I don’t know who invented the phrase “it’s a small world”, but I feel pretty sure they must have been a football fan.
I think it’s just a different way of saying that we’re all connected, isn’t it?
On Sunday, as I travelled up to the Arsenal from my home in Beckenham, I really felt some of those connections. Plonking myself into a seat on the northbound Victoria line at Victoria, I look up and realise I’ve somehow managed to sit down next to Greg. Greg is a personal trainer at my local gym and an Arsenal season ticket holder. It’s not exactly a case for Mulder & Scully to run into him when we’re both ultimately going to the same place, from approximately the same place, but those Victoria line trains are pretty damn frequent, even on a Sunday.
I used the qualifier “ultimately” there, by the way, as although we were both going to the Arsenal (obviously), he was going to the Tolly first and I was headed to the Drayton Park Arms to meet Tony, my mate James’s uncle, who’d been kind enough to sort my ticket out for the match. So, Greg and I chatted with each other as far as the cannons roundabout and then split up into small groups.
After a couple of drinks, Tony, his mate Dave and I then sat through a fairly stolid and in some ways not entirely dissimilar encounter to last season’s home game with the current FA Cup holders. The one notable difference being that this time, Ebere Eze produced his moment of magic for the home side, nearly bursting the net with his scissor kick and it won us the game. What a time to score your first Premier League goal for Arsenal and, coming as Manchester City lost to Aston Villa on top of Liverpool falling apart at Brentford, this first goal may just prove to be the biggest.
It’s a weird feeling to be watching this Arsenal team at the moment. Led by the King of Brazil, they are so obviously happy and comfortable in defending a lead and it’s quite jarring because this level of defensive security will be entirely alien to anyone watching Arsenal under the age of, say, 30. My cousins, James and Josh, for example. James is 28 now and would have just turned two at the end of 98-99 season in which we let in a miserly 17 goals. Josh has the misfortune of being born in 2003 and therefore being alive for the GOAT Premier League season, but not being at all aware of it.
To be fair though, even amongst the Arsenal “elders”, I think the scars of last season have still not completely healed. Chatting with Greg yesterday, he told me he was kicking every ball with the players in the dying embers of Sunday’s game. I’m not going to lie and say I was completely zen, especially as the game moved into the minutes beyond the allocated added time, but I never really thought Palace looked overly likely to get their equaliser. To be honest, they didn’t really look overly interested in trying to.
To me, this is one of the interesting challenges Arsenal are seeing much more often. With a squad full of technically proficient and physically dominant players, opposition teams are increasingly just looking to sit in their shape, plug holes and try and stop us from creating chances. Palace were much more successful at this than Fulham the week previously, but it came at an enormous cost to their attacking threat – which was negligible, even after they went 1-0 down. And, as I’m sure you’ve read, no team in the Premier League has a higher xG when chasing a game than Crystal Palace.
So, people can sit and make their set piece jibes, the fact is Mikel Arteta has created a defensive monster and the Premier League, currently, can handle neither this, nor the set piece deliveries from Messrs Rice, Saka and (when available) the skipper.
Anyway, the game finished and I zoomed down the Holloway Road to the pub and a first meeting in far too long with some of the people who contribute to this very website; Anita, Sylvain and our estimable editor, Lee. Anita was bringing her young daughter, Dora, to her first Arsenal game. I think she enjoyed it, although I gather a nap was taken at some point during the game. Anyway, it was great to catch up with everyone and know that even if the connections hadn’t quite been there on the pitch, they were still very much intact off it.
Before I go, I just wanted to say that in chatting to Greg, I learned of the very sad passing of Steve Ashford, aka The Gooner fanzine’s Highbury Spy. When I returned to London from Leeds in 2002 and resumed my pilgrimages to North London (sometimes without a match ticket), the Gooner was an essential purchase and Steve’s column was always my first stop. Constantly funny, ranty and unashamedly biased, his words may be the reason, or a part of it anyway, you’re reading this now. Like Steve, I also ended up getting printed in the Gooner, albeit with nothing like the frequency, or brilliance, of his regular columns. I met him once (stopped him may be more accurate), on a platform at London Bridge and was able to say to him how much I loved his work.
Years back, I remember showing my uncle – yes, James and Josh’s Dad – one of the articles I had printed in the Gooner and flicking through it, he completely surprised me by saying that he worked with Steve at BMG. My uncle Stephen has always been a bit of a hero, more of a superstar older brother than an uncle, to me – but to know that Stephen was associating with someone I regarded as royalty in the world of Arsenal writing – well, that was really something.
With love to Steve’s friends and family, RIP Steve.