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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© 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

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