gunners

It’s 1970. The big match comes to Melbourne television. Jimmy Hill’s wagging goatee accompanies Brian Moore’s commentary. At 19 I put aside my schoolboy prejudice against soccer and watch stuttering black and white images of England’s first division football. I’m Aussie Rules through and through, but I watch any game with balls.

To increase my interest I slide into following a team. I choose The Arsenal. I like names with the definite article in front of them. My first dog is The Pod and later in life I have a post office box at The Patch.

The Arsenal is a good choice. Red shirts with white sleeves. Nice. Captain and defender Frank McLintock is the man. The rest of the 70-71 Arsenal FA Cup team is Wilson, Rice, McNab, Storey, Simpson, Armstrong, Graham, Radford, Kennedy, and George. Every man Jack a Brit. Arsenal wins the double and my fate is sealed.

Our home is Highbury until it can no longer accommodate our supporters or our budget. Now we play at Ashburton Grove: they call it Emirates Stadium, but I can’t think of a greensward that couldn’t land a Tiger Moth as having anything to do with an airline.

The game and the team go global. Last week’s Gunners are three black Poms, a Belgian, a Spaniard, a Pole, a Czech, an Cameroonian, a couple of Frogs and a mercurial Dutch striker. A Swiss, Brazilian, Ivorian and Israeli grace the pine.

Like my AFL team, The Arsenal give great head over more than 40 years. The Blues win eight premierships, the Gunners bag seven FA Cups and top the table six times. Despite their achievements they are damnably frustrating to support, always flattering to deceive.

Manager Arsène Wenger, The Professor, believes in the beautiful game and Arsenal play elegant breath-taking passing football that should yield seven goals a game but rarely does. Is it better than the old ‘boring, boring’ one-nil-to-the-Arsenal?

The current Arsenal has a habit of dashing our hopes. They start this season a train wreck, The Professor’s tenure tenuous. The team claws back, bursts into sudden flower with seven wins on the trot. We dream of Europe the easy way, then crash and burn at lowly Loftus Road. The Prof talks up his team’s ‘mental strength’, but none is apparent this day.

We hang in there, we supporters. It’s in the blood. How it gets there is a mystery. Why it keeps circulating defies explanation. Will we crawl out of bed at two o’clock on Sunday or Monday morning to watch RVP and Tomàŝ and Alex and Wojciech and Laurent go round at Ashburton Grove? You bet.

   

Rock on.