Tom Clifford
(Ed’s note – The author is an Irish journalist and long-time Arsenal fan (witnessing League Cup final heartache as a nine-year-old in 1969) now living in China.)
The Gunners are coming to play a pre-season match in Beijing. The supporting act, apparently, is a team from Manchester. Not too sure how many will turn up to see them. Well, do they have a tube station named after them? Did they introduce numbers on shirts? How many doubles have they won? Arsenal won three doubles - 1971, 1998, 2002; that qualifies us for Alcoholics Anonymous. Our snooker-table pitch has won more prizes than most clubs. We even have a manager, Arsène Wenger, whose name sounds like Arsenal. Hold it! Offside flag raised. Actually, so do the team from Manchester. But we did it first. Biased?
My son Fionn (12) and I disagree on many things; broccoli is good for you, school is important, computer games are not educational, but we agree on one big thing - Arsenal. But he has never been in their presence. For him, on this issue, it is faith of our fathers. He has seen them on TV, read about them in magazines and newspapers, discussed the urgent need for a tough-tackling midfielder, he has idolised them from afar. I am convinced that his first words were Arsène Wenger. The first realisation I had that my son’s vocabulary was expanding beyond Harry Potter was his reaction when van Persie missed a sitter against Chelsea. “Let’s not say that again, it’s not a good word,’’ I told him, laying down the law firmly. Three minutes later Vermaelen missed an even easier sitter and we both yelled the verboten word.
And now they are coming to Beijing. He will see them. In the flesh. Yes, I know, the match is described as a friendly, a pre-season encounter of less importance than a Sunday newspaper on a Friday. Not important? Football not important?
Being a football fan is for life. Jobs are changed, spouses are changed, eating habits are changed. No fan would ever be so fickle. “For the next year I’ll support City, come August I’ll switch to United and round off the year shouting for Rovers.’’ It wouldn’t happen. In years to come, my son will realise that I have enormous feet of clay, we will have the usual disgreements, I will disappoint him. He will do his own thing, set forth on his own path. But I believe in magic. I know that at a certain time on a Saturday, wherever he is in years to come, he will look at the classified results and see how a team based in north London, with a tube station named after it, did. He may even think of the time we went to watch the match in Beijing. I know I will. Arsenal against Manchester City. A game? To borrow loosely from Shakespeare, Our revels are never ended. These are our actors. It’s the stuff dreams are made of.
