Love affair that began with Charlie George and a whiff of danger
...to the horror of my poor Dad who’s a Spurs fan!
MY team is Arsenal and it goes back to 1971 when we won the Double and I was six-years-old. Charlie George scored t hat amazing 25- yard screamer at Wembley. And that was it. I was in love. With Arsenal. With Charlie. With Frank McLintock. With Bob Wilson. With George Graham. With Pat Rice. It was the start of a 49-year love affair, with all the torment that love brings.
It was the dawn of colour television and Arsenal had great yellow and blue shirts. I have one of those shirts signed by Charlie, one my prized possessions.
People talk about the last 20 years as if we never had a great team before then; that ’71 team who won the Double was a really great side, from back to front. One of the greatest in Arsenal’s history.
The complication was that my Dad was and still is a lifelong Spurs fan. He was running a pub down in Sussex and took his eye off the ball; before he knew it...
Charlie George was so beloved. There have been lots of great players, but when you talk about the most beloved, it tends to be people like Charlie George or David Rocastle or Ian Wright or Ray Parlour or Martin Keown. Not necessarily the ones you may think, but those who have a real connection with the fans.
Charlie was the fan from the North Bank who scored the winning goal in the FA Cup final. The biggest cup competition arguably in world football. The Wembley FA Cup days were so brilliant. It was a national event, the build-up, the whole day, over 20 million people watching.
One of the saddest things about modern football is that my boys and my daughter — they’re all Arsenal fans — have never experienced what the FA Cup meant to my generation.
My Mum remembers that within hours I was a crazed Arsenal fan. Up went all the posters on my walls. I had Charlie, Wilson, McLintock, all of the Double-winning team.
The first game I went to was in 1972: Arsenal v Manchester United. We won 3-0 at Highbury with goals from Ray Kennedy, John Radford and Peter Simpson. I was seven years old. I can remember the smell, the noise. There were no allseater stadiums. I was standing in the North Bank with my Dad and the crowd was swaying and the beer was everywhere and the smell of the hotdogs...
I watched Fever Pitch with my daughter, who is eight, the other night, so that she could get a sense of how different it was and understand what football was like. Colin
Firth’s character as a kid was like me as a kid. An amazing experience; it wasn’t as clinical and clean and safe and comfortable. Hooliganism was rife.
It was oddly exciting. More dangerous and therefore more exciting. I wouldn’t say it is sad that it is cleaner and safer, it is different. I have a picture that is very special. When we won the league in the Invincibles year at White Hart Lane in 2004, I ended up in the boardroom with my Dad.
Everyone for Spurs had left obviously. The doors swung open and in came Arsene Wenger and Pat Rice. I grabbed a bottle of wine and we sat and talked football for an hour. It was probably the last time I spoke t o Wenger, but i t was special! No question, the longer Wenger stayed on as manager and it dragged on, the more sad it got. At the end, I didn’t see anyone who would shed a tear for him.
I never thought that day would come. It was a sad, elongated ending to his time at Arsenal and looking back I’d rather he had gone seven or eight years previously.
I, like quite a few fans, had detected he had lost that edge. Yes, we won some FA Cups, but they are not the same in terms of how that tournament is valued by the top players and coaches.
We haven’t competed in the league since 2004-05 so I felt that Wenger went on a third too long. It was sad for the club, it dragged us down and it is hard to get back up again. It was sad for Wenger. It wasn’t tinged with the same regret as when Sir Alex Ferguson left Manchester United as a Premier League champion. I could see Wenger didn’t want to leave on a low, like a drug addict with the next high around the corner.
Enough time has passed now that I can look back to those first eight years of his management and say it was the greatest period in the history of the club. The football he gave us was utterly brilliant. When he and Ferguson were going at each other, it was one of the greatest battles in football history.
For eight years he was Arsenal’s greatest manager and transformed the club. He gave us a uniquely brilliant brand of football and during that period was the best manager in the world. He transformed English football.
Mikel Arteta looks and sounds the part. He is doing all the right things. I like his style, I like him personally. And, given he has no experience as a manager, he has been impressive. I have confidence that if he is given the money, he can get Arsenal back competing. But will he be given the money? Can he keep a player like Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang?
If you are Aubameyang and in your 30s, you’ve got to look at this like Robin van Persie did: I am nearing the end of my career, where do I go to win trophies? If it’s not at Arsenal, we will lose players like him as we have been doing. If he were to leave now, it would be a crushing blow to the club. We have talented young players s howing r eal promise, l i ke Bukayo Saka and Kieran Tierney. I’d much rather see them in the team than Mesut Ozil. But if you lose your talisman you’ve gone forward one or two steps, but you are back 10. To all Arsenal fans, we are all in this together. It’s often very painful, but there’s no doubt in the 49 years I have been following the club we have had great moments.
We should always cherish the great moments because, as we now know, the bad times are never very far away.