Arsenal, Nostalgia and the Problem with Modern Football

I was going to write something serious about Arsenal. I had intended to discuss the current team, tactics, recruitment, the midfield, the manager, the transfer window and whether we are finally going to win the league again.

Then I remembered that I don't really know anything about tactics.

So instead I have been thinking about Highbury.

This is probably what happens when you support a football club for long enough. Eventually the present becomes slightly less interesting than the past, largely because the past has the considerable advantage of already having happened.

I can still remember Arsenal when footballers looked vaguely like people you might actually encounter in real life. Tony Adams looked like someone who might repair your roof. Steve Bould looked like someone who might subsequently come round and tell you that you had repaired it incorrectly. Nigel Winterburn looked permanently annoyed about something.

And then there was David Rocastle.

Rocky was one of those players who made football seem wonderfully uncomplicated. Get the ball, run at somebody, make something happen. There was none of the modern discussion about progressive carries, expected assists or whatever the latest statistical invention is. You simply watched him and thought: bloody hell, he's good.

Then along came Arsène Wenger and, rather wonderfully, Arsenal became a different sort of club.

Suddenly footballers were eating properly, stretching properly and presumably being told that red wine was acceptable in moderation. Ian Wright was still Ian Wright, but now he had Dennis Bergkamp alongside him, which was a bit like discovering that your local pub had secretly employed Mozart.

Bergkamp remains one of the great reasons for supporting Arsenal.

There are footballers who are excellent and footballers who are memorable. Bergkamp was something else. He made ordinary things look faintly ridiculous. A ball would arrive at his feet and, for a second, the laws of physics seemed to become optional.

And then there was Henry.

I don't think we appreciated him enough at the time.

Well, obviously we appreciated him. We weren't idiots. But watching Henry now, in old clips, is almost strange. He was so quick, so elegant and so completely in control that he seemed to be playing a slightly different version of football from everybody else.

The 2003/04 season is particularly difficult to explain to anyone who wasn't there. Arsenal went through the entire league season unbeaten — 38 games — and eventually extended the run to 49 matches.

It sounds like something invented by Arsenal supporters after several pints.

"Yeah, but we were unbeaten for nearly fifty games."

"No you weren't."

"Yes we were."

"You definitely weren't."

"Look it up."

And then you realise they actually were.

There were also the less glamorous moments. The FA Cup final against Manchester United in 2005, for example, which was essentially two hours of football followed by Arsenal deciding that penalties would be a perfectly sensible way of dealing with the situation. Patrick Vieira eventually scored the winner and Jens Lehmann saved from Paul Scholes.

Then there was Highbury itself.

Modern stadiums are magnificent, obviously. They have restaurants, corporate boxes, enormous television screens and enough technology to launch a minor satellite.

But Highbury was different.

It felt like a football ground rather than an entertainment complex in which football happened to be taking place.

I remember the Clock End, the smell, the programmes, the noise, the fact that you could look around and somehow feel that generations of Arsenal supporters had been sitting in exactly the same place having exactly the same arguments about whether Graham had picked the right team.

And football arguments were better then.

You could say, with complete certainty, that a player was rubbish because he had misplaced two passes.

Nobody would produce a 14-page statistical analysis demonstrating that he had actually been in the 93rd percentile for progressive defensive actions.

You just said:

"He's crap."

And that was the end of the matter.

We have come a long way.

Arsenal have won 14 league titles and 14 FA Cups, and the club's history is now so extensive that you can spend an afternoon on the official website discovering that some player you've never heard of scored a decisive goal in 1937. But perhaps that's what supporting Arsenal ultimately becomes. You start off wanting to know who we're signing. Then you want to know whether we're going to win something.

Then you want to know whether the manager should be sacked.

Then, eventually, you find yourself watching a grainy video of Dennis Bergkamp scoring against Newcastle and wondering where the last twenty years went.

And that's the slightly melancholy thing about football. When you're young, you think you're watching history being made. When you're older, you realise that you were.

The 1989 goal at Anfield. Michael Thomas running through. The Double. Bergkamp. Henry. Vieira. The Invincibles. Highbury. The move to the Emirates. All those players who seemed as though they would be there forever.

They weren't.

None of us are.

Which is probably why football matters rather more than it ought to.

Anyway, I was going to write something about Arsenal's prospects for the coming season.

But I've just found a video of Bergkamp's goal against Newcastle.

So perhaps next week.