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

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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

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Listen to Bobcasts #1-34 here!



© 2007 Swipe Enterprises