When Arsenal finally won the Premiership last week, it was well past midnight. I didn’t know where to park my guttural joy. The early hours are a bad time for the older football fan watching alone at home, not with others where enthusiasm, tension and joy can be shared. I remember being taken to a pub in North London by my son two years ago to watch an Arsenal game where fans of the other team were actively discouraged from entering. Everyone drinking there was of the same mind and rooting for the same result. The place was comically diverse; it thrummed with the most various bunch of people you could imagine and yet it was the perfect hive mind. I can’t speak for other clubs but Arsenal tribalism is the most plural form of exclusion ever devised by man.
My attachment to Arsenal is inorganic, formed in late middle age, digitally nurtured by Star Sports and ESPN. The game I grew up with was cricket, which I followed first in the sports pages, on the radio and, then, when live video coverage became a thing, on the telly. My love for Test cricket is broad; I know lots of random stuff about the game in general, not just the Indian team. I’ve read books about it and I nurse grudges against English and Australian teams that have festered so long, they’re archaeological.
I know nothing about football. I played it in school at a subhuman level. I didn’t care about the Durand Cup and I couldn’t name a single Indian footballer growing up apart from Chuni Goswami. An enthusiastic uncle from Calcutta took me off to watch a match between JCT Phagwara and Leaders Club Jullunder (yes, that’s how it was spelt then). This must have been sometime in the late Sixties. It was a rudimentary form of the game where a ragged mob of ten on either side of the pitch ran towards the ball wherever it was headed. It was mainly aerial with many mighty headers and no formation, pattern or intent that a ten-year-old boy could make out.
Football in my mind was a Bengali sport. Mohun Bagan, East Bengal and Mohammedan Sporting seemed locked in a private triangular contest of their own which was not our business. I knew of Arsenal, though, in passing. Thanks to my older brother, we listened to the BBC on shortwave radio mostly for Test Match Special’s live commentary and mainly when India was playing a series in England. But we also tuned in most nights to a short bulletin called Sports Roundup broadcast at around 11 pm. On winter nights, we had to endure five precious minutes of this short bulletin, listening to a plain chant recital of the football results: Nottingham Forest 1, Chelsea 0; Newcastle United 2, Ipswich Town 1; Manchester United 1, Arsenal… and so it went on.
Of all these unfamiliar names, Arsenal stayed in my mind because it was a word I knew and being a boy the idea of a club as gun armoury was vaguely glamorous. But nothing came of this. When I went to England as a graduate student as a twenty-three-year-old, it was endlessly annoying that common room TVs were monopolised by football, especially when India was touring England to play Test cricket.
Most conversation happened in that narrow band between ‘Who Shot J.R.’ and the football results. I couldn’t see the pulling power of a game where mainly nothing happened over ninety minutes and brutal, maiming tackles were met with grunts of approval. The First Division (as it was then) was almost entirely made up of White English players. It was an insular league, though the odd foreigner like Ossie Ardiles and Frans Thijssen played for Spurs and Ipswich Town, respectively. The only thing a desi needed to know about the First Division was to stay indoors when Chelsea came to town and to bring their wheelie bins and milk bottles in so they weren’t set on fire or used as weapons by that club’s mouth-breathing supporters.
Nick Hornby’s great auto-fiction about Arsenal fandom, Fever Pitch, has a father initiating his son into his Arsenal obsession so he can bond with him. It was the other way round for me; my son caught the bug from his best friend who had lived briefly in London, and the fever took because he could now watch the Premiership live on cable TV. A whole generation could now be proprietorial about their Premier League teams because they watched the games as they happened; they weren’t second-class fans who followed their teams in a secondhand, time-delayed way. I followed in his slipstream.
Sadly, for both of us, we pledged ourselves to Arsenal the year after Wenger’s Invincibles swept the Premiership. In spite of the many pleasures of watching Wengerball in its many avatars, we suffered through two decades of disappointment and defeat. There were years when Arsenal’s teams seemed peopled by virtuoso hobbits, magically gifted small players like Cazorla and Arshavin and Sánchez, who played beautiful, one-touch football only to be ultimately bullied off the pitch by large Chelsea-contracted Nemeses like Didier Drogba and Diego Costa.
There was the game against Newcastle where Arsenal led 4-0 at the break, only to ship four in the second half for a draw. There was the time we came second to newly promoted Leicester, the long years when Sheikh Mansour’s money and Pep Guardiola’s genius and Jürgenn Klopp’s hard-charging abandon consigned us to the horrible limbo of the nearly-there.
And then, after a season of attrition, injury, set-pieces, genius, epic teamwork and luck, Mikel Arteta’s men won it off the pitch when Bournemouth held Manchester City to a draw. It happened past the stroke of the midnight hour and for a nanosecond I felt like a bantamweight Nehru. The transition from Highbury to the Emirates was complete now that Arsenal had become Premier League champions playing in their ‘new’ arena. Wenger’s pledge had been redeemed by Arteta. Not wholly; there is still the Champions Trophy final against Paris Saint-Germain to be won at the end of the month. But substantially.
There is a lesson there; no epoch of defeat, however long, is endless. There are no lost causes because people keep faith. A hundred thousand fans spontaneously gathered outside the Emirates stadium inside minutes of the Bournemouth draw that made Arsenal champions. They were a cross-section of London’s diversity, a gathering that dwarfed the racist march led by the far-Right activist, Tommy Robinson, a few days before. The popularity of bad actors is an interregnum. It ends because division is not our natural condition.
mukulkesavan@hotmail.com