So Paddy Got Up - an Arsenal anthology (6 page)

Yet perhaps such an edge was exactly what was required to compete for titles and after a mid-season lull Bergkamp continued to be the key protagonist of a campaign that finished with not only a first league title in seven years, but the FA Cup to boot. By the end of the campaign, Bergkamp would become the first man from outside Britain to win both the Football Writers’ Association and the Professional Footballers’ Association’s player of the year awards in the same season. Not that Bergkamp especially wanted to be thought of as a foreigner. His successes in the English game, allied to those of players brought in by Wenger, would prove the precursor to a massive influx of foreign players into the Premier League, as teams became aware of the value to be had abroad and players of the growing wages on offer in England as television revenues grew. Yet Bergkamp was as wary as Sugar had been of Carlos Kickaball. “I often feel quite protective of the league like a child who doesn’t want to share with others,” he noted in 2003. “I’ve often looked at other foreign players and thought, ‘You have no right to be here. I’ve put a lot of work in to prove that foreigners can make a difference in England, so why are you coming here to ruin that?’”

Bergkamp promised when he arrived that he was here for the long haul and he was as good as his word. Over 11 years he would stay committed to Arsenal, faithful even in the dark days when it seemed their devotion to him might be wavering. Days such as the one, shortly after he declared his international retirement in order to concentrate on his club football, when Wenger said that his spot, too, would be subject to squad rotation. That was in 2000, a year further darkened by a combination of Achilles injury and self-doubt; yet a season later there was Bergkamp, pulling the strings once again as Arsenal repeated their double triumph of four years previous. He would also be there to lift the FA Cup in 2003 and 2005, as well as to claim a further Premier League winner’s medal in-between. In the end he would be with the club until 2006, retiring an Arsenal player at the ripe old age of 37. If there was to be one regret, in the end, it was that he never managed to lift a European trophy with Arsenal. He had been withdrawn after 75 minutes of the lost UEFA Cup final against Galatasaray in 2000, and never made it off the bench when Arsenal were beaten 2-1 by Barcelona in the Champions League showpiece six years later.

Few fans have not wondered at some point whether things might have been different had Bergkamp not missed, or at least been hindered, in so many European away fixtures by his refusal to fly. Certainly it was a favoured topic for the British press for a time with newspapers variously drawing up schedules to get the player to matches and one or two reporters even attempting to replicate his routes themselves (in one newspaper’s case, even taking a cardboard cut-out of the player along for the ride). But for all the words expended on the topic it may have been something of a red herring. It was, after all, Arsenal’s home form in Europe that had done more than anything to undermine their prospects during Bergkamp’s best years at the club. In both 1996-97 and 1997-98 the club exited the UEFA Cup at the first hurdle after failing to win the home leg of their first round fixtures, while over the following two seasons they would win just two of six home Champions League fixtures following an ill-advised plan to relocate to Wembley for European fixtures. Besides, in the final analysis, judging Bergkamp’s career on trophies at all feels like it might be missing the point. After all, ask a fan, or even a team-mate for their fondest of memory of the Dutchman and they do not talk of trophies but of individual goals, assists, or even just a touch that made the heart sing. They will tell you about the Leicester hat-trick, the gleeful hand-over-mouth celebration after scoring against Sunderland or the absurd game of cat and mouse with three Juventus defenders in December 2001 – capped with an outrageous outside-of-the-boot, chipped, through-ball for Freddie Ljungberg that left one Dutch commentator bellowing “Harry Potter! Harry Potter!” into the night sky. Or indeed the act of wizardry against Argentina at the 1998 World Cup which rendered another TV announcer incapable of doing anything but screaming the player’s name over and over.

The reality is that Bergkamp was not always the most effective player on the pitch – indeed, there were lengthy spells at Arsenal when he felt like the precise opposite: an anonymous, sulking presence more likely to chop down an opponent than slice open a defence. When the journalist Henk Spaan published his book Top 100: The Best Dutch Footballers of the Century in 1998, he placed Bergkamp a lowly 12th. Bergkamp, admittedly, had a good few years left in him at that time, but as many people might still agree with that verdict now as did then; others would make him an emphatic first. You would, as Simon Kuper wrote in the Financial Times, “never want Bergkamp playing for your life,” but for a spell he just might have been the player you most wished to see play before you died.

“I used to say the same about Liam Brady back when I was a season ticket holder,” says former Arsenal vice-chairman David Dein. “He was worth the entrance money alone.”

Even if only to find out what sort of man could have that effect on Wrighty.

***

Paolo Bandini writes for the Guardian, plus one or two others. He once made Ian Wright cry with laughter by bringing a ‘Keown for England’ sign to an away game against Wimbledon

5 – HIGHBURY  V EMIRATES - Jim Haryott

You’d think there would be no comparison. An elderly, compact and – whisper it quietly – rather dog-eared stadium pits itself head-to-head against a state-of-the-art, squidgy-seated, curvaceous megabowl of an arena. The latter, a docked spacecraft bristling with steel and concrete; boasting 22,000 more seats than its predecessor and generally speaking, infinitely more suitable to football in the modern era, should win the contest hands down.

And yet, and yet... my own memories of Highbury grow fonder over time.

It’s not that I don’t like The Emirates – or if you’d prefer, because it probably won’t be a middle-eastern airline forever – Ashburton Grove. For the most part, I love it. I watched it grow, via a webcam, like an expectant father. From the very first moment I set foot inside it (a 1-1 home draw against Villa, its first competitive match) I was taken aback by its scale. Sure, repeated visits have dampened the novelty somewhat, but even now, during a mid-game lull or when we find ourselves 1-0 down after 15 minutes, I crane my neck and admire the beauty of its wavy lines and mammoth roof struts (are they struts? I have no idea – but let’s call them struts for the sake of argument). It’s a stunning football stadium. The pitch is vast and in a permanent state of perfection. The seats are wide enough for all girths and soft enough for the boniest of behinds. There are urinals and toilets aplenty, into which the club pipes in an incredibly realistic waft of tobacco smoke every half time to remind us all of the olden days (at least I think that’s what’s going on). You can hear actual words coming out of the tannoy. It’s the best-looking club-ground in England, though I might, of course, be blinkered. It holds over 60,000 fans, which is more than Highbury had held for a very long time indeed, and rather amazingly, it’s almost always full, or at least sold out.

But perhaps best of all, it’s a mere Delap throw from the old place. For many people, perhaps most people, the routines and tics picked up through years of trudging to Highbury remain. The same tube station, the same pub, the same burger stand. It’s a world away from Highbury and yet it’s strangely familiar. Even now, I shudder to think how things might have been had it not panned out the way it did. The club found enough inner-city land practically next door. How unlikely is that? It secured an absurd amount of money at favourable rates – how many clubs could do that now? Look at the desperation of other clubs in London to secure new premises, and marvel at what our club did, and how they did it, ten years before others started fretting about their own futures. Sharing Wembley? It would have ripped the heart out of the club. No: the move to the Emirates was the best possible outcome to an intractable problem. How do you let more fans in, and how do you make more match-day money, at a ground hemmed in by Victorian terraces?

And yet you only have to look at some of the work that’s gone on at the Emirates since it opened to realise that there are some things the march of progress has trampled on. Some of it unintentional, and some of it unavoidable, true; but all the same, it’s happened. Since 2006, there have been repeated, mostly admirable attempts to ‘Arsenalise’ the Emirates. It’s a word I hate but it implies the new place doesn’t yet really feel like ‘home’, and there’s a definite element of truth in that. Gone are the concrete facades of the tiers, replaced by a chronology of trophy-winning years – still resolutely blank after 2005, but you can hardly blame that on the stadium, can you? In have come murals, and pictures, and other memorabilia to make the new place feel a bit more, well, like the old place. The ends have been renamed North Bank, Clock End, East Stand and West Stand (as they should have been from the word go). The famous clock – or at least, a replica of it – once again hangs above the Clock End. It feels more like home than it ever has, but there’s only so much that can be done to speed up its assimilation into the hearts of those of us who knew and loved Highbury. In reality, the only things that will make that happen are memorable matches and trophies. But mostly I suspect it’s the passage of time that will do the best job.

There are of course downsides, not all of which can be attributed solely to Arsenal moving ground. The Emirates is as much about making money as it is about providing an arena for football – it’s a hundred times brasher than Highbury was. The seats are now among the most expensive in the country, and indeed in Europe. Whole swathes of the ground are given over to corporate entertainment. The food and drink – outsourced – is overpriced. Gone are the “Peeeeannnnuts!” at 20p a bag. Now we have ‘meal-deals’ costing the best part of a tenner. Rolling up at the Highbury turnstiles in the 1980s cost about £5. Now you’ll get no change out of about £40, and football ticketing these days dictates that there’s very little room to spontaneously roll up to a game anymore, without a ticket, and expect to get in.

At Highbury, the Gunners Shop by the Clock End on Avenell Road was so small it operated a one-in, one-out policy on match-days. There were scarves and rattles and ashtrays and Charlie Is My Darling scarves, but it all squeezed into a room about the size of a corner shop.  The Emirates now oozes merchandising outlets – there are now even retail kiosks in the concourse areas, just in case you want to tip-toe out of the game eight minutes before half-time rather than a mere three minutes before half-time, which is the current norm. Football now and football then – everywhere, probably, but at Arsenal, certainly – are worlds apart.

An additional 22,000 fans, rather than creating a better atmosphere, have diluted it. It seems impossible, but it’s true. Again, that’s not all down to the move. It’s been happening at Arsenal since the terraces were replaced by seats, but the move to the new ground did seem to accelerate it. Now we have singing areas (a fantastic idea) and piped crowd noise, flags, balloons and so on (you can’t blame them for trying) – all to generate something that used to come naturally at Highbury. People arrive increasingly late and leave early, or they don’t turn up at all, despite having bought a ticket. It seems odd to me to travel long distances only to miss ten or twenty percent of what you came to see, but there you go. It happened at Highbury, for sure, but it didn’t happen so much.

But maybe we tend to look back at the ‘good old days’ when really, perhaps they weren’t that good after all. In the 70’s and 80’s, the football at Highbury was often functional at best; hooliganism was more prevalent – though Arsenal to their credit always refused to fence fans in – and to get 20,000 for a league game was not abnormal. The facilities at Highbury, compared to those you get now, were lacking, though they were nothing unusual then and an awful lot better than some grounds. Since the Taylor Report, and the Premier League, football changed irrevocably and in the end, it signalled the death knell for Highbury and its old-world comforts. A capacity that used to be about 57,000 (if everyone got a bit cosy) shrank to 38,000 in about seven years. Rather ironically, the huge reduction in capacity began to happen at a time of re-emergence on the pitch. George Graham’s young, vibrant side of the late 1980’s threw Arsenal’s lethargy off, winning two titles and four cups, before the baton was picked up by Wenger. Suddenly, thousands more people wanted to come, but couldn’t.

Some things though have not been redefined in my mind over the passage of time. They are plain fact. Highbury was definitely more affordable and the atmosphere there was definitely better. Turning up an hour early to a big game in the 80’s not only guaranteed several throaty renditions of the best songs, but if you didn’t get there in good time you’d either not get in at all, or you’d be squeezed out of the action on the sides of the terraces. My first season ticket, in 1994, cost around £200. Now, the equivalent seat costs £1,000.

I think back to the kinds of atmospheres generated on big nights at Highbury and compare them with those we have had to date at the Emirates; there is no comparison. The 2-1 defeat of Barcelona in February 2011 comes nearest: the place was a crackling cauldron and had all the ingredients for a bubbling atmosphere: a quick-fire comeback against arguably the best club side of this generation. But I can think of many better memories at Highbury. I’ll never forget the opening day of the season in 1987, against Liverpool, when over 54,000 squeezed into Highbury. Gates closed an hour before the game. People ended up sitting on the roof of the North Bank. The terrace was one vast, bubbling, ebbing and flowing mass of humanity. The noise was relentless and we sang ourselves hoarse. I’m not sure we will ever see the likes of that again at the Emirates.