talent, his unshakeable bottle, his sheer nerve. And many times it did, and that was his genius and his hatefulness combined. If Peace has hit on the essential truth of Cloughie then you can read his managerial career as the playing out of an extended revenge at fate for the premature demise of his career. Adams may have had his back to goal but you get the same sense of discomfiture now, watching his contortions as he plays the unwilling pundit, as when he was a player; as ill at ease in victory as in defeat, always wanting more, the past dead with the whistle, the next game now the only thing. Will he do a Cloughie? Use management as an extension of his will beyond his playing years? If so, just how will Adams' play out those demons? What will he do with his 'part two'?

Maybe that's why he's so nervous? Not drunk again, as we uncharitably infer from his tortured awkwardness on screen. Apprehension, perhaps, brought on by the conflicting loyalties thrown up by this return to the club he served so faithfully and so well? Or maybe just impatience? A Hal who knows that one day he must become another Henry - the IV, not the 14 - and come back to us transformed. No longer Tone, but Anthony, the prince-in-waiting no longer, now our returning King. For surely, if such things as character and destiny count for anything, there's only one man big enough - one man Arsenal enough - to fill Arsene Wenger's shoes when the time eventually comes for him to leave. As a player, Tony Adams had no time for transitions, or excuses, was always chomping at the bit. Perhaps the apprenticeship at Portsmouth is only so much dead time before the proper work begins? If so, his restlessness makes sense. Some, you feel, are born to rage.

Arsenal take seven minutes to kill off the tie. Walcott's cleverly angled cut back is swept in by the Czech Rosicky against his former club. Eduardo (The Striker Formerly Known as Prince) feeds Fabregas in identical fashion for the second on 68 before scoring a third himself just before the end. Hleb exchanges a joke with Le Boss as they embrace after the game. I can't lip read, but I'm sure he said something along the lines of, "this time I'll win it for you, I promise". We'll see.

Another serendipity: in the group stage we draw Slavia Prague, so another walk on part returns - you couldn't script it better, could you? But then, there's only so much luck. I'm sure I'll use all mine up well before next May.





L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

Hear Bob read his novel in progress, The Road to Moscow!!


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© 2007 Swipe Enterprises

An Unimportant Incident...

Champions League qualifier: Liverpool 4 (Crouch, Hypia, Kuyt 2), Toulouse 0 (Liverpool win 5-0 on aggregate).

That field of loss. That field of hate. That field of blood.

David Peace, The Damned United.

I scan the sports news on teletext:

Spain international Antonio Puerta has died after suffering a heart attack in his club side Sevilla's 4-1 win against Getafe on Saturday.

Defender Puerta, 22, collapsed in the first half and medics prevented him from swallowing his tongue. He collapsed again after going off and was later given cardiac rescusitation before being taken to hospital and placed in intensive care. Doctors say his condition deteriorated before his death.

Leicester defender Clive Clarke collapsed in the dressing room at half time in their Carling Cup match at Nottingham Forest. The game wass called off. Clarke is now said to be in a stable condition...

Kieron Dyer suffered a suspected broken leg as West Ham saw off Bristol City...

The players put their bodies on the line and all we do is watch. Or is it? At its best, football is as much a test of character as it is of skill and strength, of speed and endurance. But fans show strength. Fans endure. It just goes unrecorded in the main. Because it all comes down to what happens on the pitch in those 90 minutes. "All the rest is propaganda."

Character. The Arsenal sides of the thirties had a bit of that. Edris Hapgood. Eddie Hapgood would go on to captain England. Never the sharpest knife in the drawer, he lost his £10 signing on fee (a lot of money in those days) to a gang of grifters playing the three card trick. Later, he suffered severe burns in an accident, so Arsenal physio Tom Whittaker built a harness for him to wear to protect his skin from the constant rubbing of his shirt.



Alex James: "...does that mean I get to go up in the air playing my saxophone Mr. Chapman?..."

Alex James - one of the under-sung greats of British football. As one of the 'Wembley Wizards' he'd played a large part in Scotland's 5-1 demolition of England in 1928. Arsenal had won nothing before he joined the club. By the time of his retirement in 1937, they'd won four championships and the FA Cup twice and become the most famous club side in the world. James was obviously a colossus, an invulnerable superman who could singlehandedly transform a club's fortunes. Well, he was and he wasn't. Bizarrely, he suffered from acute rheumatism in his ankles. Those extraordinarily baggy shorts of his might have made him stand out on the pitch, given him an identifiable trademark, but they also served a purpose. He wore extra long long-johns because of his condition.



Cliff Boy Bastin: "..your knee bone's connected to your...erm..."

Then there was Cliff Bastin. Cliff 'Boy' Bastin who, until the emergence of Messrs. Wright and Henry was Arsenal's all-time goal scorer - although, to put his achievements in context, it's worth remembering that he usually played on the wing. Bastin had a cartilage problem. It kept popping out. On the sideline Whittaker would gently tease the recalcitrant bit of gristle back into place and the Boy would get back onto the field, score a few more goals until it popped back out again. When the knee finally gave up the ghost, the Arsenal physio was even allowed to attend the operation to remove it, no doubt to allow him a good look at the cause of so much patient massaging and adroit anatomical probing. The Royal College of Surgeons was certainly impressed by the hideously deformed thing, as they put it on permanent exhibit. So that was Cliff 'Boy' Bastin. Oh, and he was deaf. It's not so much a wonder that the team achieved so much on the field so much as that they managed to take to it at all.

Bastin, James and Hapgood were all pall bearers for Herbert Chapman, the legendary manager who built the club into the world-renowned institution that dominated football in the 1930s. Chapman died of pneumonia at 3 am on Saturday 6th January 1934. At 3pm the same day, Arsenal kicked off against Sheffield Wednesday, some of the players having learned of the great man's death from the newstands on their way to the ground. "I suppose Arsenal gave a good display that day", Bastin would later recall, "considering that to the players the game was just an unimportant incident. Even the crowd was practically silent throughout the ninety minutes of a game which seemed to go on for ninety years."

That field of loss. That field of hate. That field of blood.

Poor old Alan Hanson. "He wants shooting for that", he'd said as part of his match analysis when Columbian defender Pablo Escobar had put through his own net. His goal contributed to the 2-1 defeat by the United States that was to see his nation eliminated from USA '94, and allow the hosts to progress. Arriving back home, he duly was shot. Escobar, that is; not Hanson. But then they go to war over football in South America. It's different there. People don't get shot in the streets over here...

That field of loss. That field of hate. That field of blood.

There was a pleasant surprise last night. There were two, in fact. Scrolling through the onscreen menu, we notice the words UEFA Champions League. I assume it's a preview of this season's tournament as both English sides played on the same day in the first leg, and Arsenal's game is tomorrow. But no, they're showing the return leg of the Liverpool v. Toulouse game. Rhys Jones' parent and brother are there, three pillars of blue in a temple of red. Rhys would have loved nothing more than to hear his beloved Everton's Z Cars Theme blaring out from the Anfield PA system. So it does and 40,000 scousers hold up their scarves of red and white. It's as if they're silently reminding the bereaved family that they'll never walk alone. And then they sing just that, 40,000 of them, red consoling blue. And then they clap him until their hands are sore as if he was one of their own. As we should them.

As we should them.

L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

Hear Bob read his novel in progress, The Road to Moscow!!


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© 2007 Swipe Enterprises

May 1971...

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets. (1935-1942)

Highbury bore me. Oh, alright; Hampton bore me, if you must know. The Bearsted Memorial Hospital, 17th April, 1965. But we'll come back to that, I'm sure.



Like father, like son; a 1 month old Bob and his father in May 1965.


Highbury may not have borne me, but there is a North London connection. My Mother's family moved over from Belfast to a house at 497 Archway Road (I think) some time in 1953. Mum would have been about eighteen. Mum's father, Robert George Knight - known as George - was a painter and decorator. He invented a tool that helped you paint up to the skirting board called, appropriately enough, The George. It was patented, I believe. I never met either of my Grandfathers. Dad's father - like him, a Joseph - had died before they were married and George left his wife (my grandmother) Sarah - everyone called her Sadie - for another woman shortly before the same big day. My Mother banned him from the ceremony I believe, so distraught was she at his infidelity and subsequent departure. He's notably absent at Sadie's side here on August 29th, 1959 as the wedding party spills out onto the Archway Road from the Methodist Church on the corner of Jackson Lane.



Liz, Joe and well-wishers all eagerly awaiting the news of the Arsenal's 3-3 draw with Wolves at Molineaux...

My grandmother was a frequent presence in our home as my sister and I were growing up, so we never really heard that much about grandfather George and I suppose I just assumed him to have been long dead - which, if my Mother's attitude to him was anything to go by, he pretty much had been from the day he packed his bag.

Sometime in the early seventies, my grandmother (that's her to the left of her daughter, the bride in the photo above) moved out of 497 and took a small flat above a sportswear shop on Green Lanes, just by Haringey Station. From the window in the small kitchen at the rear of the flat you could just about make out Haringey Stadium where there used to be dog racing and, some time in 1973, the tail of comet Kohoutek just visible flying into the away shirt yellow of the sunset. In January 1975, I went with my Dad from that same flat to Highbury to watch my first game; a pitiful 1-1 draw with lowly York City in the third round of the FA Cup. It was a short tube ride from Manor House to the Arsenal. It felt like what I suppose it was; a second home.

Dad had been a fan of the club since childhood. He'd grown up in the afterglow of the great Gunners sides of the 1930s, possibly even going to see them play Brentford at Griffin Park in the Inter-war league or cups. The first game of football I remember seeing was the televised 1971 FA Cup final between Arsenal and Liverpool. It was another George, Charlie, whose spectacular winning goal and famous cruciform collapsing celebration of it that captured my heart and imagination that day.



My sister has left me some family photographs for safe keeping and I spend much of the Bank Holiday Monday going through them. Here's Samuel Crawford, born according to his death certiicate, "about May 1880", with his son-in-law George, in a photograph probably taken somewhere around Brookeborough in the very north of Ulster where the Crawford's family home was.



Whilst I'm looking among the documents in the loft for my Mum and Dad's marriage cerificate, I come across those recording the deaths of mum's side of the family. There's Samuel's and my great grandmother's. Sadie died in 1982 - only a year, I notice, after her long-lived mother (and my mother's namesake). Elizabeth Ann Crawford, nee Bullock; was born in 1885. She was born a year before Arsenal was formed. And then I come across George's death certificate and I realise that I've never bothered to check when he actually died. I feel my chest tighten a little when I see the date; 22nd May, 1971. So I could have met him, but never did.

It felt very strange, coming down from the attic with that thought - like losing something you never even knew you'd had. And the strange symmetry of football, of winning and losing - finding a new George only to lose another two Saturdays later. And that game, which had until then been a fixed, unyielding point of reference; a pole star by which I could navigate my youth suddenly veered off, Kohoutek-like; no longer a reliable crutch for the time-ravaged memory; now that whole month has splintered into a kaleidoscope of uncertainty. How much had my Mother known of her father's illness? Had his death come out of the blue? Why hadn't I picked up on her grief - if, indeed, she'd shown any. And if not, why not? How had the woman who through all of her life had proved so extraordinarily forgiving and charitable towards others been unable to extend those virtues to her own father? Had he gone peacefully, like my father, in his sleep?

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.

In the garden, late May, serene and tranquil, untroubled by the sadness of the world, I hurl myself down in a cross on the grass; a double winner, a George glittering in the youthful sun. For weeks this goes on, months; all the pleasure of the world encapsulated in one goal, one timeless prostrate celebration.

Out there, in another world, another May, another George lies dying, lies dead.



L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

Hear Bob read his novel in progress, The Road to Moscow!!


Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!

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Listen to Bobcasts #1-34 here!



© 2007 Swipe Enterprises

Keeping the Faith...

Saturday 25th August, 2007: Arsenal 1 (Fabregas) Manchester City 0

Jed (Ray Winstone) isn't a believer. Not in the religious sense at least, although he's not altogether without faith. How can you believe in The Man Upstairs, he asks, when you see those poor little kids who've never done anything worthy of punishment, stricken by illness, taken too soon? Jed has one of those permanent frowns. It could be because his father and his grandfather both died at the age of forty-nine. Dicky tickers. Jed is forty-five himself, so the next four seasons are going to be pretty critical ones for him, you'd imagine. Or maybe he's frowning ahead of the sin he's about to commit - the only truly cardinal one to be found among the articles of our particluar faith. He'll have to leave the game ten minutes before the end in order to get back home, head straight off to Gatwick and pick up his daughter from the airport. The last time he and Scott (John Turturo in Miller's Crossing) did that, we were (as they tell it) two-nil down to Birmingham City, in December 1975*. They headed off early to beat the rush to New Street Station and missed the two late Malcolm MacDonald goals that hauled us level. Miracles *do* happen, you see. They've never left early again since. Or perhaps Jed is frowning at the thought of today's opponent's Manchester City sat there proudly at the top of the league.



RVP11: "..come on then, you Belarussian softy - give it your best shot..." AH13: "...WHY-YIY-YOUDDA..."

City fans are a funny bunch, aren't they? If there was any logic in football fandom, we'd probably be their second team, so often have we pissed on the parade of their deadly Manchester rivals. But it doesn't work like that. We have our faith, they have theirs. "You've got the worse support we've ever seen", they sing from their sky blue lido beneath me to the tune of "He's got the whole world in His hands". That apart, the song selection is pretty spot on - a na-na-na-nana-na-naing "Hey Jude" as well as their soulful theme tune, "Blue Moon": it's a wonder that with all their newfound optimism they haven't jazzed it up to sound more like the Marcels' high octane doo-wop version than Presley's take on the same song. It's the desolate reverie of his prairie lament that their singing captures so well. After the game, three or four of them continue singing their jibes at the Arsenal faithful with what is either trademark Mancunian bottle or plain idiocy, surrounded as they are by several hundred gooners making their way home. Perhaps they feel they have to compensate for all those prawn cocktail munchers over at Old Trafford. Only a retaliatory rendition of "we won the league in Manchester" seems to score a point, but by then they've been guzzled by the funnel of bodies descending into Arsenal tube.

It is a baking hot day, warmer still within the confines of our Smeg-shiny oven of a stadium, so the team do well to finish the ninety as strongly as they do. City are well-drilled and with better finishing at the end of their occasional breakaways, might have pinched the first goal you felt they'd settle for and defend to the hilt. New boy Bacary Sagna (John Lee Hooker with a mop on his head) is injured putting in a crunching tackle and hobbles off to be replaced by Denilson. Flamini moves from central midfield to full back to accomodate him and you wonder if the young Brazilian and Fabregas will have the muscle to hold their own in the middle. Barring a ten minute period early in the second half when Man City finally perform like plausible league leaders, Denilson and Fabregas keep Arsenal pressing and around the 70 minute mark, Hleb runs purposefully into the City box and is brought down by Richards for a penalty.



Robert Swipe Charlie George Double-winning Wembley Goal Celebration Re-enactment Update: The dream becomes reality...

Kasper Schmeichel (a peroxide Prince Harry) looks tiddly in the goal but his ludicrous aping of father Peter's star jumping seem to do the trick. When it seems that a firmly-struck shot placed low inside the post is sure to elude his dive, Van Persie elects to blast the ball straight down the middle, where it strikes the young keeper's flailing boot. The evening highlights suggest that Schmeichel moved off his line too soon and that the spot kick should have been retaken. Even the assistant referee appeared to notice it, but the score remains nil-nil.

Then with ten minutes remaining, my man Hleb seems to pull himself together, as if for the previous hour and twenty minutes he's just been kidding around and now, finally, with the game almost up he'll play as if he means business. Another surge into the box, a deft forward ball rolled into the path of Fabregas who blasts the ball high into the top left-hand corner of the City goal. One-nil Arsenal; the sky blue choir's 'Hey Jude' na-na-na-naing silenced by our own Fab4.

AH13 sees a good low drive fizz wide of the post and City force a late corner for which the feisty 'keeper comes into the Arsenal goalmouth, only to see his header go straight to the gloves of his opposite number, Almunia. It ends one-nil to the Arsenal. Quite a few of us stay to watch the players do what seems to be becoming their traditional post-match huddle in the centre circle. Keep the faith; there's something tasty bubbling away nicely in that shiny Smeg of ours. I just hope Jed didn't leave before the goal.

* It was probably 18th January 1977. Arsenal drew 3-3 with Brum that day, 'SuperMac' scoring all three.

L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

Hear Bob read his novel in progress, The Road to Moscow!!


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© 2007 Swipe Enterprises

For Rhys Jones...

I can see the bike he rode, Rhys; can see it in my mind's eye. One of those silly little BMX things - you know, the sort that are OK for kids but that you should be starting to grow out of when you get to the age he was. Only this lad hadn't. Not yet. I can't tell you what he looked like though - he was wearing a hoody, so you couldn't really see his face. It was nothing personal as far as we can tell, you just got in the way is all. You see, the men who deal drugs 'round your way use young lads like him to run their errands for them; drop off packages, pick up the money they're owed, all that sort of stuff. Kids like him are less likely to get picked up by the police, you see. They just look like everyday softheads, acting tough, riding around like big shots on bikes that are way too small for them, don't they? So you see, Rhys, that's all he was; a BMX Bandit who had a gun and got carried away.

But you've gone into the blue now - at least I always imagine it to be blue, where you are now. Silent, peaceful, blue as an Everton shirt. There'll be a silence at Goodison for you on Saturday, before the Blackburn game kicks off. They'll have that photo of you in your replica shirt up, with a kind message for your Mum and Dad and all your friends and family, up there on the Jumbotrons. But the crowd probably won't see it. No, they will all be looking down; heads bowed in sadness and feeling a little ashamed, if they're honest with themselves. Ashamed that they've let things get the way they are so that this could have happened to you. There'll be a silence at the Emirates too, I'm sure, and I'll be there and thinking of you, feeling just like the folks up in Liverpool. We all will, at all the grounds, on all the parks, in all the pubs, or at home on our settees as we watch the highlights later in the day. We'll all be ashamed and crying and thinking of you.

I used to wait there, just like you; waiting for someone to turn up with a ball. Did you used to do that thing in your head where they play the Z Cars Theme as you run onto the pitch? Or Match of the Day? And then through the game, that commentator's voice accompanying every play, relaying the action as if it was a proper game. You never really grow out of that - at least, you wouldn't have if you'd been given the chance to. We all have a lot of the eleven year old in us, which is why this hurts us so.

It's no consolation, I know, but you're the braver lad by far - not that thoughts of honour or anything like that would have been in that young mind of yours. Oh, sure - he'll be full of himself at first, basking in all the attention he'll get from the bigger lads, the ones who'll try to hide their own fear from him and hope he doesn't panic or do anything silly; still cowards, still covering their own backs. There'll be a step in his strut for a while, and they'll give him some more of whatever it is they give him that calms him down, keeps him sweet and he, unlike you, will have a future. Only it won't be much of one, will it?

It can't be, can it? Always looking over your shoulder; always living in fear. Your future may have been snatched away, Rhys, but is was a better one than that. You lived your young life looking forward - to the next game, the next kickabout, who knows - perhaps a trial? An apprenticeship, even? One day, a squad number. It may never have happened, but at least you dreamed of those things while you could. Whereas the boy who robbed you of all those things...

Oh, he'll grow older, sure he will - he'll have that and you won't. But the hood that hid his face from us won't hide him from himself. And he'll always be there, looking back in the mirror as the boy turns into a man: that overgrown kid on a BMX bike, who shot an 11 year old in the back of the neck.

So, rest in peace, Rhys; sleep silent in the blue. We all end up there anyhow. You just were taken too soon.


L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

Hear Bob read his novel in progress, The Road to Moscow!!


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© 2007 Swipe Enterprises

International Friendly...

Belarus 2 (Vasilyuk, Bliznyuk), Israel 1 (Gershon)

England also play Germany at The New Wembley. As an Arsenal fan, watching the national team lost any meaning it may once have had some time ago. Aside from the issue of quality, the fortunes of France, from whose shores most of our players seem to have arrived at the club, seem more directly linked to our own. Tonight the only appearance of any concern is our German goalkeeper, Jens Lehmann, who instantly catches the eye with his salacious warm up routine. It seems to have been adapted from one of the scenes in Oh Calcutta! that didn't make it past the censor, by way of a particularly provocative Christine Aguilera video. Buttocks clenched and pert, Jens performs what can only be described as a series of zigga-zigga-aaaahh-style pelvic gyrations into the submissive Wembley turf, presumably as some bizarre act of psycho-sexual retribution for the fire bombing of Dresden. It's not a particularly edifying sight - although it is at least preferable to being forced to watch either of the pair of blunders he committed in each of our opening Premier League games.



Aguilera: 4th in the Arsenal goalkeeping pecking order after Lehmann, Fabianski and Almunia...

Lord Reith's legacy may be hard to discern elsewhere on the Beeb these days, but at least the football coverage still strives to educate as well as entertain. We are treated to a bit of Elgar, for a start. And surely commentator John Motson, once an enthusiastic emblem of the game's youthful vigour, now stands as a sobering lesson to us all in the cruelties the passage of time can inflict. Hesitant, stumbling over words and prone to irrational outbursts aimed at no one in particular, he might have wandered into the commentary box from some harrowing documentary on the debilitating effects of a degenerative disease; Mark Lawrenson, peremptory and irrascible as ever, his long-suffering carer, too ground-down by the misery of it all to correct his aberrations or stop him wandering off on to the gantry muttering nonsense about Paul Peschisolido. He's a sorry shadow of the bright-voiced cub who features in the opening, Nimrod-themed montage of prior Wembley encounters between the two nations. His trademark "Rummenegge - Oh! It's there?!" is not out of place beside Coleman's monolithic "Hoeness - one nil" and Barry Davies austere "two nothing" in the pantheon of great goal pronouncements.



Motson and the horrors of degenerative illness: It's alright love, the elephant's got my tie rack and I'll leave your kippers under the fzzzznam fzzzznam gertcha Zimbabwe...."

Germany's 1966 world cup veteran Uwe Seeler (Selwyn Froggett) is presented to the players before the traditional booing of the national anthems. We're told by Motty that tonight's crowd won't quite reach the 90,000 capacity due to "segregation", the poor soul obviously having been transported back to the unforgiving streets of the Montgomery of the early 1960s. It's a wicked illness. England coach Steve McLaren, we are informed, wants to make Wembley a difficult place for teams to come and play football. The local traffic police have evidently been roped in to help achieve this laudable objective. The Germans find it so difficult even to find their way to the wretched stadium that they arrive late and the kick off is delayed.

While their anthem is being booed, the 6,000 or so German fans who have made the trip to see this historic fixture hold up what appear to be black, red and yellow bin liners, turning their corner of the ground into a vast teutonic tricolour. In response, the England supporters in the upper tier of one of the side stands hold up red and white cards in a similar fashion, spelling out the legend "fuck Euro 2008" - at least that's all I can make out as the camera hurtles by, presumably trying to get away from a miscreant, mumbling Motty. It certainly seems an apt encapsulation of the team's attitude towards next summer's tournament.

England have made rather a dog's dinner of the qualification process so far, losing to Croatia and drawing with Andorra - the footballing equivalent of Eric Bristow being uanble to beat a blind drunkard at darts. "It's a Big Issue," concurs the head coach in the pre-match interview and that's certainly what he'll be selling copies of outside his local supermarket if the papers have anything to do with it.

The game kicks off. "Strange to see the Germans wearing red..." pipes a clearly medicated Motty, sadly so hampered by his hideous degenerative disorder as to be unable to add "they normally wear grey..." England start brightly, aided by a German side who seem to be pursuing a bold tactical inversion of the received wisdom that it is better for your side to retain possession by passing the ball to players on the same team than to hand the ball to your opponents at every available opportunity. Thus gifted the ball, Micah Richards, who looks born to the position on his debut at right back, shimmies outside the German box before dinking a shrewd ball ahead of Frank Lampard. Despite, we are told by Motty, having followed through, Lampard retains enough grace under pressure to allow the ball to run onto his shooting foot and blast it high into Lehmann's goal before, presumably nipping off to change his shorts. One nil England, nine minutes played.

The Germans offer little of note in the next 15 minutes or so and then, in time-honoured fashion, proceed to score. A rousing chorus of "football's coming home" greets Kuranyi's tap in after Schneider's cross-cum-shot has surprised Robinson and elicited from him a slapstick resonse of which Lehmann watching from the opposite goal must have been deeply envious.

The game briefly sparks into life on the 40 minute mark. Lamm feeds Pander whose scorching drive from 25 yards puts the Germans two-one up sparks a frenzy of eats, shoots and leaves based punnery in the press box. Moments later, Michael Owen (an older David Healy) is put through only to see a sharp save from Lehmann push his header wide of the post.

England play some nice stuff in the second half, as Beckham's influence begins to fade. Shaun Wright-Phillips must surely be preferred to the waning Becks for the crucial games ahead. He combines well with England's best player on the night, Joe Cole and shows that there's more than a glimmer of hope for this team if they are allowed to play football that is based more on their collective speed and canniness of passing than on Beckham's 'get-it-in-the-mix-and-get-it-in-early" punting. Even Peter Crouch (Finchy from The Office) seems to add something to the team when they play like that, rather than as a sight for Beckhams's long range hoofing displays.

So, amid a flurry of substitutions, it ends 2-1 to Germany. We'll just have to hope that those steely Belarussians have softened up the Israelis a little before they come to play here next month.



L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

Hear Bob read his novel in progress, The Road to Moscow!!


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Listen to Bobcasts #1-34 here!



© 2007 Swipe Enterprises

Interlude: Literary Arsenal XI v Literary Spurs XI...

...over to Jonathan Pearce at the Emirates...


Arsenal (Probable; 4 - 4 - 1 - 1)

Goalkeeper: Pollard

Defence: Moore, Rosen, Adams, Bragg

Midfield: Collins, Coelho, Marber, Parsons

Attack: Hornby, Swipe

Sub: Lawrence.

Tottenham Hotspur (Probable; 3 - 5 - 2)

Goalkeeper: Wardle

Defence: Forsythe, Cook, Rankin

Midfield: Chas, Rushdie, Sugar, Vargos Llosa, Dave

Attack: Aaronovitch, Smash

Sub: Hunter Davies

Arsenal 'keeper Eve Pollard will be hoping for an uneventful 90 minutes after 2 high profile errors have marred the voluble shot stopper's start to the season. The gunners go for solidity and familiarity at the back; classy left back Melvyn "Lord" Bragg and American rightback Michael Moore have 9/11 starts between them. Michael Rosen will once again partner Douglas Adams in the centre of defence as the lanky stopper starts his last season, hoping to say so long, and thanks for all the medals at the end of another trophy-filled campaign. Jackie Collins and Paolo Coelho bring a touch of the exotic to the midfiled; the silky samba skills of "The Alchemist" and "The Bitch" being balanced by the archetypal English grit of Patrick Marber and Tony Parsons. The left sided midfielder, who's been with the club Man and Boy, will be hoping to renew his successful partnership with striker Hornby, playing in the hole today behind the prolific Swipe. It's A Long Way Down for the big lad, who has a quick pair of feet and an elegance that belie his height. He'll be hoping to maintain his goal a game ratio against Tottenham. Sub Amy Lawrence will be keen to get on and show that she has inherited more than a famous name from grandfather D.H. Lawrence, the famous Nottingham Forest schemer and novelist.

A fine proponent of blank verse, Tottenham goalkeeper Wardle will be hoping for another clean sheet today. A 'good game, good game', for Spurs is virtually assured with ever-present Bruce Forsythe combining once again with Ian Rankin and Peter "Unidexter" Cook in a three man backline. The one footed Cook may find Arsenal's quick pass and move a little too much, although the one he does have is very, very good. Fiery Scot Rankin will be hoping to avoid getting into the referee's Black Book although you don't need to be Inspector Rebus to know that he's an accident waiting to happen when all that blood goes to his head. Spurs will pack the midfield and hope that Alan Sugar, who served his Apprenticeship with the club, supporter's boo-boy Salman Rushdie and new South American signing Vargas Llosa will be able to impose themselves on the gunners' more fluid and skillful midfield. Rushdie will hope to rise above the "you fatwa bastard" taunts and finally start to deliver some of those Satanic Passes whilst Peruvian Vargos Llosa knows that if ever there was a The Time of the Hero, it's now. With his protection in the middle of the park, wing backs Chas and Dave will be hoping they can get their knees up and provide the service for Nutty Boy Chas Smash up front. It must be Love for coach Martin Jol as he is persisiting with the striker despite recently describing him as "an Embarrassment". The Dutchman will be hoping that Smash's strike partner, David Aaronovitch will be his reliable self; talking bollocks about a load of old shite.








L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

Hear Bob read his novel in progress, The Road to Moscow!!


Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!

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Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!

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Listen to Bobcasts #1-34 here!



© 2007 Swipe Enterprises

A Cock and Bull Story...

Sunday 19th August: Blackburn Rovers 1 (Dunn), Arsenal 1 (Van Persie)



Photon: "vee need to know zee process..."


Saturday 18th: Stray Photon has signed up for the Hull City goals alert service on his mobile. It rings six minutes into the second half. "Oh dear, Coventry have scored", I quip as Stray flips open his phone like a Star Trek communicator to check the goalflash. (They have indeed.) Eleven minutes later it rings again. "Oooh, you've equalised", I say. (They have indeed.) It ends one one.

Sunday 19th: I go into a strop because I can't find a live commentary of the Blackburn game on the radio, so have to settle for the tantalising bulletins that interupt the Liverpool v. Chelsea game. I cheer up when the news comes through that a scrappy Robin van Persie goal has put Arsenal one up in a bruising physical encounter. I become increasingly zen-like in my calm as the game progresses and Arsenal appear to be weathering the storm of physicality that always threatens to engulf them when they visit Blackburn. With around ten minutes to play, I start to sense that the points are within our grasp and so, when Alan Green breaks off from criticising the referee at Anfield for just long enough to inform us that there has been another goal at Ewood Park, I'm halfway up in the air to celebrate the late Hleb game-killer that I have convinced myself is imminent.

Instead, another Lehmann howler has allowed Blackburn to level the scores, the tall, volatile German 'having pawed at a well struck but eminently saveable David Dunn effort like a cat toying with a ball of string. I've picked the wrong story. Where I have cast Hleb as my hero, I should have seen the signs, spelt out in bold capitals for me when Lehmann turned nemesis and gifted Fulham their first in the opening minute of the first game of the season. Despite all my angst at not being able to follow the game ball-by-ball, I wonder if it isn't preferable just to cut out the middleman and rely on the text alerts after all. No details, no horrific images; just the bald facts, the only ones that matter in the end - the goals as they are scored and the state of play when the whistle blows. If you weren't there, what use is someone else's account?

Monday 20th: With my personal narrative in disarray, it seems fitting that the BBC should be showing A Cock & Bull Story, the recent adaptation of Sterne's masterpiece The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy. What better prelude to Match of the Day than a meditation on the impossibility of representing the human experience through literature and the outrageous hubris of man's efforts to impose order upon chaos and

Tuesday 21st: ..oh, I've lost the thread of all this...


L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

Hear Bob read his novel in progress, The Road to Moscow!!


Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!

Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!

Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!

Watch Bob's promos on Youtube

Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!

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Listen to Bobcasts #1-34 here!



© 2007 Swipe Enterprises

Bobcast #42...

... is available to download or listen to here...

L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

Hear Bob read his novel in progress, The Road to Moscow!!


Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!

Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!

Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!

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Listen to Bobcasts #1-34 here!



© 2007 Swipe Enterprises

A Book at Bedtime...

Hear Bob read the first four chapters of his Novel in progress, The Road to Moscow...

Subscribe to hear future installments here...

Oh, and apropos of nothing, here's a lovely old Atlantic label...



and this lovely Bergkamp shirt from the first ever game at the Emirates:




L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

Hear Bob read his novel in progress, The Road to Moscow!!


Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!

Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!

Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!

Watch Bob's promos on Youtube

Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!

Listen to Bob's songs at GarageBand.com!

Listen to Bobcasts #1-34 here!



© 2007 Swipe Enterprises

Mobile Phones for Goalposts...

Wednesday March 15th, 2007: Sparta Prague 0 - Arsenal 2 (Fabregas, Hleb)


'Telling stories is telling lies'. Not like telling lies, you notice. As soon as you embark on that first fork-tongued once of your "Once upon a time.." you've become, in effect a liar. But then...

Once upon a time, a group of us would kick a ball about on Twickenham Green. Most Sundays this bunch known mainly by their nicknames, common names distinguished by their team affiliations; Blackburn Dave, Brentford Dave, Grassy Noel, Squeaky Paul, Marky Mark, John Gilhooligan, would meet up try to get the ball between the jumpers. "Mobile phones for goalposts!" we'd laugh, when laying out the pitch, a parody of Paul Whitehouse and his Ron Manager turn. Also among our number was Eric, whose parents ran the Tai Fox Chinese takeaway in the high street. He was an athletic 'keeper, a good outfield player too, and looked like a young Jackie Chan. We called him Eric Cantonese.

That's all true, even though it sounds like something you might read in a storybook. This is all true too: on that same green, my father played cricket for Middlesex schoolboys - the first Twickenham boy to represent his county on the local track for countless years, if not ever. Here's a photo of him, proudly sporting his colours by way of proof.



He was presented with a commemorative bat by Sir Jack Hobbs for best schoolboy average and later offered an apprenticeship at Lords. The lad had promise. He turned it down, though. The job he'd tie himself to for thirty-odd years paid a shilling a week more. Times were hard. Later he'd swap passes with his son, who seemed happier sliding over the grass so as to green his shorts and look like a footballer on the telly than acquiring ball skills. They'd hoof about for hours by the same decaying pavilion he'd walked out from all those years ago with pride, the silver sky yellowing as the Heathrow engines roared.

There's a cafe there now so it stays open when they're not playing a game. They've done it up nicely. Mothers stop for coffee there after dropping off the kids at the school behind it. You see lots of fathers with their kids at weekends, in the generous shade of the horse chestnut trees, trying hard not to hit the plastic stumps or tie their young offspring into knots with their patented body swerves. It's a very happy place now, the only regular sadness occasioned by the floral tributes remembering Amelie, the young French student murdered there.

That was all true. That is all true. So do we really need stories to jazz it all up? Change the young cricketer to a promising centre half, perhaps? The symmetry would suit the narrative better, at least. Why not call him Alex, to mirror the hoped for hero of this season's storyline? But then, why not just shut up and watch the football? Why the need to write at all?

To commemorate, I suppose. To celebrate or mourn. I wrote the following last night, waiting to watch Match of the Day:


Those who do not share the passion for the game see only twenty two grown men chasing a ball about. Looked at logically, one might even be tempted to agree. Why all the fuss over, what is in essence, a game? Why, they might ask, would someone reasonably switched on, politically minded and concerned for the welfare of the planet prefer to watch Arsenal play Manchester United in an FA cup tie at Old Trafford than add their voice to those of the 2 million other opponents of a foolish and illegal war? One could respond, smile perhaps, recalling an unexpected win away, why write a novel about that Saturday either?

As I write this, the BBC shows footage of the latest atrocities in that ongoing conflict. Over two hundred and fifty people are killed in a bomb attack on a small Kurdish sect. It seems aimed at fanning the already rampant civil war and sectarian conflict that has already engulfed the invading force and which suggests that either an occupation spanning generations or humiliating withdrawal will be the price the coalition ends up paying for the removal of Saddam. The marches and the novels and the bloggers have all had their say. The war goes on, the game goes on. Just a different war, another game.

seems to fit in here. Human activIt ity tends to wear away at the same immemorial themes. There is always war, always love, always hunger, always fear. But there's always a game going on somewhere. Jumpers for goalposts, or, nowadays perhaps they really do use mobile phones, there's always someone between the sticks. And someone watching. Someone recalling the particulars.



Thanks to the 'reasonable economy', Bob finally gets to grips with Footman's opus: "I don't understand this ...bit at all..."

I head off to the Goat, which I'm told still has Setanta Sports, hoping to watch the game. They don't have it after all, so I head back towards the Prince of Wales. They're showing the Wigan game. I make towards the Albert, but then it starts to rain. I make the call to get straight home and catch more of the game on the radio, than risk probable disappointment (and getting soaked) by hunting round the pubs.

It's on BBC London, 94.9 FM. The commentary is unremarkable, delivered in that peculiar football speak that followers of all classes lapse into with such ease. There's a 'mental element' in the crowd, it all goes 'a little bit staccato' Repka 'has a howler in him' before limping off still finding time to 'have a pop' at the ref. Arsenal patiently play their 'little triangles' and, apart from one Alan Partridge-esque sashay from Steve Brown in which he gets all tied up in knots with an extended metaphor about how Celtic's draw with Spartak challenges the idea that red is considered a lucky colour in Moscow, before remembering the hardships suffered there under the red flag between the years 1917-1989 and starts to peter off, it's a reasonably event-free 90 minutes. We win two nil and my man Hleb scores. His deft breakaway second away goal, the ball arcing inside the post like a canny golf putt when he looked to have placed it wide, pretty much kills off this tie. So, the story can go on.







L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!

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Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!

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Listen to Bobcasts #1-34 here!



© 2007 Swipe Enterprises

Barry - finish this...

It feels strange to be writing like this, not knowing what will happen next. It's more of a performance than anything - a ritual, even. With 'proper' writing, you see, you have some idea of where you're going. In fiction, your route map is the plot, that sturdy handrail of events and happenings, sneakily sprinkled breadcrumbs that will guide you back through the forest, from the beginning, through the middle, to the end of the trail; of the tale you have already traced out in your mind. But this feels more like stepping out on to the pitch must feel; or taking your pew among the rest of the believers, uncertain, apprehensive and a little bit afraid. Because tonight, it could all be over, having barely even begun.

It happened to Celtic a couple of seasons ago. They went to play some former eastern bloc side, started poorly and were hammered for five or six. They won the home tie well, but couldn't find that one last goal that would have seen them through to the group stage where the competition proper can begin. And that would be it. Curtains. The end of The Road to Moscow with barely a step taken. If this were fiction, I would have planned out my denouement months ago, rehearsed it, honed it, sent it off to publishers already. I would have researched every last nuance of the biomechanics that allow AH13 to Cruyff-turn past the last Real defender, round the keeper and score the last gasp goal that wins the European Cup for Arsenal. But there are no such safety nets here. Fiction has its comforts, doesn't it?



B.S. Johnson: Glenn's bigger brother? Not so carefree now, eh?


But not for the novelist B.S. Johnson. 'Telling stories is telling lies', he wrote, and in his seven published novels, he earnestly set about reinvigorating the form, trying to stop it telling tales. Using a variety of techniques (gimmicks, some thought) such as cutting holes in the pages so that the reader could see what happened next and his famous 'book in a box', whose pages could be read in any order as the reader saw fit, he sought to make explicit the artifice of the novel and make it work in different ways. I finished Like a Fiery Elephant recently. It's not, as I'd mistakenly assumed when I picked it up, the ghosted autobiography of Chelsea and England midfielder, 'Fat' Frank Lampard (that's called I Ate All the Pies, I believe), but rather a fascinating portrait of Johnson by another novelist, Jonathan Coe. In his time, Johnson wrote match reports for the Observer and Indian Times and was a keen follower of football, despite having been a Chelsea fan. Indeed, until fairly recently, this extract from his second novel, Alberto Angelo, could have stood as a timeless testimony to the unswerving nature of his beloved blues:

Chelsea's play is intensely aggravating, by turns appallingly bad and supremely skilful. They always play like this. Chelsea supporters are men of a special cast of mind, and widely cosmopolitan: all they have in common is this need to become emotionally involved with a team which can play as well as any and worse than any. Men who need to experience a wildly fluctuating range of emotions within ninety minutes. They would not come to Stamford Bridge if the team played any differently. Whoever manages the team, whoever plays in the team, the tradition is the same, is perpetuated.

Though a small handful of the more died-in-the-wool Chelsea tradionalists will be nodding their heads in sage agreement at that passage, I doubt that Roman Abramovich and Jose Mourinho will be joining them. Chelsea's time-honoured consistent inconsistency has been replaced by an almost metronomic ability to grind out the necessary result. They have not lost at Stamford Bridge in the league since Jose Mourinho (Alain Delon) took charge of the side. And that's how much a hostage to fortune this tale is. Before Abramovich arrived out of nowhere with his petro-billions, there was only one team in London. Now, many fancy Arsenal's older, fiercer rivals Spurs to edge the reds out of the lucrative and prestigious fourth spot and deny us the Champions League football we have come to expect. But at its core, regardless of the moneymen and the way the game's traditional followers have been priced out of its stadiums, football still just about retains its ability to slice through the barriers of class and privilege. We are all of us united in serfdom in this democracy of the unknowing; no one else has a clue what will happen in the end either.



Mourinho: "like the titfer? It's from Matalan.

I break away from typing this to try to buy a ticket for the Portsmouth game. I join what I expect to be the long virtual queue to reach the sacred hallows of the Arsenal Football Club box office, my progress visualised on screen for me by a long, thin horizontal bar of white along which I, a slowly extending oblong of crimson, edge painfully along; blood being pulled up a syringe. You have to time it just right, try to join the waiting throng so that you don't arrive too soon, before the tickets go on sale at 9.30 a.m., but not too late so as to be sent, a naughty schoolkid who's been cheeky to the dinner ladies, straight to the back of the line. I get it wrong, bursting into the inner sanctum two minutes too soon. I refresh the screen and see the tortuous journey start again. I think I've blown it. Last season, you'd queue patiently for three quarters of an hour only to find the game had sold out when you got there. But this time, when I click on the blue quadrant of the stadium map, I see a bank of green, all unsold seats arching away behind the goal. It's good for me, but bad news for the club. They're good seats mind, the upper tier gives you a good view of the whole pitch - although at £46 (plus booking fee), it should be a spectacular one.

So, tonight, Sparta Prague await. We played them in early November 2005 in the Champions League group stage. I fetch down my programme from that game. On the cover, Robert Pires is hugged by Sol Campbell, Robin van Persie, Jens Lehmann and Gael Clichy. Pires and Campbell have moved on, as have - scanning the teamsheet on the back - Ashley Cole, Fredrik Ljungberg, Jose Antonio Reyes, Dennis Bergkamp, Lauren and Thierry Henry from that great Invincibles side. It was the last game I went to at Highbury.

B.S. Johnson worked as a supply teacher in North London and describes in Albert Angelo the area around the ground that I know so well:

Dead cinemas and a musichall sadden corners. Only Arsenal Stadium, older looking in its outdated modernity than the last century's homes, competes in height with the dark red stone brick, stonedressed schools.

He died in Islington on November 13th, 1973, having taken his own life. By the side of the bath in which he'd slashed his wrists was a bottle of brandy with a note next to it saying 'Barry -finish this', and a card on which he'd written,

This is my last

word

Four days later, at Highbury, Arsenal and Chelsea played out a goalless draw.


I'm normally filled with a very particular mixture of emotions when I go to see a game. For the most part, this has not changed with the move to the new ground, the journey being much the same as it was until that part where the Emirates stadium's curves begin to loom like something out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. There's a distinct sense of nostalgia - no, that's not quite right - timetravel is more apt. I seem to go back in time to that very first Saturday I came to see a game here. That is mixed with an optimism quite ridiculous in its intensity - the oxygen common to all fans. That last November night was quite different, though. I had my bag stolen outside the Auld Triangle pub, it rained its arse off and I was soaked all the way through the game; all in all, a thoroughly miserable night. Who knows, maybe such a night as that on which B.S. Johnson took his life? But we won 3-0, van Persie scored a beauty and we were through to the next stage. I'd settle for 1-0, tonight, with the scrappiest of goals.



L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

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© 2007 Swipe Enterprises

Prague...

It is, if my calculations are correct, autumn 1995. Old Mike & Stuff and I are off to see the Prague derby; Slavia v Sparta. We leave Strangely Brown in the apartment, as hungover as we are ourselves; Old Mike & Stuff (Robert Fripp in the early days of King Crimson) still barely recovered from the terrible case of the old shits & stuff he's just, basically, you know, got over & stuff and which have forced him immediately to locate the lavatory in every bar or restaurant we've visited since so as to place himself within a clench-arsed shuffle of their security and peace for the remainder of the evening. Leaving ourselves a cosy three quarters of an hour before the game kicks off, we go off in search of Slavia's ground.

An hour later, we find it, having thoroughly enjoyed our brief tour of Viktoria Žižkov's crumbling wreck of a stadium to which we were directed by a kindly Czech constable who seemed completely unfazed by our manic miming of Herculean goal kicks and broadly spherical objects. He may even have exclaimed "Borby Charl-torn!" or "Norby Stee-laze" or such like proof of comprehension, in a predictable caricature of the international language of the sport. We finally get to the old Strahov, Stadion Evzena Rosickeho & stuff, hand over considerably more of the worthless pre-euro local currency than the cover price to a man who may or may not be an official representative of the club for an otherwise reasonably priced pair of tickets and take our seats - or rather, our section of wooden bench, to be precise.

We've basically, you know, missed the start of the old game & stuff having heard a tremendous roar as we approached the ground; presumably Slavia have scored. We will hear a similar eruption a few minutes into the second half when Slavia bag their second, shuffling as we are outside the ground with three quarters of the rest of the attendees stood ahead of us in the queue that circles the stadium for a beaker of tepid Gambrinus. We do get to see a fair bit of the second half. The distinctively poodle-haired and Alice-banded Karel Poborsky plays for Slavia. He will go on to score a famous lobbed goal against Portugal at Euro '96 and help the unheralded Czech Republic to the final, which they lose to those heartbreaking Germans by way of an extra time golden goal. In the wake of the tournament he joins Man. (krrr-phttt) Utd., but fails to live up to his tournament form there.



Karel Poborsky: I'll swap you him and Jan Coller for a Patrick Berger.

It ends 2-0 to Slavia. Having missed the goals, the highlight for us is the extraordinary devilry of the away fans as they fling themselves at the thirty foot high wire fence that separates them from the pitch and, by the end of the match, around 50 heavy duty officers in full combat gear wielding shields, snubnosed machine guns and a pack of rather large and intimidating alsatians. Suitably terrified, we rush to the exit as rapidly as possible in order to get Old Mike & Stuff to the nearest lavatory and leave the gangly Prague youths hanging from the mesh; basically, you know, setting light to the Sparta scarves they've pushed through the old wire and taunting the police & stuff.




Milan K: I'm really Inter his books...

"Es muss sein!" Tomas repeated to himself, but then he began to doubt. Did it really have to be?

"Es muss sein!" It must be. There aren't many books I can honestly claim have changed my life in any fundamental way. The Beatles; an Illustrated Record by Roy Carr and Tony Tyler is one, obviously. I don't recall any other reading material passing before my eyes between the ages of eight and thirteen other than that book. Private Schulz, the tie-in novel by Jack Pullman, the TV series' creator, marked another turning point in that I not only finished it, but did so, by and large, without mouthing the words as I read them. Of the books I've read by Czech authors born in Brno, if any of them had a significant effect, Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being is the one that would most readily spring to mind. I first read it when I was 24 or 25 years old. From my early teens on and up to that point in my life I had been convinced that I would make my living as a musician; there would be a degree of fame, wealth and female fanaticism involved as well, if memory serves. I willed it; it had to be, didn't it? I'm sure I would have been abused of the notion eventually, by another source; the realisation would have sunk in anyway, with time. Or maybe not? Maybe it did have to be but, by chickening out on my true fate, I'd surrendered the dream too soon. Either way, sat there in a dingy public library feeling all the heavy weight of a life to be lived out in the shadow of failure, Kundera's suggestion in The Unbearable Lightness hit home with some force: "Muss es sein?"

It's a disorienting thing to lose that sense of certainty, but necessary, I feel. If nothing else, it's useful practice for the greater disorientations that lie in wait ahead. I remember reading an interview with Martin Amis where he says something along the lines of when you're young you keep telling yourself that one day you're going to get old and die; but you don't really believe it. That's what happens to all the others; you're different. It does sink in though, eventually, and is a similarly unnerving revelation as the discovery that the things you were certain were going to happen almost certainly won't. So, apart from the fact that you'll definitely be checking out one day, Es muss not necessarily sein at all, really. I want to be a writer, to make my living at it, earn a crust doing something I love rather than cooler kinging it through to a clapped out retirement, stomach clenched in anger at every slap of the baseball in the mitt as I was serving my time. I want that, but there is no inevitability about getting it. But if it does happen, it will really mean something; I'll know how lucky I have been. Or so I tell myself.

I suppose it might have been like that for those Invincibles. We will win! It must be! And so they did, more often than not in that heady period. And when they couldn't win, they couldn't be beaten either. In 49 league games this astonishing feat was performed until, at Old Trafford on October 24, 2004, they came across a team who finally had the resources to impose their own will on that astonishing side. It still is an extraordinary sequence, but it wasn't just the not losing streak that disappeared that day. The team had lost its aura; the spell had been broken. The immortal and unyielding qualities we'd all taken for granted had evaporated; we were no longer gods, but had been revealed as all too human, and eminently fallible. And what followed is what always happens when you wake up from a dream. Disorientating? Yes, for sure. But necessary, perhaps, as all awakenings are.

Now a new team is beginning to grow out of the disorientation that came with the realisation that we really were mortal after all. Arsenal are rebuilding, as we do after setbacks; as we must. The team may not yet match the grandeur of the shiny new Emirates stadium yet, but give it time. We may yet look back as fondly on this season as we did 2004, just as I have enjoyed being spirited back to a beautiful time when we couldn't find the game in that beautiful gothic city; the charming town that was spared the destruction meted out to Warsaw as a consequence of Chamberlain's appeasement. Its old Old Square & stuff are still as pretty as a fairy tale, I'm sure and the lucky gooners who've made the trips out there will find that what the Czechs say is true; they really do have the strongest women and the prettiest beers (I might have got that the wrong way around...). Lovely to recall Old Mike & Stuff, too; to visualise him dabbing at his granny glasses with a pointed finger, pressing them tight against the bridge of his nose; the two of us hysterically laughing at our inept attempts to find the ground. Good to go back one day, perhaps? And maybe another Tomas, local boy Rosicky, the 'Little Mozart' will at last start to deliver some of the promise he so evidently has but has so far rarely shown? It will be, perhaps; but not because it must.






L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

Bobcasts now available at iTunes!!

Bobcasts now available at Jellycast!!

Visit me in MunterSpace - 10,000 Goth Girls Splattered in Feck Blood Can't be Wrong!!!!!!!!

Watch Bob's promos on Youtube

Listen to Bob's songs at indie911.com!

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Listen to Bobcasts #1-34 here!



© 2007 Swipe Enterprises